pure1ruby: The Pied Piper was not specifically a Muggleborn, no, nor was he targeting Muggleborn. The plaque was put in place by wizard supremacists to honor a man they believed was wrongfully murdered by the government. After all, all he did was kill a few "mud people", and how could that be bad enough to warrant executing a wizard?

ArcWraith: Hazel would be a bad Ravenclaw in the same way that Luna is a bad Ravenclaw; i.e., it isn't that she doesn't have the qualities that house is based on so much as the way she manifests those qualities wouldn't fit with the other members. Ravenclaws typically seek to learn what is already know and accepted and build on top of that where Hazel prefers to learn from first principles and from direct experience rather than just reading what's in the books. Not only that (and I'm spoiling things just a little), she is the type of person who will completely reject an accepted expert source if what that source says conflicts with her own experience and instead will keep doing her own thing.

Smokinbarrrel: Hazel isn't slowing down so much as I'm skipping all the boring travel portions for the sake of brevity. When it was just her and Morgan in England, very little happened for good stretches of time, so I had no reason to write about it. More things worth writing about happened in France, and now even more interesting things are happening in Germany.

allie213: When Hazel was staying with the werewolves, she just went somewhere outside of the forest on the night of the full moon.

CastleTrime: Like I mentioned last chapter, I'm trying to make Dumbledore into a good guy (more or less) for this story, which means limiting his insight into what was happening in the Dursley house. Specifically regarding the device monitoring the wards, it was meant to alert him if someone was attacking the wards. The alarm stops shortly after the wards break because at this point, if he hasn't heard it and moved to respond to it, it's too late. This issue is compounded when you consider that Dumbledore did not in a million years think that Hazel would break the wards herself on accident.

Now, regarding Mrs. Figg. Three things are happening here. First, keeping in mind that Dumbledore is a good guy here who didn't think he was putting Hazel in an abusive home, there was no reason to have somebody to monitor the Dursleys. Figg's job was to be eyes on the ground in case someone tried a long con to get access to Hazel, not monitor the Dursleys and their own behavior. Second, even in canon Figg did not have a huge amount of interaction with Harry. She was an occasional babysitter, nothing more, so she wouldn't have all the information either. Third, and to end this on a bit of a dark note, Figg is a Squib. If she did get hints of how the Dursleys were treating Hazel, she might not have paid them the attention she should because it's entirely possible that is still better than how her family treated her when she was younger.

Chapter 23
Tale as Old as Time

It took three days for Hazel and Hedwig to replace all the everburning lamps in the hags' home. Not because it was strenuous or truly time-consuming; Hazel needed a few attempts each for the first several lamps, but just like her normal spells, the more she practiced the faster she was able to light the lamps the next time. No, the real reason was because they did not want to risk the lamps all going out at the same time. If it happened in the evening or the night, the hags would be blind in their own home until the sun rose. By refilling the lamps on different days, they would have time to get everything set up before the rest could likewise go out.

Considering they had a well instead of stairs leading to their basement, and their attic was also reached via a simple hole in the ceiling, it was understandable that they did not want to run around in the dark unable to see where they were going.

Instead, only a few hours of each day were spent working on the lamps. The rest was spent doing all the normal things the hags did, which in turn meant that Hazel dedicated her spare time to working in the basement alongside Gertrud. Just like last time, the younger of the two sisters – as Hazel had discovered after asking – was far more civilized when she stood in front of a cauldron or five. Hazel was not able to say for sure, but she had a theory about why she was safe in the basement but not elsewhere. With so many potions in front of her, Gertrud's mind was too busy keeping track of everything going on to pay attention to her own Insatiable Hunger.

In any case, she had shown Hazel a number of useful things over the last few days. One of them was the recipe for Night Eye, the paste Elfriede had mentioned using to see in the dark when she needed to harvest ingredients that could only be found at night. Considering how often Hazel had found herself walking at night while exploring, anything that would let her see more clearly would be very useful.

Another, and in some ways more important, thing Gertrud taught her was how to read the blasted chart that hung on the wall. The short version was exactly as Gertrud had described: the chart allowed for on-the-fly enhancement or even diminishment of different ingredients depending on their quality. That quick description was utterly lacking when the longer version came at her.

All potions ingredients had several properties. They had physical properties, which were mostly obvious to the naked eye. Taste, smell, viscosity, density; most of the time these were not important, but as Gertrud had explained, they contributed heavily to what the potion actually looked like and behaved in the real world. Each ingredient also had magical properties, typically tied to nine 'celestial affinities' with few exceptions. Those affinities in turn had a myriad of interactions with the constellations of the zodiac. Not every single one, thankfully, but each affinity would interact with at least two or three constellations. Where the sun, the moon, and the planets were in the sky in relation to those specific constellations determined the exact method for how to strengthen or weaken any one ingredient's magical properties.

By the time Gertrud finished what turned out to be a twenty minute lecture, Hazel's head was spinning around and around. The feeling of drowning in new information was not helped when Gertrud further told her that these celestial affinities were not readily apparent to the eyes or nose. It was information that previously had been memorized and passed down only by word of mouth. Nowadays it was written down, much to her relief until she saw the book in question and just how thick it was.

Copying it down for her own use would doubtlessly be the work of many weeks.

But that was a problem for tomorrow-Hazel. Today-Hazel was washing her hands and trying to ignore her stomach growling at the smell coming from the kitchen.

When she came out of the bathroom, Elfriede and Hedwig had already set the table. Beside each of the plates was a bowl of salad and a small plate for the heavy brown bread the hags preferred, but in the middle of the table sat a platter holding slices of a whitish meat generously covered with a thick yellow sauce. She took a sniff and nodded. Pork with a mustard-based sauce, perhaps?

Portions of the main course were passed out once everyone was seated, and Hazel eagerly set to work cutting. Elfriede had proven herself to be a talented cook, certainly better than Aunt Petunia had ever pretended to be…

She frowned to herself. From how much work it took to cut the meat, it seemed that Elfriede might have overcooked the pork. Once a piece was cut off, she popped it in her mouth and chewed. And chewed, and chewed. All she could do was sigh around the bite. Overcooked for sure.

Strangely enough, though, she seemed to be the only one who noticed anything wrong. The others were tucking in with gusto, almost scarfing their portions down. She kept chewing as best she could, wondering whether looks might be deceiving and this might not be pork at all. 'What is this?' she asked, tapping the table to get someone's attention when nobody looked up.

Hedwig's gaze moved to her fingers and then to her floating words, another piece of meat speared on her fork. A look of confusion crossed the hag's face as she read Hazel's question. "What are you ta— Oh no." Eyes widened with sudden horror shot to her own face. "Uh… Hazel? You do not want to eat that."

Elfriede and Gertrude had looked up at the sound of Hedwig's voice, and at the nearly panicked statement their own faces drained of color as the air around the table grew thick with something like and yet unlike embarrassment. Hazel stopped chewing, her own mind taking a moment longer to figure out what had remained unsaid before stuttering to a halt. With almost mechanical movements, she lifted her napkin from her lap to her mouth to spit the single bite of food out. Laying her napkin on the table, she pushed the plate of what she could only assume was human flesh away from her and pulled her salad bowl closer.

The hags were still staring at her, lost for anything to say almost as if they were waiting on her to break the silence. Foolishness from the start, even had she words for this situation. Right now the only thing that was coming to mind was…

'I think I will stick to salad tonight.'

"I am… so sorry," Elfriede said after several long moments to gather her scattered thoughts. "We were thoughtless. How could we be so foolish? She is part hag, but that means she is still mostly wand-waver. You have my word, we would never intentionally push you to eat your own flesh. No, we just accidentally almost pushed her into a monstrous act."

No, not embarrassment after all, Hazel realized looking at the downcast faces of Hedwig and Elfriede and their silent recriminations. Even Gertrud, the most bloodthirsty of them all, refused to look at her, although in this hag's case she was still shooting occasional glances at the meat on Hazel's abandoned plate. It brought to mind something Elfriede had said when she decided the first time that Hazel was part hag, that no one would dare eat 'of their own flesh and blood'. This was a culture where cannibalism was likely one of their strongest taboos.

It was not embarrassment the hags were feeling. It was shame.

Looking down at her salad as though the lay of the leaves might give her the words to write, eventually she looked up again. She still had so many questions about the hags and their Hunger, and this felt like the best time to ask. 'Why do you have to eat humans in the first place?'

"…It is not something we do by choice, necessarily," Elfriede said. "It is something we have to do. Pig-humans and wand-wavers, just the smell alone, causes us to feel—"

Hazel waved her to stop. 'I already know about the Hunger. Hedwig explained it to me. She said you die if you do not.' Elfriede shot a scolding look at her daughter at that comment. 'What I meant was, why is that true? What happened to cause that? Is it just the way you are, or…?'

"Ah. You ask about the source," Gertrud murmured.

"We do not have many explanations for that." Elfriede gave her a weak smile. "Only one, in fact. It is not a tale we typically tell to wand-wavers, even if a wand-waver would believe it in the first place. They do not like hearing about entities greater than themselves."

'I am not a typical wand-waver,' Hazel reminded them, 'but if you are uncomfortable telling me, you can forget that I asked.'

"No. No. You deserve to know, especially after this." With a small sigh, Elfriede straightened up in her chair. "Let me tell you then about how magic came to mortal hands, and how our greed caused our downfall.

"Long ago, when the world was yet young, beasts and creatures and beings were not so different. There was nearly nothing that separated humans from hags from dwarves from goblins. And above them all, twisting through the earth and swimming through the seas and drifting through the sky, were the spirits. They roamed the whole world, and magic was their gift alone.

"As all thinking beings grew and learned, many built shrines and circles to the spirits, for what else in the world was more worthy of respect and adulation? The spirits heard the prayers and praise, and they came to enjoy the devotion of the different races. As time went on, these spirits taught their Secrets to the race they most favored. Most races attracted the attention of only a few powerful spirits. Humans," said Elfriede with a meaningful look at Hazel, "however, became loved by many of the weaker spirits.

"We, the hags, in particular had two spirits who cared for us and took us as their own. Each took the form of massive snakes, one white and one black. The White Serpent gave us a drop of venom from each of his fangs, and with those drops he taught us how to brew potions to aid ourselves and poisons to harm our enemies. The Black Serpent saw how his brother's gifts were received and sought to outshine them. He therefore shed his own skin and used it so we might learn how to create artifacts with our own magic.

"With the Brewing and the Making in our hands, we created many things that we could trade with the other races in exchange for the results of their own Secrets. Our closest and dearest partners were the humans, for while the minor spirits who aided them could not grant them powerful Secrets, what they did learn was of a far greater variety. We tied ourselves together and called each other friend.

"For a time, that was enough." Elfriede's face fell then, and Hazel felt a shiver run up her spine.

"But it did not last forever. The wealth of smaller Secrets humans held was turned onto our own potions, and soon enough humans started making their own version of the Brewing. When we learned of this, we grew wroth. Some of it was from fear, for if humans learned both the Brewing and the Making, what use would they have for the fruits of our Secrets? And some, maybe most, was just anger at what we saw as the theft of our gifts. We petitioned the Black and White Serpents for guidance and the sanctity of our Secrets, but the brothers ignored us.

"Yet our pleas did not go unheard. Another spirit listened, and so the Red Serpent revealed herself. She claimed to be sister to the serpents of black and white, but unlike her brethren, she was willing to help us. The humans had more than their fair share of attention from the spirit world, she said, and that was why they could take our Secrets and master them. So long as the minor spirits loved them most and were there to offer aid, that would not change.

"She had a solution to that. Showing us her own fangs, she taught us how to trap and bind these lesser spirits, and once bound we could consume them. 'Whomever eats one of these lesser spirits will take for themselves the Secret that spirit refused to give you,' she said. 'In this way you will be able to gain the mastery of magic that the humans claim as their proper right.' The Secret of the Binding was taught to all hags of the time, and we started setting our traps.

"The Red Serpent's words proved true. We trapped the weakest of the spirits that had given their favor to the humans and consumed them. The Red Serpent's words proved true, and those that ate these spirits did indeed gain their Secrets, although they could not teach their new Secrets to anyone else. That did not stop us. We caught and ate the least of the spirits, and as our powers grew many set their eyes on spirits of greater and greater strength. Leveling the imbalance was no longer our goal; we were drunk on our power and thirsty for yet more.

"And so we hunted and ate, and hunted and ate, never satisfied but always wanting more.

"Our behavior did not go unnoticed. The Black and White Serpents appeared, and they demanded to know why we had done such a thing. Where did we plan to stop, they asked. Would we be content with the spirits who chose the humans, or did we plan even to try hunting they themselves. The hags who had been chosen to speak to the Serpents promised that this was not what anyone intended, but it was too late. We had stirred up the Serpents' anger, and they cared not for our excuses.

"Instead they chose to lay us low. The Black Serpent tore away our skin just has he had done his own, and as he did the greed and ugliness that had festered in our hearts was shown at last to the entire world. The White Serpent, still angry at how his brother's gift was held in higher regard than his own, opened his maw and breathed out his poison onto us all. 'You wish to eat those who aid you for power? Then you will continue to do so, feasting on the humans you once held so close. Your hunger will never abate, not until they are all dead at your hands or you are dead at theirs.'

"Their punishments given, they turned their backs on us. No matter how we begged and pleaded, they disappeared into the distance. From that day, neither the Black nor the White nor the Red Serpent has been seen again, and soon after they abandoned us all but the most meager of spirits likewise vanished from the world.

"And so we were alone, our faces proof to all the world of what we had in our arrogance done."

Hazel could only stare silently at Elfriede, lost for anything to say after the tale that had been told to her. Hedwig too was quiet, a frown on her face and her thoughts wordlessly whirling around and around in her head.

"Always hated that story when Mother told it to us," Gertrud said. Hazel glanced over and could not help but smile faintly when she realized that through her sister telling the story, Gertrud had finished her own plate of food and snuck Hazel's in front of her.

"I always find it a little hard to believe," Hedwig added, very deliberately not looking at Elfriede. "What spirits I've seen are not really the kinds of things I would ask for lessons on, well, anything. I know, I know," she said when her mother opened her mouth, "the story says that all the spirits that can do that vanished, but that is my point. It is hard to believe in something you have never seen."

"All your point really is is that you spend too much time around small-minded wand-wavers," Elfriede thought, her glare of disapproval never leaving Hedwig. "There are many things that exist that you yourself have never seen. For most of them, I hope your life stays that way. Regardless, Hazel, that is the only answer that I know to your question."

"It is all ancient history anyway," cut in Gertrud, who to Hazel's surprise pushed a second bowl of salad in front of her. She supposed salad for a plate of meat was as close to a fair trade as she was going to get tonight. "Quit worrying about it. It isn't going to change anything anytime soon. Eat your dinner. Tomorrow is another day, and everything in life will still need doing."

Hazel planted her staff firmly into the dirt as rocks shifted beneath her feet. When everything stilled to a stop, she cautiously started walking again. Considering she was halfway up the slope to the top of this rock, taking a tumble now would just be embarrassing.

With the lamps in the hags' home all replaced, she had taken a week to travel from the Black Forest here, to the town of Sankt Goarhausen, all for the sake of a rock. Specifically, she had come to see the Loreley Stone, standing over the town and looking down onto the Rhine River. Myths held that once upon a time, a siren sat on this stone at dawn and dusk and sang at any of the sailors who tried coming up or down the river, luring them to the rocks just barely covered by the water and wreck their ships to drown them. The village of Sankt Goarhausen was later built to provide aid to those sailors, building up into a reasonably sized town.

There were few to no sightings of that siren in the recent past with the exception of a statue of a mostly nude woman at the base of the rock, but as the gate or rift above Elva Hill and de Rais's castle and the pillar in Hamelin all proved, just because something was unseen did not mean it was absent.

The sun slowly sank below the horizon and darkness washed over the sky and the land. To Hazel's lack of surprise, when the day transitioned fully into night there was still no sign of any siren or spirit or anything at all.

She was not really disappointed by that fact, though. She came out here mostly because she needed a bit of time to herself in light of the story the hags had told her. Her own experience with spirits had been… mixed, she supposed. On the one hand, she had the spirits who gave her the lens she now wore over her right eye and that helped her track down the boar when she went out with Grégoire, both of whom had been very helpful; on the other hand, she had the spirits inside de Rais's tower that wanted nothing more than to gobble her up.

None of these spirits had been as powerful and knowledgable as the greater spirits Elfriede had talked about. The idea of spirits being that strong was worrisome in its own way. If anything, they sounded less like the spirits she had dealt with and more like the great fae or the Greek gods. The kinds of entities that in at least one case had been sealed away in the Otherworld from which they came. That was not to say that they all sounded terrible, but it was nevertheless unnerving. It also made her wonder whether further dealings with spirits were in her best interest, or if she was getting worried over nothing.

She already knew that anything that looked or acted like a fae was something to run from, so did she really need another rule when that one was probably broad enough? And that assumed that she ever ran into a real fae or one of these greater spirits in the first place.

With the last light of the sun gone from sight, she slid down the backside of the stone and wandered back to the little camp she had set up last night when she arrived at the town. It was not much at all, just a small campfire and a divot at the base of a tree where she could shelter, but it was still better than nothing and something she would not have been able to put together without the lessons Grégoire had taught her in France.

Grabbing the wood she had gathered earlier in the day, she set it in the shallow pit she had dug and wriggled her fingers in her satchel. Her last pocket lighter slapped gently into her hand, and she pulled it out and flicked the flame into life. We're going to need to grab more of these sooner than later, she told Morgan as she moved the flame into the small nest of dried leaves at the base of the cone of twigs that would serve as her beginning fire.

It was a very good thing everything was so dry because as soon as the first couple of leaves caught, the lighter guttered out.

Well, that's it, she thought with a sigh. It was a good thing that she had a place to stay with the hags. She did not have any extra lighters left, and conjuring up a handful of fire was something she still had not figured out.

The flames crackled and grew, and in the brightening light she rolled her plastic pocket lighter around and around in her hand. Maybe there is some way to refill it?, she asked her friend as she looked all around the lighter's case. She did not see any easy way to do that, which she supposed made sense when she thought about it. These were disposable, after all. When one ran out, most people would just go buy a new one.

Her thumb found the spark wheel and button, and she spun it a few times. Even without fuel, the spark wheel still worked and flicked out sparks that quickly died out. Maybe, if she could not refill the lighter, she could keep the top part? She just had to figure out how to get leaves and the like to catch fire from a simple spark.

Spin, whir, spark. Spin, whir, spark. As she flicked it again and again, a thoughtful frown spread across her face. The sparks themselves would not be enough to light something on fire, but what if she made a magical version of it? She had no idea how to make anything out of metal, but if she could figure that much out, it would be a useful… tool…

She stopped her rolling examination as what she had thought caught up to her. This was a tool. She could not create fire directly and had failed in those attempts whenever she tried, but neither could normal humans, and that had not stopped ancient man from harnessing its power. This was a tool she could use, and that meant she should be able to make it into a construct just like she had her ghost hand and her key.

It was more complex than a key, but not impossible.

Spin, whir, spark. Spin, whir, spark. She watched the wheel spin, but when she tried to peek inside, there was just too little space to see all the components. She had little choice but to take it apart. She would not be able to create a construct without it.

Or can I?, she wondered after several seconds. Not all of her spells were done with the aid of a visible image. Most of them, yes, but not all. She did not need a tool or anything to teleport but instead just jumped. Her compulsions – she hesitated to call it 'mind-control', both because she did not know if it would really work on another human and because she did not fancy the idea of controlling another person like that – did not even need that much. Maybe she could tie her mental spark wheel into a motion?

There was only one motion that was obvious to her for this purpose. Picturing the fat glowing sparks, she snapped the fingers of her right hand. Despite it being easy to imagine, she could feel that it was just that: her imagination and nothing else. Several more attempts all felt the same.

Did she need to add another element to it? Another sense? Closing her eyes, she flicked the lighter several more times and paid close attention to the sound of the clicking whir of the wheel. When she was sure she had it firmly in place, she opened her eyes again and snapped her fingers several more times.

Nothing.

By now her thumb was almost uncomfortably warm. It was only when she flapped her hand around slightly to let it cool off that it hit her. Friction. That was how the spark wheel worked, or she thought it was how anyway. She knew that cave people rubbed sticks together to start their fires. Friction made heat, and heat made fire.

In some ways, it was both similar and totally unlike how she and Hedwig had relit the everburning lamps. This was not creating an imbalance in anything, not really, but it still involved pulling energy or something out of somewhere to start a fire somewhere else. If she could apply those same lessons to this, she might have the answer.

Hazel gave herself a bit of a head start by rubbing her fingers and thumb together, and when they were warm again she mentally braced herself. It was not just a matter of snapping and imagining. When she snapped, she had to flick the heat from her thumb outward and let that become the spark. That way it was not just an imagined spark but a real bit of heat.

Suiting action to thought, she gave her fingers another snap, this time pulling at the heat she could feel, and imagined a big fat spark flying away from the thumb. This time, however, the imagining felt real.

She grabbed a leaf off the ground and held it in front of her right hand. Another snap sent the spark onto the leaf, and she watched with delight when the spot on the leaf where the spark landed turned dark with a bright center. She gave it a tiny, tiny stream of breath, as weak as she could make it, and that bright spot grew bigger and brighter until a small tongue of flame blossomed and started greedily devouring the entirety of the leaf.

A grin nearly split her face in two, and she dropped the burning leaf onto the rest of the fire before leaning back against the tree. We did it, she nearly shouted at Morgan, and he chittered in excitement on her shoulder. She reached up to scratch him on the belly. We really did it. That was probably on of the biggest challenges we've faced yet, and we succeeded. Finally!

We got this, Morgan. Doesn't matter what the world throws at us. We can get through it sooner or later.

In case you're wondering what the hags looked like before the curse, Tolkien-esque elves aren't the worst analogy. HP canon doesn't have orcs, but hags are close enough. :-)

The potions theory talk may be a little confusing, and if so, don't worry. Hazel doesn't have a reference for what the hags are teaching her. Not yet, anyway.

Silently Watches out.