Chapter 19: Potter Twr
Wind whistled over a minor mountain peak, the summit bare of shrubbery or growth. Along the slopes new sprouts and buds grew, welcoming the presence of spring, but between the wind and lingering winter, at the crest the chill was still biting, and Dora found herself snuggling back into Harry's arms as they waited for Sirius and Amelia to arrive. Andromeda and Ted were off to the side, speaking softly, and while others knew of the time traveling secret, this was something Harry wanted to keep to family - which apparently Amelia was joining, as her budding relationship with Sirius had blossomed recently. Andromeda had informed the teens that Sirius had spent fewer nights at the Tonks townhouse than at Bones manor, smirking as the two teens grimaced at the implication. Harry wondered how Susan was handling it, though Sirius had nothing but good things to say about the girl.
"Why haven't we gone to visit Potter Manor?" Dora wondered aloud, as she tried to steal more Harry's warmth for herself, Andromeda rolling her eyes at her daughter. Harry pulled off his light coat, handing it to his girlfriend with an amused smile before replying.
"Voldemort torched it with Fiendfyre, killing my grandparents." He cast a warming charm upon himself and stuck his hands in his trouser pockets as Dora bundled herself into his residual warmth in the coat. "I did take a look at the site, actually, and while the foundation is still there, there's nothing else left. I'm planning to ask Goldfist to send a team out, to take a look and see if it can be rebuilt. That curse, if left to run completely rampant, will eventually burn out the magic in the area - wild and channeled - to the point where even if you tried to set up wards, there would be no natural magic to power them. There's blood wards or charged wards, but neither are optimal." Harry sighed, looking back down the mountain, seeing Sirius and Amelia hiking up the path from the apparition point.
"If there's no natural magic anymore, as much as I want to hold onto Potter family legacies, there's really nothing to do but sell the land to non-magicals." Dora stepped over to him and snaked an arm through his, hugging it close.
"Sirius looks like he's a bit out of practice, look at him gasping for breath." Dora tried to pull the subject away from the maudlin topic. Harry smirked, waiting for the pair to finally approach. Sirius was struggling more than Amelia, though she was also breathing heavily.
"You know, Sirius, that if you hadn't wanted to hike this morning, that you could have been on time for the portkey through the wards?" Harry smirked at his godfather's obscene gesture in response. Andromeda raised an eyebrow at the blush Amelia sported, the others' interest more on the grim animagus.
"You're out of practice old man, weren't you the one who insisted on us running a seven minute mile this summer?" Dora joined in on the ribbing. Amelia rolled her eyes and changed the subject before Sirius could form a rebuttal.
"Why is there an anti-apparition ward fourteen miles wide over this mountain?" She raised an eyebrow in a way that belied her experience interrogating suspects.
"I hope to find out!" Harry replied, all too cheerfully, mostly to ignore his godfather - though it was a nice day, he was with family, and was exploring his family's legacy. He'd been looking forward to this.
"What mountain even is this?" Sirius asked, as he finally caught he breath, placing his hands on his hips and looking around. The welsh countryside was gorgeous, if stark. The mountaintop was bare, and the slopes were only sparsely populated with shrubs and grasses.
"Pen yr Ole Wen." Ted spoke as he and Andromeda approached the other four. "It's the southernmost mountain of the Carneddau range."
"That means nothing to me, Ted."Sirius leveled a look at the lawwizard, who only grinned back.
"We're maybe ten miles from Anglesey." Ted continued rolling his eyes .
"Okay, but why here? And where even is Potter Twr?" Sirius asked, looking around, getting frustrated. His idea of a pleasant morning was sleeping in before ravishing Amelia, not hiking. There was nothing but loose rock and stone covering the top of the mountain, no ruins let alone a still standing tower.
Harry frowned. He had been wondering that as well - as nice a mountain as it was, It would be pretty disappointing if there was nothing of the structure left. He was about to suggest going to talk to Goldfist, when he felt his head-of-house ring warm on his finger, before information began trickling into his mind as if it had simply always been there. He shut his mouth from where he had it open to begin speaking, the others looking at him oddly as he turned and approached the southeastern side of the peak, above the most sloped face of the mountain - though while it appeared impassable, it was not a true cliff. Harry lightly slashed his left palm with an underpowered cutting charm, before holding his hand out to let the blood drip upon the stones before him.
After the seventh drop fell to the ground, a pulse of magic from the ring healed his hand just as the enchantment upon the tower fell - revealing an ancient stone keep, standing against the sheer cliff that had been hidden by the blood magic concealment. It was some forty feet tall, and about half that wide, tapering towards the top where crenellations protected the roof. As the group approached, it loomed tall over them and the landscape. Harry was once again compelled by the head-of-house ring, resting a hand on the sturdy wooden door recessed into the entryway.
"Fel arglwydd y gorthwr hwn, yr wyf yn gorchymyn ichi agor." Harry spoke, the others hesitant behind him. The lock was audible as it released, the door swinging inwards to allow the group entry. Torches in sconces flared to life and bathed the interior in flickering firelight. There was a spiral staircase against the outside wall, leading to the second floor and down to a cellar, with a grand fireplace opposite. The stonework, while rough on the exterior, was smooth and expertly joined on the interior walls. A large dining table dominated the space, sitting in the center of the room with the Head's chair facing the entryway down the length of the table, with its back to the fireplace. The group fanned out, each going to look at different elements of the room that held their interest the most. While others were inspecting items on shelves or tapestries or even the walls themselves, Harry was drawn to the lord's chair at the head of the table.
It seemed in perfect condition - or at least, perfectly preserved. There was plenty of evidence it had been used. The wood was heavy and sturdy, though, and the cushions had not worn down or rotted over the years. The entire tower must have been under stasis while it was hidden. Harry slowly lowered himself into the seat, relaxing back into it, resting his elbows on the arms. It was a bittersweet moment - Here he was, in yet another example of his family's legacy, but with none of them to share it.
And it's simply yet another twist of fate that while I have traveled through time to the point of saving others from death, I was unable to do so for my own parents. Harry's mood darkened as he began brooding, imagining visiting this or Penrhyn Mawr with his parents - or his grandparents. It wasn't an anger that overtook him, Harry had spent plenty of time being angry and it had never amounted to much - no, he found he was just tired.
It took a few minutes for Dora to turn from her inspection of the tapestries, not quite understanding what they illustrated - though it appeared that this tower was placed here to protect something - and finally notice her boyfriend had slipped into melancholy. She padded over to him, before frowning as he looked up at her briefly, his sad eyes not really reacting to her presence before he looked back into the distance. She thought for a moment, considering trying to make him laugh or distract him, but instead deciding that maybe this was something he needed to work through - she hadn't seen him in such a mood before. With a small sigh, she morphed herself to be a bit smaller, before climbing onto his lap and cuddling into his side. She felt him place a light kiss on her temple before he returned to his thoughts, though she was heartened to feel him pull her closer and hold her in his arms even as he did so.
Croaker sat at his desk, a frown on his face as he considered the stack of parchment in front of him. Delays, requests for additional funding, minor discoveries, none of it was important. Spectre hadn't made any progress into the time traveler case, nor had they even been in the office for over a week. He hoped they were following a solid lead, because the trail was going cold, and fast. The traces of time magic were dissipating and soon it would be impossible to tell if someone was displaced or not, outside of their actions.
Croaker sighed and pulled the next piece of parchment from the stack, wondering absently about who Spectre was, as he was wont to do. He had become department head a few years after the war, and Spectre had already made a name for themselves. Their personnel file was missing, and the two or three times he had had them followed, they couldn't even manage to track past their third apparition jump - and of course they were random, and not a pattern. Spectre was too good an operative for that, even if they were protecting themselves. Croaker would have asked the previous head of the department, but they hadn't retired, they had died when conducting an experiment with the cognivores. The man had spent his life researching the mind and ways to add or remove knowledge, and after something went wrong - nobody was sure exactly what, even now - he was less responsive than someone kissed by a dementor.
Croaker hadn't mourned the man's passing, he hadn't supported Riddle's terrorism outright, but he was certainly a blood purist, and had been shutting down research into the source of squibs - and more generally the source of magic - his entire time as head of the department. Croaker had initially joined the department to study just that, wanting to know why the rate of squib births was rising among purebloods, but had been forced onto other projects while Hedgewaithe had been head, and now was far too busy to bother.
He looked at yet another request for additional funding, this time to study the impact of different kinds of sweets on dementor exposure. He denied it without reading any further, that project had been going on for far too long and had nothing to show for it. Only chocolate was of any help. Was chocolate inherently a magical plant? He wondered, stopping to consider it, before quickly writing it down on a far-too-long list of ideas for projects he'd never have time to research himself.
He quickly denied another request to demolish the veil's archway and see if the void remained. He sighed again, wondering why none of his competent researchers seemed to ask for things. Next was an approval for an expedition in the Amazon. The true heart of the forest was magical and so dangerous to enter that it remained uncharted beneath the canopy by both magicals and muggles - but if someone wanted to try, well, it was cheap enough a request.
Where the hell is Spectre?
The group was sitting around a much more personal table found in the ystafell wydr, as described by a documentation of the tower that Andromeda had found in the small library. It was a small room with large windows on the south side and skylights open to the roof. It was easily the warmest room in the castle, functioning as the family's main space in the winter, trapping heat rising from the ground floor and from what little sun there would be. Harry was in a better mood now, having spoken with both Dora and Sirius. They had insisted that while James and Lily Potter were gone, Harry still had a family. It was something that he needed to be reminded of on occasion, and Dora held his hand as the two sat next to each other on the Lord and Lady Potter's loveseat, which of course had only inspired smirks from Sirius.
Amelia had been fairly quiet this trip, not having been as close to the Potters as her brother and his wife had been - Susan's parents. Andromeda and Ted were fascinated by the history of the tower, which they were struggling through the history of the tower - as both were only passably fluent in welsh, and this was an older dialect.
"Hold on - Is this explaining why the tower was built here?" Ted pointed to a passage. Andromeda looked at it, running her finger under each word as she mouthed the translation to herself, her eyes widening.
"... And so Caswallawn asked of us, and four other clans - families? Houses? - to build upon the mountains, and provide advance warning of approaching foes." She looked up, her pureblood upbringing forgotten as shock and awe were openly worn for all to see.
"He bid us to prevent all magical forms of transport to Ynys Mon - Anglesey island - but it was not enough, they sailed around our defenses." Sirius cringed at hearing this - the Black family had been critical in the roman fight against the druids, but he hadn't realized that it may well have been the fight against Arthur's waning kingdom. Harry frowned, not sure of this significance.
"It seems your family was rather important in the Celtic defense against the occupying Romans, Harry." Ted said softly, still looking over the passage. "This was a lookout tower and ward anchor for a line of defenses meant to keep them off of Anglesey, which was the heartland of ancient druidic practices." he frowned though. "Of course, it appears the Romans simply sailed around them…" Everyone sat back, absorbed in their thoughts. It wasn't anything groundbreaking, but was yet another piece of the Potter legacy. Harry was still disappointed, all of this ancient history had started out pretty cool but it was beginning to disconnected from him now - Penryhn Mawr was for a large family, even a clan, of a culture and era not his own, and this was in service to a dying kingdom that no longer existed. And they still couldn't translate the ogham runes properly! This tower was covered in them - and without a proper runestone in the cellar to power the wards, they assumed that all of the runes were actually using the tower as the runestone. It would be fascinating, if they could actually read it!
"I think I'm done here." Harry said, standing rapidly to varying levels of confusion and shock from the others. Dora ran after him as he exited the room, while the others shared glances.
"Is he okay?" Amelia asked, confused as to why he wouldn't be ecstatic to learn more about his family's history.
"He will be." Sirius replied with a sigh, as Andromeda gave a sad smile to the door the teen had just exited through. "He doesn't feel like he's doing enough, so this doesn't feel like progress."
"He was hoping to find something to help him against Voldemort - a weapon or something." Ted spoke softly, his eyes still on the welsh history before him.
Arcturus stood on the stoop of Grimmauld place, before raising his hand to the door and pressing his head of house ring to the knocker. The door immediately swung inward, and he grimaced at the state of the house. Walburga had been dead for three years now, and the elf had allowed things to completely go to seed. He allowed the door to slam shut behind him, and simply waited for the elf to come forward. Kreacher popped into existence before him, bowing so low his hooked nose touched the floor and left a mark in the dust that he had allowed to accumulate. Lord Black loomed tall over the elf, looking down upon it, as it waited for his order.
"You will tell me everything you know of my grandson's death." Lord Black demanded of the elf, who shivered as the family's magic broke the order given to him by Regulus.
"It started when Master Regulus came to Kreacher on the Dark Lord's orders, Lord Black."
A/N:
I've reached parity with AO3! Chapters will now be posted weekly.
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