A/N: Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed. I realise chapter 1 may have seemed a little manic and convenient. It wasintentionallymanic and convenient, partly to get some things out of the way, partly to reflect Harry's currently jumbled mind, but it won't always be that way. Sorry that this chapter took a long time, I had a baby and then Hogwarts Legacy came out, so…

This chapter has not been edited.

Ron: I get that people dislike Ron and think he's basically comic relief, but I don't see what Ron realises about Harry sacrificing himself as much of a logical leap for him to make—in fact, I feel like it's blindingly obvious once one knows Harry is a Horcrux, given Harry's nature and the methods by which Dumbledore thinks Horcruxes must be destroyed. I'm not trying to characterise Ron as some kind of strategy genius just because he's good at chess, but I'm also not going to paint him as a total dullard just because people have gotten used to fan portrayal tropes or have only seen/remember movie Ron.

Gradients

Chapter 2

The flurry of triumph Harry felt had tempered by the time he woke, feeling fully refreshed after only two hours. He wandered downstairs and out onto the sandy patio. The crescent of the Moon was rising over the ocean, along with the first stirrings of dawn. Despite that, hundreds of bright stars burned serenely on the sky. He'd only known it was a real possibility for a few hours and yet, he wanted to be out there amongst them more than anything he had ever wanted in his life. He longed for that freedom.

Potterwatch had been quick to report several instances of people dropping dead late at night. The names of those who died eluded them, until one Corban Yaxley had been found dead in his office at the Ministry by a sympathetic wizard on night guard duty. Then it clicked.

The soul-rotting curse sought out the connections to all of Voldemort's marked followers and had consumed them all. The entire upper echelon of Voldemort's movement, including the man himself, had been wiped from existence. Harry had tested it with the Resurrection Stone—every Death Eater he could think of responded. He felt a bit queasy at the thought. As much as he loathed Draco, he recognised that Draco was an unwilling participant in Voldemort's game, even to the point of pretending to not recognise Harry. He certainly didn't deserve this sort of grisly death.

Somehow though, Harry's role felt…incomplete. He pondered, with the guidance of Nehebkau's experience, whether the power vacuum would resolve favourably. The Ministry, even without Voldemort, had already been an autocratic propaganda machine. With sufficient unmarked sympathisers in positions of authority, it seemed likely that it would just revert to that status quo of simmering anti-Muggleborn sentiment held at bay by the devotion of good, compassionate people who were part of the Ministry and the fact that the average person didn't give a toss about blood purity one way or the other, even if they still discriminated out of ignorance. Not really the societal upheaval Harry had hoped the defeat of Voldemort would bring, but perhaps enough would be able to change without the most ardent supremacists lining the pockets of powerful Ministry officials.

Bill had left soon after they found out, looking a bit unsettled himself, to inform Kingsley Shacklebolt. With a bit of luck, Kingsley and the Order would be able to seize control of the Ministry amidst the confusion.

"'Arry? You cannot sleep?"

"Hey Fleur," he said, looking over his shoulder. Fleur was standing at the threshold of the house in her dressing gown and slippers. "Not that I can't sleep. I'm finished sleeping. Seems like I only need a couple of hours now."

"I cannot sleep," she admitted, stepping out beside him. "I 'ave been questioning what I did wrong with my calculations all night. I feel terrible guilt that I 'ave caused Bill to commit mass murder."

"Even though any of the Death Eaters would have gladly killed us all?"

"Civility is what separates us from them, 'Arry. We cannot unilaterally execute people, regardless of what they 'ave done. That is not justice."

"It wasn't an execution, that implies that it was deliberate—it was an unintended consequence. We couldn't have known that the Dark Mark was enough of a link for the curse to latch onto. It's not like we had one to experiment with," Harry said.

"It was a consequence that I should 'ave considered," she said softly.

"It is a war, and Bill didn't know it would happen either. And besides, we have to consider how many lives might have been lost if the war had been allowed to continue for who knows how long."

"Per'aps you are right, 'Arry, but it still doesn't feel right," she said, sighing. "They had families, many of them. Innocent children will still 'ave lost one or both of their parents."

Harry looked at her and the righteousness of what they'd done evaporated. He sighed. "We'll clean up, Fleur. We'll take care of any orphans and whoever else has been cut adrift. Even if it means leveraging Nehebkau's knowledge to do so, I promise we'll do it."

Fleur put a hand on his shoulder. "You are a good man, 'Arry Potter."

He shook his head. "Orphans just deserve better," he said.

"Both of these things can be true," Fleur said, with the ghost of a smile.

Bill appeared in the sand twenty feet in front of them. He smiled tiredly at them.

"Kingsley knows what's happened. He dragged me to an emergency meeting with the Muggle Prime Minister. They're now coordinating a strike to retake the Ministry," he said.

"The PM?" Harry asked. "Why him?"

"Well normally the government allows the Ministry of Magic operate autonomously, but with all the spillover from the war, they're very keen to restore order. Supposedly they have some special forces Squib Squadron armed with Muggle weapons who are going to accompany Kingsley and co., and the Prime Minister has already named Kingsley Interim Minister for Magic."

"Good. That's good," Harry said. "I want to pay Hogwarts a visit, would you mind letting the others know so they can meet me there if they want?"

"Sure, Harry. Go via Hogsmeade station, not the village—there's a curfew in the village. Professor McGonagall has probably inherited control of the grounds, so you should be able to walk in."

.o.

Harry, covered by his Invisibility Cloak, slipped around the edge of the Black Lake. The terrain was rugged and slippery, but Harry was surprised by the lack of security. No one appeared to be guarding the station, and the archway onto the grounds of Hogwarts admitted him without fanfare. There were no boats on the lake he could use, but he wasn't averse to walking. It was still early.

Through the trees, he spied some lights on in a few of the towers. He wasn't too worried. He knew Voldemort had left Hogwarts in the hands of marked followers only, and any unmarked sympathisers in the castle were students with a very spotty Defence education. Unfolding the Marauders' Map, he activated it and found McGonagall and Flitwick in Dumbledore's old office. No sign of Snape, or the Carrows that he'd so often seen. He tucked the Map away and kept walking.

After half an hour or so, he reached the wall surrounding the greenhouses. Perched as it was upon several feet of steep rock, it presented an imposing challenge, but Harry had a plan. He cast a sticking charm on his left hand, jumped as high as he could—his leap supercharged by the Goa'uld pumping his blood full of accelerants—and slapped it on the wall. His arm held the weight of his body with a level of ease he marvelled at. Then he cast the charm on the tips of his feet and brought them as high as he could before jabbing them at the wall. Then it became a simple matter of standing and pulling himself up higher, repeating that until he reached the top.

He vaulted over the top of the wall after barely a minute, landing easily on his feet. Now that he was inside, getting to the Head office was easy. Two shortcuts and a hidden passageway later, he stood before the gargoyle.

"Let me up, will you?"

It took a moment in which Harry thought he would have to find another way, but the gargoyle began to move and he hopped on. He could hear Professor Flitwick's voice above.

"—he was a Fifth Year, Minerva. Marked or not, he was a child. I don't know if it was even his bad decision, or his parents being press-ganged into it. Either way, he did not deserve death."

Harry grimaced.

"Were there any clues as to what happened?" Professor McGonagall said.

That cue was as good as any, he guessed.

"Hello, Professors," Harry said, throwing down the hood the Cloak. "I'm afraid I know."

"Potter!" McGonagall said, clutching the front of her robe. Flitwick jumped a foot into the air, spinning around with his wand aloft.

"Oh, it is you Mr Potter," he said, "we certainly weren't expecting to see you here."

"I've come to deliver some news," Harry said. "You-Know-Who is dead. Unintentionally, that also resulted in the death of everyone who bore the Dark Mark, including I'm sorry to say, anyone who may have been coerced into taking it."

"Oh my," McGonagall whispered. "You're sure?"

"Let me explain," he said, stepping into the office.

.o.

As the morning sun spilled across the top of the Forbidden Forest, the surviving students of Hogwarts emerged from their dormitories and converged in their respective Common Rooms. A loud gong sounded throughout the castle, jolting the last remnants of sleep away, followed by Professor McGonagall's voice.

"All students, report to the Great Hall immediately. I repeat, all students, to the Great Hall immediately," she said.

The response wasn't quite immediate, but the Great Hall filled respectably fast. Within fifteen minutes, Harry could see on the Map that there were only a handful of students yet to make their way down. Eventually, even they were in the Great Hall, looking about as distressed as he would have expected. He looked up at Professor McGonagall and nodded, and she swept out of the chamber behind the Great Hall to address the students. He donned his Invisibility Cloak and followed.

She clapped her hands once, and the ensuing magical crack brought instant silence. "Thank you all for assembling so quickly. I expect many of you have noticed some conspicuous absences. Professor Snape, along with Professors Carrow," she said, snarling a little, "are deceased. As are, I am sad to say, several of our students. Yesterday evening, the Dark Lord was defeated. A consequence of the curse used against him led to the demise of every individual he Marked."

The sentence hung in the air for a moment before there was rapturous explosion of sound. Harry saw a bruised and unkempt Neville grab Seamus, who was next to him, in a hug while the Irishman thumped his back cheerfully. Harry's other Gryffindor year mates present were in similar joyful embraces.

Then Ginny caught his eye. She had dark circles around her eyes and her face seemed a little hollower than he remembered, but she was smiling and clutching Michael Corner's arm. His eye twitched, but otherwise he felt very little. He was relieved that she was okay, at least. His little romance with her felt insignificant in the face of 20,000 years of experience, Goa'uld tainted as it was, but in hindsight his interactions with her had always felt a bit forced and uncomfortable.

He moved on. Amidst the deafening chatter, Harry noticed absences from all houses, though the most obvious were in Slytherin. Harry could only spot a couple of girls from his year amongst the Slytherins, and none of the boys.

"Thank you! That's enough!" McGonagall called, before setting off another cannon blast. "I would ask that you all stay in the Great Hall until we have swept the castle to gather the remains of those who perished. If you are aware of someone who is not with us in the Hall at the moment, please provide Professor Flitwick their name so we may attempt to account for everyone."

A disorderly queue quickly formed in front of Professor Flitwick, full of anxious and cautiously optimistic energy. Satisfied that Hogwarts was in good hands, Harry slipped back out into the back chamber, took a few shortcuts and made his way back out through the main gates at Hogsmeade village. The curfew in Hogsmeade had lifted at six thirty, so he had no issue getting through. Still, he remained concealed. Then, with a final glance at the castle, he spun on his heel and Disapparated.

.o.

He landed on the beach by Shell Cottage to see Ron pulling on his boots while Hermione waited impatiently for him.

"Harry! Don't disappear on us like that!" Hermione said, frowning.

"Somebody needed to tell Professor McGonagall," he said. "I stayed under my Cloak the whole time, but everyone's okay. A bit worse for wear, but they all survived."

"Hey mate," Ron said, dusting off his robe, "we were about to catch up with you."

"Think it's best we give Hogwarts some time to clean up before going back," Harry said quietly. "There were quite a few Marked students from the looks of it, so they've got to find all their bodies. I want to check out Nehebkau's lab, want to come with? And where's Luna?"

Hermione looked conflicted.

"The staff are handling Hogwarts, Hermione," he said. "Give them a few hours at least."

"Alright, at least they're safe now," she said. "Luna said she wants to rest today, but she's very interested in joining us for future 'alien adventures'—so she says. Anyway, where's this lab?"

"When Nehebkau had a host, they called the town Suwenett. Pretty far up the Nile, so south Egypt today, I would assume," he said. "I can Apparate us all there."

"Harry, that's got to be at least two thousand miles away," Hermione said, "and you don't even have a passport!"

"Pass-what?" Ron asked.

"Passport? Didn't you have to present some documents when you went to Egypt before Third Year, Ron?"

"Nah, you just go to the Portkey Office, don't you?" Ron said.

"We won't need them if we're going directly there anyway, Hermione," Harry cut in. "It's deep underground. And as for the distance, well, it's complicated. Apparition clearly involves wormholes and the naquadah in my blood helps me amplify the negative energy burst needed to open a wormhole. There's another thing you can do to make it even more efficient—kind of a no brainer once you can generate a wormhole in the first place—but because the wormhole is traversing a higher dimension it doesn't have to be as physically long as the distance you're travelling. It can be as long or as short as you want. I've realised that intuition makes you expect a further distance to take longer, so you would tend to generate an unnecessarily long wormhole when you Apparate."

"Harry—that's—that's brilliant," she said, smacking her forehead, "of course Apparition would be a wormhole."

"Same principle applies with Stargates. Portkeys and Floo are clearly another flavour of wormhole, but it's all the same underneath. I don't think there's any travel we do that's true teleportation, but what do I know about magic, really? Anyway, hold on," he said, offering an arm to each of them.

They disappeared in a swirl of cloaks.

Nehebkau's lab materialised before them. Well, it was pitch black, but Harry knew it was the lab.

"Lumos," Hermione cast.

"Thanks Hermione," he said, snapping off an Air-Freshening Charm. "Let's see if there's still power," he said. He squatted down near a small hatch and pulled up at it. The whole hatch rose out of the ground, bringing with it a foot-tall cylinder part filled with a yellowish green liquid and a pedestal for the cylinder comprising the reactor chamber and neat runs of piping and wiring. A compact liquid naquadah reactor.

Harry peered at the control crystals. "It's in good shape," he said, and started the plasma ignition process. The lab's lights came on immediately.

It looked precisely as he'd left it however many thousands of years ago. Ra must not have thought much of it.

"Bloody hell, Harry," Ron said, "it's actually real, isn't it?"

"This is incredible," Hermione murmured. "I can't believe I'm standing in an ancient alien facility." She looked around, trying to soak in every detail.

"Blimey, is this real gold?" Ron asked, knocking on a wall pillar.

"It's a nanostructured alloy. Much stronger and lighter than pure gold, but yeah, the Goa'uld use gold extensively. It's a lot less valuable when you have spaceships and a whole galaxy full of the stuff, although they still use slave labour to mine it," Harry said. "Anyway, welcome to Nehebkau's lab. We're about two miles underground. There are three much bigger floors beneath us. This is more like an office and a conceptual research and design level. Follow me."

Ron and Hermione fell into step behind him as he led them to a console in the corner.

"This is my—Nehebkau's personal computer," he said, gesturing at the screen embedded in the gold pedestal. There were two gold arms extending from either side of the pedestal, each bearing a bulbous protrusion that Harry rested his hands on. The screen came to life, and he began mentally instructing the computer—it was automatic, as though Harry, not Nehebkau, had done it hundreds of times before. "I'm just telling it to calculate how much time has passed using relative star positions."

"Like Hermione's Dad's whatsit?"

"Yeah, but Muggles probably won't reach this technology level for a while. The Goa'uld scavenged a lot of their own tech, but they do understand the fundamental principles behind how it all works…oh, it says it's been five thousand and twenty-six years."

"So that would be…three thousand and…twenty-nine BC," Hermione said. "Goodness, that's well before the Old Kingdom of Egypt!"

"I wouldn't be surprised if the Old Kingdom period kicked off shortly after Ra left Earth. The Goa'uld don't let the Jaffa—that's their genetically engineered human warrior caste—have much cultural freedom, and the human slaves even less," Harry said.

"Earliest recorded magic here was 'bout six thousand years ago. Bill told us when we visited," Ron said.

"Interesting, perhaps people developing more complex magic had something to do with Ra's departure," Hermione said.

"Alright, I've connected to the Moon lab. Power looks good, but we should give it an hour to cycle the atmosphere up there before we check it out," Harry said. "Come on, I'll show you 'round."

Harry led them to the lift platform.

"Harry?" Ron said tentatively as the platform descended, "I think I'm out of my depth."

"Don't worry too much, Ron," Harry said as the platform came to a stop and he stepped off. "Not everything is about Muggle—or alien—science, and compared with what I think we're all going to be facing soon…honestly? We're all out of our depths. Look—" he pointed at a dark grey metal cylinder, about fifteen feet long and five feet across "—that's an experimental spaceship hyperdrive unit. Before yesterday, that would have meant nothing to me. Yeah fine, I know about all this stuff now, whatever. It still doesn't mean anything if it's only me. I can't explore the galaxy and confront the Goa'uld by myself.

"How about this? There's a ship up on the Moon. We can fly anywhere we want and explore a little. I know the Goa'uld situations seems terrifying, but the truth is they mostly concentrated on planets with Stargates, and I'm certain they didn't even know every planet with a Stargate. There are billions of star systems in the galaxy that they just don't care about, because they've never had a reason to. We can explore planets that are literally untouched."

"That does sound wicked," Ron said, "but we'd come back here, right? To England, I mean. Just—my family, y'know? I dunno if they'd all be on board with leaving the planet."

"Of course, Ron. They're all welcome to join, but I know it might not be for everyone. It will get dangerous eventually. Your parents are invited too, of course Hermione," he said, looking to her.

She visibly cringed.

"What?" Harry asked.

"I never really told you, did I? About my parents. Harry, Obliviation usually can't be undone and—well, I obliviated them for a reason. My mum is...a horrid narcissist and my dad is an emotionally absent enabler, and they have been my whole life. I don't get on with them at all, and it only got worse when Hogwarts started."

"What? But those trips you went on with them—"

"Mostly my mum showing me off to their dentist friends," she said, her face turning sour. "Most of every trip is just my mum making disparaging comments about my hair, my body, what I eat, what I say, my makeup, getting jealous when any of her friends pay attention to me, amongst other things. It's why I love books so much, actually—my parents never taught me how to look after myself, so I had to learn from the library. But I put up with it to even be allowed to go to Hogwarts."

"Hermione—why didn't you say anything?" Ron asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know. In the beginning, I guess life at Hogwarts felt so amazing, even with all the life-threatening drama. I didn't want to break the illusion by talking about my parents while I was there. And then I just never did, because there were always more important things."

"Well, for what it's worth, I'm sorry I didn't ask sooner. I'd like to hear more about how your life was outside of Hogwarts sometime, if you ever feel up to talking about it," Harry said, resting his hand on her shoulder.

"It's okay, Harry. I know you've been preoccupied, but thank you, that means a lot," she said, pulling him into a side hug. "It's surreal, you know. It was only a few years ago Muggles confirmed the first planets outside the Solar System. I remember being so excited about it."

"If you want surreal, there are a few planets around Alpha and Proxima Centauri. One around Proxima is even Earth-sized and has water and some life. The Goa'uld assessed it from orbit, but to my knowledge never bothered landing on it. We could go there. An hour, there and back in my ship. A new planet no one has ever set foot on."

"We…really can do that?" Ron asked. "Can I…can I step on it first?"

"Sure, Ron. You can claim the whole planet for yourself if you want."

Ron's eyes bulged. "What? The whole thing?"

"Who's going to stop you?"

"Blimey, you're not even joking, are you? My own planet."

"Nope," Harry said, grinning.

Hermione rolled her eyes, a small smile on her face. "Honestly Ronald, what are you going to do with a whole planet?"

"You can have your own planet too, Hermione," Harry said, poking her side teasingly. She yelped indignantly and jumped away from him.

"Harry! What would I do with a whole planet?"

Harry shrugged. "Whatever you want. Any experiment you can dream up."

"Well, when you put it like that," Hermione said, screwing up her face in thought. Harry and Ron shared an amused look.

"That reminds me—how would you like to be able to dream up things faster? And have a perfect memory?" Harry asked. "There's a DNA resequencer downstairs; I can resequence your neural structure to insert some cellular computing clusters. They store information, run thought routines, do all sorts of maths for you, overlay information like some kind of augmented reality vision, and if you'll let me implant a nanofilament antenna we can even communicate with each other. Oh, also I can resequence your eyes to function as sensors and see in different wavelengths, and you can display that in the overlay too."

"You want to fiddle with my genes?" Hermione asked. "Isn't that risky?"

"Maybe to nineties Muggle technology, but DNA resequencing is easy with Goa'uld tech. Well, it's Ancient tech really, but the enhancements I want to give you were developed by Nehebkau. As Ra's chief technologist, I—he and Pelops created the Jaffa I mentioned using a resequencer like this. They didn't get these computing clusters; they got enhanced reflexes and muscle tone and carry immature Goa'uld larvae in place of their immune systems. He added clusters to his previous host though—used his host's brain as a sort of expanded mentality."

"Fascinating," Hermione said, "and rather disturbing, but I suppose as long as it's safe, it does sound incredibly useful."

"I promise you won't regret it, but I'll go first if it makes you more comfortable."

They looked at Ron.

"What? Oh, yeah, I don't see why not," he said, shrugging. "Can't say I understood much of what you were talking about, but it'll probably make more sense after."

"The resequencing itself is quick, but it'll take a few weeks for the clusters to form and integrate with your brain," Harry said. He nodded back towards the lift platform. "By the time we're done, the Moon lab will be ready for us, so let's get cracking."

.o.

"What are you calling it?" Harry spoke through their suit comms.

Ron made another bounding leap in the delightfully pleasant 0.7 g. "Obvious, innit?! Chudley!" he cheered.

Hermione put a gloved palm on her helmet and groaned. The suits were a necessity—the newly designated planet...Chudley...had a low-pressure atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide, was a frigid minus thirty Celsius, and was bathed in quite a lot of UV and X-ray light from Proxima. For expediency, they forwent experimenting with protecting themselves magically in favour of the perfectly serviceable spacesuits on the ship.

Chudley had some basic plant life—carpets of spongy, dark purple moss seemed to be thriving under Proxima's irradiance. A few other plants, all with a variety of broad purplish black leaves and stocky black stems, jutted through the moss. Proxima itself was a huge bronze disk low on the viridian sky, 3 times the diameter of the Sun from Earth. Alpha Centauri A and B were bright white and yellow blots a few degrees above Proxima, clearly visible even during the days-long 'afternoon'. The planet was locked in a 2:1 spin–orbit resonance with Proxima, turning slowly under the star every five and a half days, but it also swung between 6.5 and 8.1 million km distant over its 11-day orbit, leading to some spectacular weather phenomena. From space, they'd observed an enormous cyclone swirling over the dayside ocean, easily bigger than anything Earth had ever seen. Its outer rain bands lashed across one of the continents into a string of five enormous volcanoes, each piercing the cloud layer to reach over ten kilometres above the surface. One—the smallest—was actively erupting, spewing thick rivers of lava down a collapsed slope.

Ron leapt again, laughing as he sailed through the air. "Say, Harry—can we build a base here like your one on the Moon?"

"Good idea," Harry said, looking around for a suitable spot. It actually was a good idea—it made tactical sense to have at least one hidden outpost outside the Solar System. Why not Chudley, where no Goa'uld would bother looking?

Hermione was waving her wand around, digging up some of the plant life to store in stasis capsules. "The Basic Plant Analysis spell is giving me some positively bizarre readings," she said. "I want to see what Neville and Professor Sprout makes of these."

"We've got plenty of stasis capsules, so go wild. Once you're done here, come join us over by that rock," Harry said, pointing at an isolated bulge in the distance.

That rock turned out to be a vaguely cylindrical limestone inselberg, standing about a hundred and twenty metres proud of the surrounding plain. Liberal application of defodio, amplified by the naquadah in Harry's blood,excavated a smooth bore in the vertical face of the pale straw-coloured rock, roughly four metres across and thirty metres deep. Ron was transfiguring some of the rubble into an elaborate stone door that could roll open into a pocket he'd dug into the tunnel wall—at least, it would roll once Hermione had carved some runes on it.

"This can be Chudley's Cannon! Get it, Harry? Chudley's Cannon!" he chortled.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Because it looks like a cannon sticking out of the ground if you squint hard enough?" Some more gouging charms shaped the end of the tunnel into a cavern about forty metres across with a rather attractive fan-vaulted ceiling.

"Come on, it's pretty good."

"Yeah, it is," Harry said, chuckling as he threw strengthening charms at the walls.

Pop.

"Hey, Hermione, do you see the gaping hole in the rock? We're there," Harry said into the suit comms.

"Yeah, I see it. Come check out what I found," she said, appearing at the tunnel entrance, holding up something on her palm. Her helmet light shone at them.

"It's…a rock?" Harry said, trying to make out the object.

"Come outside and look," she said impatiently. When they emerged, she presented her palm again. It was very…rock-like. Sort of spherical, a rough, rocky surface, and a deep midnight blue colour, similar to much of the foliage.

"It still looks like a rock, Hermione."

"It does right now because Apparating scared her."

"Her? Apparating scared your rock? Have you gone barmy?" Ron asked, eyebrows vanishing behind his fringe.

Hermione huffed. "Wait, you'll see," she said, stroking the rock-thing with her fingers.

It moved. Slowly at first—one side of it peeled away, followed by the other, into surprisingly long wings. What appeared to be rock was actually several layers of odd scaly feathers. The head popped up, revealing bright cornflower eyes and a round mouth hole with concentric circles of tiny, jagged teeth, and a trio of scaly tail feathers popped down and fanned out.

"That looks like an ugly little phoenix," Ron said. The weird bird-thing tilted its head.

"Ron! Don't be mean. She's beautiful!"

"How d'you know it's a girl?" he asked.

"That sex determining spell we learned in Care in third year?" she said. Ron stared at her blankly. "Ugh, never mind. Actually, the spell was a bit confused, but I think she's a girl…or whatever the local equivalent is."

"She does remind me of Fawkes. Like, a tiny little bit," Harry said, holding his thumb and index finger barely apart.

"She started following me and won't leave me alone now," Hermione said. "Do you think she'd survive in our atmosphere?"

Harry shrugged. "She probably breathes oxygen, but if she can't handle the pressure, I don't doubt you could figure out a magical solution."

"Hey! I reckon…she kinda looked like a ball rolled up, wouldn't you say?" Ron asked. "Like…a cannonball, even?"

"Ro-on!" Hermione groaned.

"Well, it's my planet," he said, giggling.

"Don't remind me," she said.

"She can be a Hermione's cannonball, since you discovered her after all," he said, panning his hand across an imaginary banner. The bird-thing opened its weird mouth-hole and emitted a strange sound—almost like Ron's giggle.

"Now look what you've made her do!" Hermione said. "She better not start imitating your laugh all—"

It giggled again—this time more obviously a copy of Ron's. Hermione sighed and lowered the bird-thing to the ground to let it waddle off into the tunnel on four stubby legs.

"What are we doing here anyway?" she asked.

Having caught her up on their progress, Hermione made quick work of Ron's respectable attempt at a door, and then they all set about transfiguring rubble into rhombohedral calcite crystals—ridiculously easy when working with nearly pure limestone. They weren't perfectly transparent, but they turned out unblemished and flawless in every other way. Once they had a pile of several thousand of various sizes, Hermione twirled her wand and they formed an upside-down droplet-shaped shell of crystals, each separated by a few millimetres, around a stone sphere she'd etched some runes on. The whole assembly rotated serenely in front of them, almost as tall as her. Then, she magically attached it to the apex of the ceiling, where the eight fan vaults met to leave a little flat octagonal space. The pointy end of the assembly, Harry guessed, was at least five metres above their heads.

"That's perfect," Ron said, "thanks Hermione."

"I never realised you would care so much about the aesthetics of your secret base," she said, flicking her wand and turning the stone sphere on. The sphere's glow diffused through the crystals and refracted nicely onto the rest of the ceiling. "But that is a very pretty light fixture, if I do say so myself."

Ron scratched the fuzz on his chin. "I dunno if you've noticed, but the Burrow is six different styles of architecture. I always liked the Gothic bits," he said. "Same at Hogwarts, really. Most of it is Romanesque, but there's a lot of Gothic parts, like the Entrance Hall has that great fan vaulting—that's what I told Harry to model this on."

Harry and Hermione stared at him in disbelief. "How come you didn't tell us you liked this stuff before?" Harry asked.

"Never got around to it, did I?" Ron said.

Hermione shook her head. "Anyway, we'll need to set up a ward and anchor it to the planet to keep that powered for longer than a few months," she said, admiring the glittering birefringent crystals. The bird-thing leapt into the air with a flurry of powerful flaps from its long wings and soared around the new light, letting out a few more giggles.

Harry grinned. Hermione sighed.

They spent the next few hours roughing out a layout for…Chudley's Cannon. Most parts were fairly crude—they'd finish them off later. Some parts they put a lot more effort into making pretty for the hell of it—such as the massive, 4-metre-high rolling door at the entrance, which was reminiscent of a Gothic round window, complete with all the sections between the ribs transfigured into calcite to let the Proxima-light filter through. Closed, it would seal the environment inside the base, although a rune-based variant of the Bubblehead charm also spanned the mouth of the tunnel to keep things separated when the door was open.

Harry had dug another short but much wider tunnel opposite the entrance, for when they found a spare Stargate. And to the left and right of the entrance, Ron and Hermione had crafted a pair of staircases that spiralled around the wall to above the entrance tunnel, complete with Gothic balustrades of translucent calcite. Where the staircases met, they cut a vaulted archway beyond which Harry dug a small foyer, then a hall extending almost all the way back to the rock face. Then, taking inspiration from the Great Hall at Hogwarts, they transfigured the wall at the end into four towering Gothic windows that showed the land outside in stunning clarity. Colonnades and pendant fan vaulting followed, with each of the four pendants carrying a stone light sphere that suffused the hall with a warm white radiance.

It was awe-inspiring to all of them how much they could create with only limestone rubble and a few waves of their wands; a much-needed catharsis after the destruction they had witnessed in the war. Harry could see the tension in his friends' faces and shoulders drain away as they let their imagination loose, and that in itself lifted his spirit.

On either side of the foyer, they crafted more staircases that spiralled back around the outside of the main cavern. To the right, they cut a passageway off the stairs that led to an exposed plateau part way up the inselberg, on which they erected crystal walls and a vaulted crystal roof. Directly adjacent to the crystal greenhouse, they created an identical one inside the rock with stone walls and a ceiling that provided artificial sunlight on a 24-hour cycle.

Further up the staircase, they crafted a cosy lounge space with a single floor-to-ceiling arched crystal window spanning the entire far wall, and a bar table mounted along it with floating seats. Some tables, some areas marked out for squishy sofas they would put in later, some rows of bookshelves in one corner. It felt like a relaxed, airy café, and Harry was beginning to love it.

.o.

"I think she's fine. Though how would we even tell?" Harry said, as he settled into the control chair.

"I suppose she would make more of a fuss if she weren't," Hermione said, watching their new bird-thing friend intently. "I think I'll name her Anka, after the mythological Arabian bird."

"Uh, you know what she eats, right?" Ron asked. "She won't start nibbling my arm, will she?"

Hermione rolled her eyes and pulled a stasis capsule out of her beaded bag, shaking it around to show the mottled orange blobs it contained. "Trust you to think about food. They're like little gooseberries," she said. "They were everywhere. I got a few of the plants too, but I think this will be more than enough until we're able to come back."

"I'll show you how to use the equipment to analyse them later. If there are any nutrients in them she can't get from something on Earth, it'll be easy enough to synthesise whatever is missing," Harry said, as his ship lifted off Chudley.

He made a low pass over the Cannon, watching with pride as its magnificent façade slid along the viewscreen. With its coordinates logged in the ship's computer, he commanded the ship to exit the atmosphere and jump into hyperspace.

"I still can't believe this is real," Hermione said, resting her arms on top of his chair and staring out at the ethereal glow of hyperspace.

"Tell me about it," Harry said. He was adjusting the ship's course to take them out of hyperspace in the shadow of Saturn, so as to not alarm any Muggle satellites that might be looking. And maybe so they could get an up-close look at the pretty rings. "Part of me was worried Nehebkau and everything was some sort of hallucination I was having until we actually got to the lab in Egypt," he said. "I'm glad it's real. I honestly had no idea what I was going to do with my life if I survived Voldemort, but now I know about this and the state of the galaxy, it really couldn't have been anything else."

"It's nice, y'know—having a place of my own," Ron said, a broad grin on his face.

"Having a planet that you get to call Chudley, you mean," Harry said.

"Too right," he said, slapping his knee, "and no one can make me change it."

Hermione's palm found her face again. Harry glanced back at her. "Chin up, Hermione, you can have the next planet we can find, and you'll get to call it whatever you want."

.o.

Wide, round blue eyes peered across the coffee table. Beady blue eyes stared back. "How marvellous!" Luna said breathlessly. She was kneeling on the floor with her hands on the edge of the table. Anka giggled.

"She uh…picked up Ron's laugh," Harry said, scratching his ear. "Nothing else yet, though."

Luna reached out her hand to offer Anka an orange berry. Obligingly, the bird-thing suctioned the little globe to its mouth-hole and enveloped it into its mouth cavity.

"Ron named it a Hermione's cannonball, long story."

"She looks like a Walundering Humdinger," Luna said.

"Not a Blibbering one?"

"No, silly, Blibbering Humdingers are lime green, have red eyes, and four toes per foot. She only has three," she said, smiling brilliantly at him.

"Oh, of course, my mistake," Harry said with a smile of his own. It was nice to see his friends being so happy and carefree. Especially Luna, whose cheerful innocence had been most eroded by the war. "So…you'll be with us next time we go travelling?"

"If you don't mind. You've revealed to me that there is a whole galaxy full of wonderful animals," she said. "I've always wanted to be a magizoologist—now I can be an astromagizoologist. Who knows what magical creatures await discovery out there?"

"You're always welcome," he said. "And you're right, there are bound to be thousands of animals out there with strange and remarkable traits."

She stood up and hugged him warmly. "Thank you, Harry. I really do appreciate our friendship."

"As do I, Luna," he said, returning the hug.

"I 'ope you are not planning on leaving without us also, next time," Fleur said, sitting in the couch opposite them and tucking her legs under her. "Bill and I 'ave talked. Once things 'ave settled down, and we 'ave done what we can to 'elp out, we would like to join you out there," she said, nodding up at the sky.

"Of course, you're all welcome. I meant what I said this morning about helping out orphans and families that suffered, but I'm not sure how we should go about it. As much as I would like to gather them all together and help them personally, I know that's not really feasible."

"While you were out, I 'ave thought of this also," Fleur said. "There were several wealthy Death Eaters who 'ave no remaining family—per'aps if we use their money to offer financial assistance to families that foster orphans with magical vows on 'ow they are to be treated, or loans or grants to orphaned young adults and families 'oo need assistance, with vows to prevent misuse."

"I'll donate the entire Black and Potter estates to that. Money really isn't a concern for me anymore, and I can go zap an asteroid for a literal ton of gold if that's not enough," Harry said, watching Anka trot up Luna's arm to perch on her shoulder.

"We will need to search for young children who are now alone wherever they are—and anyone held captive like we were at Malfoy Manor. Any ideas on how to do that?" he asked, looking back at Fleur.

"The Floo Network maybe. Almost every 'ouse will be connected to the Floo Network, so there will be a registry of locations at the Ministry. Many will be protected against unauthorised access, but Kingsley can override that as Minister, as the Ministry controls the Network. Some, like Malfoy Manor, I expect would 'ave additional protections that might need breaking through."

"Good idea, but that must be a huge registry, what with all the public Floo locations as well. It would take ages to go through it to find where any children are," Harry said, frowning in thought.

"You could check the Hogwarts Book of Admittance," Luna said as she scratched Anka's belly. "Rowena Ravenclaw enchanted it herself—it can find the current location of every magical child in the British Isles. And if it's Unplottable or the address is too hard to decipher, you could use the Hogwarts seal on a bit of parchment and follow an owl there."

"Hogwarts Book of Admittance first, I think, but we should talk to Kingsley about getting someone to look through the Floo registry for the addresses of known Death Eaters."

.o.

Kingsley launched the official search and rescue operation the following day. The Auror force was in too much disarray and spread too thin to field more than a couple of junior Aurors, so unofficially Kingsley was letting Harry, Ron, Hermione, Luna, Bill and Fleur take part in the operation. The six of them would handle tracking down children via the Hogwarts Book of Admittance, while Aurors Haddock and Brewster were tasked with collating information on the households of known or suspected Death Eaters via the Floo registry.

Professor McGonagall had been entirely supportive of their endeavour, and in a matter of minutes she provided them with a very large stack of addressed parchments, each affixed with a wax seal bearing the Hogwarts coat of arms. She had also informed them of the names of the fifteen students they had found dead, of the seventeen students who had not returned at the start of the school year or after the Christmas break, and of the two who had been present but vanished during term. Fortunately, the Book of Admittance was able to determine that ten of the absent students were at least alive. Unfortunately, half of them appeared to be located within enchantments so powerful that their location was obfuscated into uselessness. Despite the combined effort of Professors McGonagall, Flitwick and Vector, they were unable to get it to be anything more precise than England. Owls wouldn't do anything either—they would soar out of the office window, fly a few confused loops, then return, clearly distressed.

Harry, thinking their situation to be most dire, had insisted on prioritising them, so he'd elected to stay at Hogwarts and ask around to see if anyone could provide any clues. With absolutely nothing else to go on, the rest left him to that and got started on the much bigger pile—seven hundred and sixty-four, or so Professor McGonagall had said—of children who were too young to attend, or whose parents had elected to homeschool.

So, Professor McGonagall had handed him the bundle of five parchments and wished him luck. He hadn't even looked at the names until he found an empty classroom to sit down and plan out his investigation, but nothing had prepared him for the chill that shot up his spine at last name in the pile:

Delphini Riddle

Stamping down on those feelings, he rushed back up to the new Headmistress' office and slapped the parchment on the table in front of her.

"Voldemort's daughter?"

"So it would seem," she said. "The Book of Admittance recorded her birth a mere two weeks ago. She is an innocent babe, Potter. She did not get to choose her parents; do not give her any less consideration than the others."

"Oh, I know, I wasn't going to. It's just that there's only one person I can think of who would be mad enough to have Voldemort's child and be close enough to him to know his true surname: Bellatrix Lestrange."

"Go on," she said, eyeing him curiously.

"As it happens, we encountered Bellatrix two days ago. At Malfoy Manor. I don't know where that is, though, or how to get back there."

Her eyes widened and she hurried to open the door to the small turret that held the Book of Admittance. Harry followed her. Professor McGonagall flipped back and forth through the book, then ran her finger along the page.

"Ah! Here, Potter," she said, beckoning him over. She tapped the page. "When a student graduates or withdraws from Hogwarts, the address is frozen. The Founders had no need to be aware of former students' locations. Fortunately for us, the Malfoy family have inhabited the grounds where Malfoy Manor is for many generations, and the Book used to be aware of its location."

The entry had been struck through, but it was still legible.

Lucius Abraxas Malfoy. 27 December 1954. Third Floor Main Bedroom, Malfoy Manor, Swallowcliffe, Wiltshire, England

.o.

Hovering three kilometres above the tiny village of Swallowcliffe, it took Harry all of ten minutes to find the Manor. It was one of the largest estates in the area, after all. Getting in was…surprisingly straightforward. Harry simply landed his ship in the front garden, stealth functions activated. Harry surmised that as he had previously been permitted through the wards, albeit as a prisoner, they still recognised him. The ship was entirely unaffected. Goa'uld level technology just was not susceptible to magical interference in the way that current Muggle technology was.

He nudged open the imposing silver-gilt ebony door with a depulso and slipped inside. There was a body crumpled at the base of the stairway in the entrance hall—a halo of long blond hair and an ebony cane a few feet away told Harry it was Lucius himself. There was no smell yet, nor had any insects found him; the anti-insect wards saw to that.

The next bodies he found were Bellatrix and Voldemort in the dining room. Bellatrix was slumped, quite undignified, face first into a bowl of consommé. Voldemort was slouched in the throne-like chair at the head of the table. Unlike the others, he appeared to be in an advanced stage of decay—large flakes of skin had sloughed off his face and scalp, and the flesh beneath was liquefying and dribbling down his robe.

Several Death Eaters were present in the drawing room, where they had been playing a card game; a pile of galleons and half-drunk tumblers of Firewhisky upon the table.

The dungeon where they'd been held was next. Not that he expected anyone to have been captured and confined there in the few hours between their escape and when the soul-eating curse had been activated. Still, he was almost disappointed when he found them empty. It would have been nice to save all five unlocatable people in one fell swoop.

Finally, he found himself facing a locked door, perplexed. No spell he knew worked to unlock it. Depulso splashed uselessly against it. Even bombarda didn't so much as scratch it. He took a deep breath and clenched his fists. The Goa'uld parasite responded by flooding his body with accelerants. He could feel them burning through his blood and into every nerve, and simultaneously, he let his magic flow into the muscle fibres in his legs. With a voice-doubled roar and glowing gold eyes, he slammed his foot flat against the door.

The door itself didn't yield to his foot; rather, the whole door frame tore out and came crashing down on the floor beyond, leaving splintered wooden beams exposed. Brick dust trickled into the opening. A woman screamed. Then a baby screamed.

He walked through.

Narcissa Malfoy was holding a wand aloft, shakily, at the former doorway. She looked awful. Her platinum blonde hair was tangled and unkempt, her face was a mess of tear tracks and ruined mascara. The baby, Delphini, was clutched to her bare chest.

"Don't hurt her!" she cried. "She hasn't done anything!"

"I'm not going to," Harry said. "Whoops, sorry—that's better. I'm not going to hurt her. Or you, for that matter. Sorry about the door. I came to rescue Delphini, not hurt her. I didn't realise anyone else would be alive here."

"Potter?! What are you doing here? How do you know her name?" she asked, stabbing her wand towards him.

"Hogwarts' Book of Admittance," he said, calmly displaying his empty hands to her. "There are a lot of children we need to make sure are safe. I take it you never became a Death Eater. What are you doing in here?"

"What do you mean? I don't know what happened down there. They all started screaming and screaming and wouldn't stop. I was terrified. I brought Delphini up here and locked the door. It took hours for them to fall silent."

"We corrupted one of Voldemort's Horcruxes. Didn't know the Dark Mark was a soul-based link, so everyone that was Marked also died."

"My poor Draco," she said, her eyes dimming. "I saw him writhing on his bedroom floor. I didn't know what to do. I tried to comfort him, but nothing made any difference."

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I know he was having regrets about Voldemort," Harry said. He couldn't bring himself to feel anything but pity for this vulnerable, traumatised woman.

"I never wanted to be involved with the Dark Lord in the first place, or for Draco to be either," she said bitterly, wand hand dropping back down to the duvet as tears coursed down her cheeks. "If I'd known the Dark Lord had Horcruxes, of all things, I think I would have cursed Lucius to within an inch of his life and left with Draco. How utterly foolish."

"You're aware of Horcruxes?"

"Herpo is not a terribly obscure figure, Potter," Narcissa said. "Any half-wit with an interest in history will have heard of them. Granted, Binns tends to ruin interest in history for most everyone."

"It's Harry—but true, I never enjoyed it, that's for sure," he said, tilting his head. "I was led to believe they weren't common knowledge."

"Dumbledore, no doubt," she said. "Few would disagree that he oversaw a steep decline in the curriculum and the removal of much of our cultural heritage at Hogwarts—there used to be over a dozen electives, you know, classes such as Rituals and Ritual Traditions, Esoteric Studies, Warding, Artificing—even Alchemy, his own specialisation for Merlin's sake! An effort to make our world more approachable to Muggleborns and to more thoroughly integrate them into our culture, or so he claimed. All it did was enflame division and push many traditional families to the Dark Lord—who, at the time, claimed his agenda was to preserve our culture and traditions."

She breathed out heavily, her cheeks flushed. "No, I am not fond of Albus Dumbledore, oh—not for the reasons Lucius wasn't, and perhaps now you see why—he personally created a cause for the Dark Lord to leverage, and that cause has ruled and ruined my life for over twenty-five years. Merlin knows he would not have been nearly as successful without it."

"Yes," Harry admitted, "it was Dumbledore. And believe me when I say I can empathise. It was Dumbledore's cause that ruled and would have ruined my life had I not reached out for help. He was expecting me to sacrifice myself. But—you really weren't aligned with Voldemort?"

"I agreed with his stated agenda in the beginning—why wouldn't I? I think many Muggleborns would have seen it as a worthy goal—Muggles value culture and history as much as we do—but I'm not blind or stupid. When scores of old families were being wiped out in the seventies, it was clear he never cared about our culture at all. He desired power and to be the ultimate authority, and that was it. I knew then that he was no different to any other tyrant.

"But I had no choice. My father announced my betrothal to Lucius the day I turned fifteen. I had dreams of getting a Mastery in Potions, you know? I planned to apprentice under my great-uncle's cousin—your grandfather Fleamont."

"My grandfather?"

"Oh yes, he was one of the premier Potions Masters in Britain at the time. And he would have accepted me, too. I was good," she said, frowning and rocking Delphini absently. "But I married Lucius instead, and my life became about furthering his causes and helping to improve his standing with the Dark Lord and planning ball after ball and being a good little socialite wife, and otherwise staying quiet and out of sight until I was needed."

Her composure faltered. "As resigned as I was to my life, I…never envisioned things turning out this way," she said, sinking into the mattress. "I thought that Hallowe'en would be the last of him, and that I would finally be able to have some freedom. And for a while, things were looking up, and I was happy. I had Draco…Draco was my light," she sobbed, "when he was a little boy. He used to be so polite and kind, and everything I wanted him to be. Merlin and Morgana, how I failed him."

"If you could, would you like to see him?" Harry asked.

"If only I could," she said, sniffing.

"What I'm about to show you—I will need a vow of silence," he said. "And this is a one-time thing."

Narcissa looked at him curiously but complied. Harry pulled out the Resurrection Stone and turned it three times in hand.

"Hello, mother."

.o.

Neville did a double take, then he rubbed his eyes at seeing the Boy-Who-Lived strolling the corridors of Hogwarts with Narcissa Malfoy—clad in a fairly plain robe, which was unusual in itself—carrying a baby beside him.

"Harry?" he called out.

Harry looked around and saw him. "Hi Neville! How are you? Good to see you. Come, join us," Harry said, waving him over.

Neville's eyes flicked between Harry and Narcissa, then down at the baby. "Narcissa means no harm," Harry said. "This is Delphi, her newborn daughter."

"Good to see you, too, Harry," he said, nodding at them, "Mrs Malfoy—if Harry says you're alright, you're alright. And well, clearly, you're not Marked."

"Thank you, Mr Longbottom," she said with uncharacteristic modesty.

"We were on our way to the Slytherin common room," Harry said, as they began to walk again.

"You were?" Neville asked.

"There are two Slytherin students unaccounted for that the Hogwarts Book of Admittance unable to locate. Graham Pritchard, a fourth year, and Daphne Greengrass, in our year. I'm trying to gather clues as to their whereabouts."

"Daphne Greengrass is missing?"

"You know her?"

"Not well at all. I know she's really good at herbology—saw her around the greenhouses fairly often on the weekends. Oh, and she was in my arithmancy class."

"The greenhouses? When was the last time you saw her there?" Harry asked.

"Monday, I'm fairly sure. Don't think I saw her more recently than that. Professor Sprout was giving her advice on her bonsai wiggentree after Herbology. I was staying behind after class to ask Sprout a question as well."

"So she hasn't been missing for long. Do you know who she's friends with?"

"Oh yeah, she always sits with Tracey in arithmancy. Nice girl. Had to do an arithmancy assignment with her once," Neville said. "She's a Slytherin, too."

"I believe Miss Greengrass has a younger sister," Narcissa said quietly. "Hogwarts aged, certainly. It has been a while since I've interacted with the Greengrasses."

"Good place to start as any," Harry said. "What about Pritchard? Know anything about him?"

Neville frowned. "Not a clue. Sorry, Harry."

Harry looked at Narcissa.

"There is a Pritchard family that I'm aware of. I do not know if Graham Pritchard is a relation," she said.

"We'll have to ask his dormmates, I suppose," Harry said as the blank wall in the dungeons that served as the entrance to the Slytherin Common Room came into view. Two girls in Slytherin uniforms appeared around the corner, talking hurriedly in low tones with each other.

"Tracey," Neville muttered to Harry, "and that must be Daphne's sister. Looks enough like her."

They saw Harry and his entourage and stopped dead.

"Hello," Harry said loudly. It echoed down the corridor. "We were looking for the two of you, actually."

The younger girl was tugging on Tracey's sleeve and looking anxiously between her and Harry. Tracey said something to her, then stepped forward cautiously.

"Do you know…anything about…," she started.

"She's alive. We're investigating her whereabouts," Harry said, handing a piece of parchment to her.

"What's this?" Tracey asked, flipping it over in her hands.

"The Book of Admittance can tell that she's alive, and in England, but that's it. She's under wards that are obscuring her location too well."

"She's—she's okay?" the sister asked, coming up beside Tracey.

"She's alive," he said. "What's your name?"

"Astoria Greengrass. Daphne's sister," she said, looking down and fiddling with her robe sleeve.

Harry reached out and grasped her upper arm comfortingly. "We'll find her, Astoria. I promise," he said.

.o.

Tracey and Astoria had told them that Daphne had been with them at Hogwarts as recently as Wednesday—the day that they'd killed Voldemort and the Death Eaters. She hadn't acted oddly at all but had gone to visit the greenhouses later than she usually did and had failed to return before curfew. She had no boyfriend or girlfriend, as far as either of them knew, and was not planning to meet anyone. And yes, she would have told them if she was.

The girls had already followed up with Sprout and some other students, but no one could offer any leads. Similarly, a couple of Graham Pritchard's dormmates had said he'd been missing since mid-January after a Hogsmeade visit—said he was going back up the castle early and they never saw him again. They tried to look for him, but no one had seen him or anything suspicious, and they'd heard nothing since.

Harry found it horribly frustrating. A spaceship, magic, and twenty thousand years of memories, and he couldn't even find a handful of people. Ollivander's knowledge of divination spells seemed unlikely to be helpful if Rowena Ravenclaw's own divination enchantments couldn't pinpoint them. And a voice in the back of his mind kept asking—what if they were under a Fidelius? How would they ever find them? One fully trained witch, three and a half students, and a baby were hardly going to be cracking one of the oldest, most powerful wards ever created.

He tossed the parchments on his desk with a sigh.

Daphne Greengrass, Graham Pritchard, Laura Madley—a third year Hufflepuff, and an 8-year-old boy named Duncan Pepper. Their names ran through his mind like a mantra. He knew names held power, whatever that abstract idea really meant. It was a power that divination tapped into, and vows and magical contracts were anchored to. It was the same power that had forced his participation in the Triwizard Tournament. Even the Goa'uld had been aware of the esoteric high-dimensional energy field that was the power of names—Pelops had been the first to notice that the collective worship of so many beings had a strange invigorating effect, as though they were literally manifesting aspects of godliness with their minds. None of them had succeeded in characterising it, but it had driven them to new heights of megalomania. Perhaps people projected their own name along with their spirit into the energy field, and mental energy could literally be directed at them by using that name, somehow bolstering them. If that was the case, it should be trackable. But Harry was at a complete loss on where to start with that, and even more, he wasn't sure if that idea was substantively different to divination.

Neville, Astoria and Tracey were huddled around a piece of parchment, piecing together who was where on the day of Daphne's disappearance. The pensieve from the Dumbledore's old office lay on the desk next to theirs. Narcissa sat in the corner nursing Delphi while she perused books on divination.

"Interesting," Narcissa said. She didn't elaborate.

"Are you really going to make me ask what?" Harry said.

"Hush, Harry, I'm calculating," she said. Harry looked at Neville. Neville looked at Tracey and Astoria, who both shrugged, then looked back at Harry and shrugged himself.

Three minutes later: "I haven't solved our problem, but this may constrain our search somewhat," she said. "The Book of Admittance—we should be able to confuse it."

"I'm all ears," Harry said.

"Well—England is an arbitrary boundary. It's only the collective belief of millions of Muggles and thousands of witches and wizards that give magic any idea of its extent. That's how the Book knows anything about the concept of England."

"Funny, I was just thinking about the power of names," Harry said. "I see where you're going with this, but I'm not sure I understand how we would overcome the belief of millions of Muggles."

"We don't need to. The belief is always in flux—it gets reinforced every time the idea of England crystallises in someone's mind and wanes whenever it is absent. It's also less powerful the more distant you are. To a foreigner, actually even in an expatriate's mind, the boundary becomes more abstract. That makes it a localised effect, and the Book draws upon the surrounding magic to determine where things are. And it has incredible resolving power—with the belief of a singular individual, it can locate the room they reside in."

"That explains a lot," Harry muttered with his arms crossed.

Tracey slapped the desk. "If we go really far away from England with the Book of Admittance and collectively believe that the boundaries are different, we can trick the Book into narrowing down the region! That's brilliant!"

Narcissa actually gave her a small smile. Harry blinked.

"We would genuinely have to believe in the alternative borders, though, so we would have to use the Confundus charm. We will also have to go very far away, and the resolving power is also a function of the distance between the Book and who we're looking for. It's a balancing act," Narcissa said.

Tracey deflated. "So, it would take us ages to get far enough away, and we wouldn't even be able to find her?"

"Don't…worry about the distance," Harry cut in. "How far, Narcissa?"

"It's complicated. Because we're synchronising our belief and can do it in the middle of the night here, we won't need to be as far, but it will still be on the order of millions of miles. Based on resolving rooms at several hundred miles, I estimate that the Book will still be able to resolve towns at five million miles."

"What!?" Tracey said. "Are you joking?"

"Does having more people help?" Harry asked.

"Yes, but there's a minimum distance we have to go unless you want to bring half of England with us. It's still likely over a million miles. It's more practical to take eight people ten million miles, and time is of the essence," Narcissa said.

"Umm…," Tracey said, "there's the small matter of travelling TEN MILLION MILES!?"

Harry grinned. "Follow me," he said. "I did say don't worry about the distance, didn't I?"

.o.

"It's not actually a window, you know," Harry said from the control chair.

Tracey, Astoria and Neville were glued up against the panoramic viewscreen as Earth receded.

"Bloody hell, Harry," Neville breathed.

"Hermione's got some plants she wants to show you back there, by the way. I won't ruin her fun," Harry said.

"You'd better not," Hermione said, shrugging her robe off her casual Muggle attire as she walked in from the cargo loading bay. Bill, Fleur, Ron and Luna followed her in, chatting amongst each other.

"Uh, Harry?" Ron asked, pointing awkwardly at Narcissa, who was sitting in a one of a pair of large plush couches she'd conjured with Delphi napping in her lap. Hermione and the others came to a dead stop.

"Long story. She's good, though," Harry said.

"If you say so," Ron said with a raised eyebrow.

"This was actually her idea," he said, then smirked when Hermione sat down, cooed over Delphi and then shot off about a dozen questions for Narcissa. Trust Hermione's academic curiosity to override any reservations she had. Narcissa would appreciate the intelligent conversation, at least.

"Hello Harry!" Luna said with a cheery wave, as she passed by the control chair to plop down on the empty couch. "Hello Neville! Hello everyone else!"

"Clever tactic," Bill said, "can't say I would have thought of it. Though I do have a suggestion. There's a spell I learned about in Italy that induces a subtle shared hallucination. It's amazingly effective, and really makes you focus on the idea that is implanted. Might be easier to coordinate and control than a bunch of Confundus charms."

"Sounds good to me," Harry said. "Fill Narcissa in on the details though—see if it changes anything she planned."

The ship spun on the spot and accelerated at 40g toward the Moon. Sticking to sublight was a minor annoyance, but wise until they at least got to the shadow of the Moon—hyperspace windows of the Goa'uld variety were quite noticeable, and there was no question that Earth would be able to see the blue-purple streamers of Cherenkov radiation when it opened, especially that close. Even with that limitation, the ship could decelerate at about 153g by shedding energy directly into gravitational waves, which made it a quick 25-minute one-way trip.

Narcissa used the trip to brief them all on the alternative map strategy, with some alterations from Bill. They would share a sequence of hallucinations wherein they would believe that a successively smaller patch of England instead had the separate identity of Albion. Bill had indicated that using a singular, existing, and related name and concept would make the idea more convincing and result in stronger belief. As he was the only one who knew the hallucination spell, he would be casting it and guiding them to focus on where Albion was using a map of the British Isles that he'd conjured and spread on the floor between the couches.

That was where the sequence entered into it. To start with Albion would be half of England. Then, as the Book identified whether or not any of the missing children were in Albion, they could halve the area and try again in the half that contained the children. It would get a little complicated with four people potentially being in four totally separate places, but Bill would keep track of that. Eventually they wouldn't be able to push the resolution any higher, but they were all hopeful that it would be good enough to narrow down the suspect list to only a handful of families each once they cross-referenced their results with the Floo Network registry and historical family records.

Once they slipped behind the Moon, Harry dropped into hyperspace for all of 90 milliseconds. The view of hyperspace flashed by so briefly that everyone startled at normal space reappearing.

"Did something go wrong?" Ron asked.

"No, everything's fine. That's all the time it takes to travel nine point seven million miles. Actually, that was at ten percent power. Let's get to work, people," Harry said as he rose from his chair.

Notes

Nehebkau's ship: 9 ly/h

Wormholes: there's no guarantee that the path a wormhole takes is shorter than the physical distance in normal spacetime. In fact, the wormhole itself can be longer than the physical distance. But it is also true that it can be as short as you want.

Narcissa: I don't recall if she was ever around while the trio were held captive. I think she might have been in the movies, but for the sake of this story, she was out of sight—and none of the other captives e.g. Luna ever saw her either.

The power of belief contributing magical energy: Collective belief/faith having physical or magical manifestation is called thoughtform and is by no means an original idea (see also American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, and early 20th century mysticism). Having said that, mentioning Pelops here is definitely a hat-tip to kossboss.

Cellular computing clusters: similar in concept to macrocellular clusters Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth universe. With Goa'uld having access to DNA resequencers and clearly capable of some high level modifications, this felt like a very reasonable thing for them to be able to do.

Updates: I can't promise anything, but I will try to be quicker…

Thanks for reading.