As he walked, led by the grip on his arm again, he noticed that the air got cooler. He tried to identify a root cellar kind of smell, like damp earth. Minutes later, they removed the hood and he found himself staring around a huge room with fountains. Four surrounding him, spraying purple tinted water. Before him, was a raised platform of stone. It was peculiar, with the look of limestone but containing purple veins like marble. He noticed tiny pinpoints of light reflected back at him. The stones contained some kind of shimmering mineral. He saw that the floor was made of it, and had been carved into intricate mosaics, like that of leaf and flower patterns. Behind the stone platform, a cavern of, if he had to guess, jagged amethyst stared back at him. It was as if the entire back wall was a freshly opened, giant geode, with toothy, purple quartz cutting through the earth in mounds of shimmering crystal.
The men who had escorted him retreated and a succession of new people, entered from both sides of the stone platform. They were all dressed in grey and purple smocks, and were strapped with instruments that Harry had never seen before. The devices they carried looked like discs made of translucent quarts. Some had belts of four or more, strapped around their robes at different angles. Their heads were covered down to their eyes, by hoods with long cauls. When they were lined up in front of him, they began to hum. It was more like a slow building chant that reached a prolonged and steady level. Suddenly, it began to rain. But only in front of the row of chanting people. It proved to be a curtain of a wet barrier and Harry noticed that the water was as tinted as the fountain water. He stepped back, unprepared for the strange sight.
Through it, a figure stepped from the right. It moved with the elegance that he associated with a female, but he couldn't tell at first. It sort of slinked through the ripples of water until it crossed the platform and stopped in the middle. The veil of rain let up and he saw that a very unusual person peered through it at him. It looked like a woman, but something in his gut told him that it wasn't. She was the color of a robin's egg, for her face, neck, and shoulders were bare, and so were her arms. She was starvation-thin and every tendon protruded like extra bones from her neck and shoulders. The swell of her torso told him that she might've been biologically female, but the stiff red-gold fibers that made up her wig, told him that she was doing her best to pass for human. Her blue lips smiled at him. They parted and her teeth looked human enough, but when she spoke her tongue was blue also.
"Let him come closer," she commanded.
The guard before her stepped back. The veil of rain moved with them.
Harry didn't move. He only watched as she sat on a pillar-like seat that rose out of the ground. Her clothes folded around her in long heavy folds of brown and purple strands that looked more like veins than fabric. It immediately occurred to him that her gown was organic. He couldn't say how he knew, but it looked like something processed from a large, exotic mushroom. It had a stalky texture that somehow crinkled and flowed with her movements. Her dark eyes waited for him to take his fill of her strange differences.
"Come closer, Mr. Potter. So I can hear you better, and you can see me better."
Harry still didn't move.
"No, I'm not an alien. I was born on this planet, same as you." Her tone was forgiving.
Harry found his voice, practically belting, "What are you?"
"A large percentage of humans don't seem to know that wizards are real and walk among them," she countered. "I'm a myth, just like you. My people are Backaals . We have a long history with you, but I didn't bring you here for history lessons. Let's just say that humans no longer remember a time when we helped them survive calamities above ground by taking them in. Then we gave them the technology to dig deep into the earth in order to survive the wars above. We watched your civilizations rise and fall, forgetting everything they learned and starting all over again. I understand that you've never seen a blue person before, but let me point out, I don't normally look this way. I'm afraid you've caught me in a weakened state. That's the reason for the extra security."
"I don't give a damn what you look like. Let me see my daughter."
She sat erect and brought her slender hands together. Her hands appeared slightly longer than normal. Her body language lost its elastic elegance and became wooden as she held a stance of displeasure.
"I understand that you want to see your daughter, and you will. But our introduction cannot be rushed. You need to understand who I am, and that I am sick. My color is an indication of ill health. Normally, I am a lovely portobello tan. And my people, the ones that move easily through your world, can mimic the races that you are accustomed to."
"What does that have to do with why you brought us here?"
"My people get their strength and abilities from me. If my health is failing, then theirs will follow. I brought you here to remedy that. I am their queen."
With that, she reached up and pulled off the wig she wore. The bare scalp she was hiding was more than bald, it was clear. From her forehead to the top of what could not properly be called a skull, there was an abyss of matter. A complete absence of tissue. But something floated inside. Floated, because there did appear to be a buoyancy. A tiny light held suspended inside her head. It glowed faintly, then beamed, sending laser bright sheets out from her head before dimming to fade into the liquid dark of her cranium.
Harry had to unstick his jaw to make it work again. So what, he told himself. He'd seen strange creatures before. So she had her own magic, so what? He had to admit, her head was creepy and fascinating at the same time. But she was distracting him.
"Is that supposed to impress me? You want my help, so what? What makes you think I would if I could? You don't go around kidnapping children then asking for favors."
She dropped the wig to the floor. "I'm not asking. We've done our research, Mr. Potter. Your brave sacrifices and kindness are well documented. You have a heart. In many ways it is your only weakness. We took your daughter because we had no other hope until your magic demonstrated levels of power that we have not found in one place anywhere else. Harnessable levels. Pools and pockets of potential fuels and quantum propulsion exist all over the Universe, but we cannot collect it and use it for our purposes."
As he was about to ask what her purposes were, the floor vibrated beneath his feet. Then trembled to the point that his body rocked. His legs locked to hold him in place. The walls didn't appear to move but he heard rumbling inside them and the amethyst behind her spilt plumes of dusty mineral.
The queen turned her head to the side as though she were speaking to someone over her shoulder. Her lips never moved, but her eyes closed and the point of light floating in her head brightened to a piercing blue-white spectrum. It flared, and in that instant, all the rumbling ceased. When she turned back to Harry, her lips were more blue. She appeared flushed and physically taxed.
"My apologies." Her voice was a whisper. "Time is running out, I'm afraid."
"What was that?"
"The reason I brought you here. Backaal are a group consciousness species, with a hive mentality. Or we were. With my sickness, that is changing. I am connected to my people by my desire for the continuity of my race. My will is their will. Their will is my will. Our culture's core is a psychic one, as they are bound to me. We proliferate, not through family, but through era-long ages and keep the knowledge of the inner world that is Earth. We have always lived inside the planet, though thousands of years ago, many began venturing above ground and learned to move freely among you. They evolved to possess a will of their own. They left my protection. Their numbers were so few, I let them go, believing that our biological connection can never be severed.
"Our lives revolved around the heart of our species. It is a literal heart made of the life-force of this planet. Life-force that flows, conducted through the minerals and water and channels that surface dwellers are aloof to. Our heart is called Madhra, or Mother, in your language. It is a great crystal. It is like the sun to us. It powers our lives. It keeps our world stable. Its light went out many hundreds of years ago and we knew that if we could not revive it, we were looking at the end of our species. Naturally, I sent explorers through the earth in search of similar structures. There are less than five million of us, world-wide. We found many wonders, much of what we already knew through our connection with the soil, but nothing like our Madhra, which is why, I suppose, life developed around her to begin with."
Harry looked at her heavy eyes, which looked human. He had been so astonished by her head that he only now noticed that she didn't have ears. There appeared to be small holes instead.
"Our Madhra has been dormant for a long time. I had almost lost hope that anything could wake her. My connection to my people weakened until only those closest to me, and most loyal, remained. Those who developed the will and abilities to survive without me, did so. In this way, we became a divided people. But we are still Backaal and our lives are tied to our source. That's where you come in. We employ wizards for their magic. They're good at keeping secrets, since they themselves are secret as far as the surface world is concerned. If they pass as fiction, then all the better for us.
"Before you killed Voldemort, you had an encounter with him years ago, in which you were also victorious. He was the type of wizard to bargain for power. He wished to trade resources in exchange for our support of his campaign against those human muggles, as you call them. He did not impress me. But when he returned to make an appeal, he offered a trace of your magic. It lingered on his scorched sleeve where you had retaliated against him. He displayed it proudly."
Harry waited, dreading where this was going.
"It got my attention. I have no magic, but the star that you see inside my head, attunes itself to everything around me. I feel everything I see, and much that can't be seen with eyes. For instance, I look at your worried, angry expression, and I feel not one, but two people looking out from your eyes. You are like a gate that has opened to let another one in. I don't blame you. We told you to come alone. It's only natural that you would find away around that."
What? He couldn't even feel Snape inside his mind. And she could?
"I won't hold it against you, Mr. Potter. As long as you make no attempt to harm me or my people. As I was saying, I attuned to the magic left from your attack against Voldemort."
She closed her eyes briefly and breathed deeply. The pinpoint of light inside her head became brighter. When she opened her eyes it dimmed. "Your magic feels extraordinary. Not like most wizards. It is stronger than any I have ever felt. I dismissed Voldemort and commanded him to leave the piece of sleeve with me. With the help of wizards, I extracted what I could of your magic. I took it from there,"
she held out her open palm, "and I put it here." She touched her abdomen.
"I chose a mate. I planted a desire and watered it with your magic to see if anything would come of it. Months later, I gave birth to a child. None of our kind had ever done that before."
Harry's brain attempted to process this horrifying bit of information.
"The first of my people came forth at the same time and we're immortal, but only in theory. We can be fatally harmed, which is why it's easier to employ wizards whose societies make use of our gems and minerals within their commerce. It's easy to pay them, for our Earth gives us all the gold and precious metals that we can harvest. We have no need for money, unless we fall prey to the luxuries and empty illusions of the surface world. As sadly, many of my people have. Look around you. Even this facility is not our natural environment. It's a compromise between your world and ours. A meeting ground. That's all."
Harry wanted to yell at her. He wanted to tell her that he didn't give a damn about her people and their lives, but he restrained himself. Where was this going?
"My daughter is very advanced for her age, though she sleeps most of the time. May I call you Harry?"
He kept silent, refusing to participate in her ridiculous display of politeness.
"I gave birth to another queen. She has the Anstulem star inside her head just like me. It's a crystal that floats in our heads. It connects us with all things, sending and receiving information in the form of instincts. Instead of rejoicing at my daughter's birth, my people grew fearful and concerned. We have never experienced two queens before. What if, they said, our hive mind is conflicted between the thoughts of the two? She will have a will of her own, won't she? That's what a queen is. They fear that I've complicated things a bit by giving life. They claim they already feel torn, just knowing she's alive. I calmed them by saying, 'She's too young to hold sway over you. As long as there are two of us, my position will dominate until she is to replace me, as it is with all successions. After all, I'm dying, and I think it's wonderful that I found enough magic to leave my people some hope.
"Then there are those who see what I've done as an abomination. I've only hastened our demise, they say. 'It's bad enough there are two of you,' they curse. 'We're not meant to procreate like humans. Their world is overrun with competition for resources, food, homes. Their numbers pollute the earth's water and spawn disease as the planet tries to rid itself of their infestation.' "
"They want my daughter dead. They say she isn't one of us. Not truly. She's an artificial thing from a wizard's magic. If she grows up to be able to have a child of her own, then I have killed off my race. I have destroyed a culture in which the oldest children on Earth have survived the ages without offspring. Her kind will take over like weeds. With longevity on their side and her powers of empathic authority over the hive, the inner Earth populace will swell to the point of intruding on the surface world. Backaals will go to the surface more and more, adapting to life above and joining the competition for survival that goes on up there. We will not know ourselves and be set astrife with our descendants."
She paused, her shoulders dropping as she rested between breaths. "And if there are two queens, madness and chaos can be the only outcome. Those have rebelled against me. They see my child as the end of paradise. They prefer their secret longevity alongside aloof mortals. They prefer me dead, for they have tasted free will and split off from our ways. They want our Madhra to die.
"They know that I used your magic to conceive with a mate. Even if they should kill me, they won't stop there. They'll come for you too. They'll attempt to extinguish the idea of using magic for procreation from the hive consciousness. You and your daughter are not safe. I can offer you safety, but you have to help me. My people are divided. The taste of free will has diminished our unity and our group mentality. Without our Madhra, I can't control them. Even with my star, I can't get through to those who will not hear me. They refuse to give up their so-called freedom to choose for themselves. They can't see the burdens that they are creating for themselves. They will have to learn to sustain their own lives, and that won't be easy. If I go, their immortality goes, but they will learn that too late, for they can't hear me telling them."
Just then, the place shook again. It definitely felt like an earthquake. Harry heard the violent pop of stone cracking. He couldn't tell if it came from above his head or below it. It reverberated through the walls. Tiles shook loose and shattered between him and this queen.
He asked, "What's going on, why does that keep happening?"
She appeared to wince, but he wasn't sure if he read her blue skin correctly.
"We are under attack. Don't worry, I'm still strong enough to stave them off for now, but their methods grow more and more effective. Collectively, they are trying to cause this temple to collapse and hoping to crush me and the last, most loyal to me, with it. We have lived under these conditions for some time."
He was appalled. "Can't you leave?" They were inner Earth dwellers, right? The planet was huge internally, with caverns as big as cities, or so the conspiracy theories said. Didn't she say there were less than five million of them? Compared to seven billion humans running around on the surface, there must be tons of hidden space inside the planet.
She smiled at his concern. "We have to hold our ground. Our Madhra is here and it cannot be relocated. We have to protect it."
"But it doesn't work. You said so yourself. It went out ages ago."
"It no longer replenishes us with its nurturing light. But it is our heart, we cannot abandon it. If we did, those who rebel would destroy it, and that would ultimately end all of us. It might take a few years or more, but as a race born of crystal biology, our connection to the channels that make up the world's vascular grid of energy, would be severed. You see, Madhra's structure is comprised of veins of minerals, water, and what your people think of as Qi, all aligned in a unique way that allows stone to live, grow, and exchange its essence with all things around it. Those mineral veins are like tributaries creating a network of energy paths through the core of the earth. They are not random and do not arise just anywhere, in much the same way that one's heart sits in their chest and no where else. Key channels intersect right here, below our feet. The planet circulates its life-force through a network of mineral intelligence that serve as planetary organs. Madhra is an organ every bit as specialized as a kidney or a lung. We've found it no where else. It pumps for the whole planet."
His head was starting to hurt. She sounded doomed and there was nothing he could, or wanted, to do about it. Besides, that sounded like the entire population of the planet was at risk and he didn't have the mental capacity to try to fathom that at the moment.
"I don't know what you expect me to do. My magic isn't strong enough to keep a planet alive."
She responded, "The planet will take care of itself, even if we perish. I want you to use your magic to restore our Madhra. If your power can give me the ability to create life, as it once did, then it can revive the center of this temple. Our crystal heart is a structure that naturally absorbs and releases energy. I brought you here to try."
"I wouldn't know where to begin," he insisted. She was obviously desperate, but maybe she was crazy as well. "I don't go around bringing things to life with magic."
"Yet your magic has done so," she corrected him. "Begin with seeing your daughter. Perhaps she can inspire you."
He didn't dare retaliate. Was she finally going to let him see her?
She answered his wide-eyed hope. "Come. It's time you reunited with her."
She stood and turned her back to him. He followed, deliberately saying nothing and stepping through the ranks of those guards lined up in front of him. They let him through. The veil of rain ceased. He told himself not to try to understand their ways. Just play along till Iece was in his hands and get the hell out of here. How, he didn't know. The array of guards fell in behind him. Two moved ahead to keep pace between him and the queen.
Walking a distance behind her, he saw that her back was exposed. Pale blue muscles appeared emaciated over her protruding spine and he wondered what she ate, if anything at all. But more disturbing, there were holes dotting the length of her spinal column every few vertebrae. They stood out, darkened and bruised looking, like a fleshly leggo missing its corresponding piece. As they walked, he thought of Snape's crystal and imagined everything he was seeing and had heard onto the blackboard in the classroom in Snape's mind. He was glad that she hadn't blindfolded him this time.
They passed through an interior chamber of raw gray slabs. Soft light, whose source he couldn't determine, fell on dull course stone. It cast a milky glow through the passage. Granular texture crunched beneath the shoes given to him and he saw that fine particles in the floor reflected the light back at him like diamonds in dust. The whole place smelled bitter, as if they were near a ventilation of organic decomposition or sulfur. The slope of the ground took them further downward. The passage narrowed uncomfortably until it opened onto an expanse of stairs. At the top, where they stood, he could make out uneven steps carved into the rock. Each side disappeared into shadows, and the steps themselves drifted down into an opaque darkness. Ahead of him, that little particle of light in the queen's head, twinkled and she suddenly stopped. She signaled for her guards to stay where they were. Harry couldn't say how he knew this, he just saw that that little light took on a different quality as her shoulders stiffened when she stopped. She never audibly spoke to her escort, but only to Harry.
"You, come forward. Walk with me."
He went forward, cautiously, and assumed she'd order the others telepathically, or however she talked to them.
Before he knew it, they had stepped through an opening, into a dark interior. His eyes tried to adjust. It was like stepping from the street into a dim theater. The air flowed cool around them. Shadows took on shapes. It took a moment for him to realize they were in an enormous cavern. He could not see from one end to the other. The magnitude of raw earth, in slabs of stone millions of years old, stretched over their heads like a dome. Below it, a lake of black water sat undisturbed, reflecting a ceiling of ancient erosion and wondrous mineral growths sculpted over eons. Remarkably, giant quartz tubes protruded overhead, crossing one another's paths, creating rib-like weaves that reinforced connections through the solid rock. He saw their progression upward, to the top of the dome, where the rock resembled melted glass more than it did rock.
There, in a hanging, bulbous growth, stone took on a translucent quality, maintaining a thick, coarse and grainy texture that kept it from being completely transparent. It looked like lava having solidified in midflow. His eyes followed the long striations of stretched, misshapen stone to the hanging growth that it formed. It looked as if gravity had taken the weight of molten rock and pulled on it until it formed a purse of swollen ooze before turning back to frozen stone. At the very center of that swell, Harry detected movement. In that one spot, the rock walls went their clearest, and he saw a hint of head and hair that made his heart seize.
Before he could panic, the queen held out her hand. "Come, I'll take you up."
Something told him that if he didn't accept her hand, he wouldn't be able to go up. Sure enough, he took her cool, slender fingers and let her lead him. She stepped right off the stone floor and over the drop off of water. Immediately, something rose to meet her foot. With a tilt of her head, she invited him to do the same.
"We climb by my power. You are safe."
He didn't breathe as he imitated her steps with tremendous caution. Not having magic, and being unable to reassure himself that he could protect himself, was a bitch. But things continued to rise out of the depths of the black water, meeting his foot every time he needed somewhere to place it. In this way, they ascended over the emptiness below and traveled on cylindrical stones that met their every step and gave them a path to the overhanging growth that held Iece in suspension. As they rose, Harry saw that the growth actually appeared to have grown from the quartz tubes protruding from the cavern, two major ones on each side, as if glass had been blown from their ends and spilled out to make one big ball that had oozed out of shape and now solidified, mid drop, over the water.
Finally, their last steps came when the largest, widest and tallest, of all the columns shooting out of the water, met them. The queen walked across its smooth, eroded surface and Harry followed. He couldn't get close to Iece fast enough. And even when they stood next to the hanging growth, it was still meters above his head.
"This is the heart of our home and our connection to one another. Your daughter slumbers here, but she is not alone."
With that, the light inside the queen's head brightened and Harry heard a crunching, tightening sound, as if something crispy were being crushed or squeezed. He realized it came from the stone as it changed physical qualities. It went from a grainy, dirt-encrusted texture, through which he could just make his daughter out, to a crystal clear window, almost perfectly devoid of impurities. The queen willed their platform stone to rise higher until they were eye level with the sleeping forms inside. Only now could Harry see that Iece was nestled inside, curled as if she were sleeping in her bed, and her arms were spread across another person.
The sight sucked him forward. He attached himself to the growth, having no other way to get close to her. The child alongside Iece, was such a shade of darker blue, that Harry's eyes had no familiarity, no basis, to recognize it for what it was earlier. Now he saw that its alien head lay side by side with Iece's blonde strands falling over both of them.
It too, had a clear-capped skull with a light inside. Only, this pinpoint of consciousness was very dim. So dim, Harry saw the details of its illumination. It was actually made up of tiny, spinning pieces of matter. They spun at a rate that only allowed an indigo glow to fill the space where the two bodies slept, as if they were sharing an egg awashed in low blue light from that other child's head.
As soon as he could, Harry rushed forward, throwing his hands against the substance that held his child. He didn't like the looks of this. What was she locked in there with? He shouted her name, assuming it would be hard to hear him through whatever this was.
"Iece! Wake up, baby. It's Daddy, I'm here." He pounded. Beneath his palms, the growth felt impenetrable.
He couldn't begin to guess the child's age, though she looked like a six year-old. That didn't make sense if she came from trace magic of his retaliation against Voldemort. Six years ago, he'd entered into the Triwizard tournament and faced that madman, but that didn't seem connected to this in any way.
Inside, his two year-old nestled against the blue child. That indigo light reflected against Iece's Malfoy complexion and she barely opened her eyes. Her focus appeared cloudy and she fell right back under the spell of slumber.
"What's wrong with her? What've you done?"
The queen answered calmly, "She and my child are now sharing a symbiosis. She radiates uncontrolled magic. My daughter is able to braid the unruly strands of it into a unified field of energy. Through it, she is comforting yours. Iece reacted badly to the serum that suppresses magic. It made things worse. She shook these walls and caused further damage, screaming for her father. Those who work tirelessly to raid this temple, lost many who were crushed and entombed in the routes dug to invade us from below. They attempt to use the assistance of wizards and man-made technologies, for they have lost their abilities to use the earth as they once did. They don't understand that that has everything to do with their insistence on severing their connection with me."
Harry didn't give a fuck. "Why doesn't she wake up. She's being restrained?"
"We're safer if she sleeps. It's no different than the synthetic medications you feed to her, that keeps her docile."
He gritted his teeth as he turned to the queen. "I'm not keeping her docile, I'm keeping her from hurting herself. There's a big fucking difference. I'm her father and she belongs at home where I can take care of her. She's a very sick little girl."
The queen's neck did a particular thing just then. Long tendons, traveling from the top of her throat to what he could only presume was her clavicle, popped out. But not all at once, rather, in a sequence of emergences exactly like strings being plucked. From one side of her neck to the other, chords beneath her skin came to the surface in vertical ropes, in a rhythmical display. Each one disappeared as the other emerged, only it happened as fast as a swallow, and he realized that's what she had done. Swallowed. In annoyance. Her biology clued him in to what her facial expression hid.
She said, "So is my child, and right now, the two have found comfort in each other. Eeonay risked her life to crawl into there to console your child. Her instincts were correct. You say you are a father, but you are also a mother. And it isn't you who raises your young, it's her brother. We've been watching you ever since I experimented with your magic. I know that you cannot take credit for the care of this child."
Against every warning in his heart, Harry shook against a surge of rage that had him balling his fists.
"Don't go there. You're not even human. Don't you dare act like you can judge me. You can't even fathom a parent and child relationship, especially a human one. You had to steel from humanity to build your kid, like a machine of parts. Then you stole life again when you kidnapped her. My daughter came to life by my own magic, and she's perfectly mine, regardless of how much help I need in raising her. We have a bond that doesn't make her anyone else's, no matter how bad I fuck up. You have no right to call my parenting into question when you were never even meant to have a child, as decreed by Creation, and had to break every law in the Universe to do so. You're not superior to me or to any human. You're scum for taking her out of my arms. Scum."
The queen faced him. Ripples in the tendons on her neck appeared particularly grotesque. "You humans are not the only ones who love. In fact, you know nothing of love. If I were scum, I would do much worse than this. I'm offering you the ability to return safely with her, in exchange for your help and your magic. You can waste time throwing useless hatred at me, or you can get on with it. I want you in there."
She gestured to the overhanging mound of melted, resolidified rock. "You can control your magic, unlike your child. See if the mind of Madhra responds to you. Send your power into this heart. See if the tissues of our home absorb it. I will have to allow for your full use of magic, and in order to guarantee your cooperation, I will keep your daughter with me. If you use your magic to harm any of my people, our temple, or myself, you will either delay your freedom or loose it altogether. Now look at your child and think clearly. What would you be willing to do for her?"
She had him. He'd forgotten all about Snape and was currently in the crossfire of giving this woman-thing whatever she wanted, without knowing the repercussions. Surely, magic used in that way, even if it were possible, would have lurking effects that he couldn't begin to anticipate. Just because she was talking to him and sharing a little background, didn't mean he knew who or what he was dealing with at all. He did know that he'd sell his soul, and that of the whole world for Iece's safety, and that made him feel like he was about to murder a tenth of the world in his reckless cooperation to please this queen.
He told her, "I don't have the slightest clue as to how to do what you're asking me to do. You're only torturing me and her. And even if I did, your issues are greater than I have the resources to deal with. This is too big for me."
"Then tell me what you need to try. That's all I'm asking. I know my actions are very cruel, but I too am at a loss. I don't know any other way. You alone, have demonstrated the ability to do the impossible. If you tell me how I can help you rise to the decision, I am willing to further negotiate, short of releasing you outright."
Harry asked, "Who do you think I am? I killed Voldemort, I didn't invent the atomic bomb. I barely passed my exams, I'm not some kind of genius. This is going to take more than magic."
"Look at my daughter. Your power says otherwise."
"Look at my daughter. If I was that powerful, that smart, I'd have figured out a way to take her and run by now."
"Perhaps you require more time without her, to develop confidence in yourself. Or at least hope."
"Don't threaten me anymore. You're not making me want to help you."
"Then it's as I suspect. Your will is the determining factor."
"Look, my magic is almost completely unconscious. It just works, I don't know how. It's genetics. I don't know how my body makes dark hair, it just does. I'm not involved in that function. Don't hold my daughter hostage just because I'm not smart enough to figure out how my genetics work, or how many breaths I take in a day, or how my heart beats without batteries. It's automatic. I can't help you. And this is not my fight. I'm done with war."
Even as he was talking, his own words triggered the memory of Eileen talking him through the manipulations of his Wheel of Life. Seventeen year-old Snape had injured him. He had fixed his shoulder by confronting and interacting with the genetic codes he was dealt with in life, and the magic that weaved in and out of it.
The queen faced him squarely. "I'm not asking you to fight our war. I'm asking for a piece of your magic. You cannot leave until you figure it out."
Harry squinted, calculating how much non-magical strength he would need to crush all those tendons on her neck. "Maybe you and your people don't deserve to live, if this is how you fix things."
She met his judgment with a raise of her arm. The clarity of the overhanging rock growth went back to it's translucent grainy quality and Harry could barely make out Iece's white locks.
"You are my last hope," the queen said. "If you do not help us, then you will perish with us."
As if timing were on her side, the walls and floors shook again. A deep, grating popping sound came from overhead. They were standing so close to the rock growth, which cradled Iece and the blue child like a carriage, that they felt it vibrate from the shifting cavern around them. The quartz tubes reverberated, producing an uneasy sound that resonated all around them. The queen's head star, immersed in a fluid in her cranium, increased its brightness. Something caught Harry's eye from inside the rock growth and he realized that the blue child's head star, was imitating her mother's.
It took almost a minute for the shaking to stop. In that time, Harry saw what looked like boulders plummet from the invisible ceiling, hidden by heights of darkness, into the waters below. He looked at the queen. Her lips were a deeper shade of blue and she winced. Her slender body bent until she caught herself and stood up again. Tension appeared to squeeze her joints and limit her movement. She caught him looking, with concern more than hatred, in his eyes. In that moment, she answered his stare with a wave of explanation. She showed him her throne, in his mind. Not the thing he'd met her sitting on, but more of a central nest, made of the same mineral that the growth above them was made of. He got an image of her sleeping in a warm gold light that it emitted, much the same way modern, surgical cameras can backlight an embryo still in its mother's womb.
She wasn't supposed to leave that environment very often, yet for the sake of her people, she had done so. Her muscles and skeletal structure was ten times more fragile than a human's and it would've been very easy to kill her, if not for her resonance power which came from the light inside her head. Her body was used to being isolated and protected at all cost. She was more of a hybrid-human-insect-mineral species, than any other type and she belonged in deeper, subterranean levels of the earth. That light in her head was meant to exist in total isolation and silence, emitting certain frequencies the same way copper or gold affected the electromagnetism of the Earth. She was risking everything just by being next to him, exposed as she was. She was more elemental than human.
She gave him all of this information, without talking. It came like warmth spreading into his mind. As such, she demonstrated for him how she controlled her people for many thousands of years. He got a sense of her overall helplessness in this new age. Worse, he got a sense that she wasn't cruel, only inhuman and desperate. And wasn't he so angry, so worried about getting his daughter away from here, that he couldn't think straight, let alone spare a moment to really give what she was asking of him a chance.
"Okay, I'll try to help you. But you have to promise me, if it doesn't work, you'll let us go."
"Your sincerest efforts will determine whether or not that happens."
He insisted, "If I stand a chance at all, I have to have help myself. There's only one person I know who can wrap his head around this and come up with something. I need his help. Let me bring someone else into this. He'll know how to deal with this so much better than I can. He's like a chemist, even an alchemist. He knows the earth better than I do, and he knows my magic. He knows my daughter's magic and has been helping us with her sickness. If anyone should be helping you, it should be him."
"And who would you bring into this matter?"
"My old teacher. If you give me a break from those shots and let my magic return to me, I'll contact him. I can get him here, but I don't know where here is, exactly."
She became silent as she looked at him. Her eyes tilted up and she studied his forehead as if she could see through it. "So this is the one who accompanies you in your mind. Give me his name. I will bring him."
She could sense what he was thinking, but not know the details?
"Severus Snape," Harry answered readily.
