Liz sat with her legs folded up on the chair, her coffee mug hugged in both hands close to her chest, staring out over the sea.
The house they put the Champions in the day before each event — so they were safely away from anyone who might try to sabotage them beforehand, presumably — was right on the shore, the grassy flatland, thick with heather and the like, giving way to mixed stone and sand before the ground disappeared under the waves. She'd finally thought to ask last night, and apparently they were somewhere on the islands of Coll and Tiree (Colla and Tiriodh in the local Gaelic), in the Inner Hebrides. Liz wasn't sure which one, and she guessed it didn't really matter. This place was a rural villa sort of thing probably owned by one noble family or another, the house big and fancy, with a few little out-buildings scattered here and there, low walls and paved paths suggesting at the shape of gardens which had been abandoned and eventually died off in the harsh northern weather. The main building, with the brick walls and the big windows and the little towers and stuff, looked very Victorian to her — she suspected whoever had built the thing must have copied the muggle style in vogue at the time.
Liz had woken up relatively early, well before they'd be being served breakfast — they'd be eating right before it was time to go back to Hogwarts for the event, which was rather later than she was used to. After a bit sitting around in the rooms she and Severus had been put up in — separate bedrooms and a common living room, reminding Liz very much of where they'd stayed at the Greenwood a year ago (though in a very different style, obviously) — and reading the second of Säde's books, Liz had gotten too antsy, had left to aimlessly wander around the manor. One of the people staffing the house had found her poking around the gardens, had asked her if she needed anything, and she'd ended up sitting in a circular gazebo on the shore with a mug of coffee. There were environmental spells on the gazebo, mostly keeping away the constant chill wind coming off the sea, Liz more or less comfortable as she blankly looked out over the waves.
Over the last couple of years, Liz had gotten around a lot more than she used to, but she still hadn't seen the sea much. The places she'd been were mostly all well inland, so. It was...big. And very bleak and grey, because Scotland in January.
Not that she thought the view was unpleasant, exactly, but it was hard to put her finger on what exactly she thought of it. She'd spent a lot of time just sitting here staring, though, so.
Looking out over the endless rising and falling waves, it occurred to her that she didn't know how to swim — she'd literally never been in the water before, ever. Normally she wouldn't mind, because dealing with, like, swimsuits and stuff sounded like it could be...complicated. Kind of hard to hide her lopsidedness if the material was getting all wet and clingy, and, she'd expect people would end up looking at her, which would be super uncomfortable. Yeah, no thanks. But, that was for muggle swimsuits, and the magical convention was even worse, considering it was typical for mages to not wear anything at all. Of course, there were still all kinds of propriety rules around it — to the point that people didn't actually go swimming out in lakes and the ocean and shite at all, and if they did almost always only in single-sex groups — but still, that wasn't happening. Which, the fact that she couldn't swim wasn't really a problem, exactly, since she was never around open water...
...except, one of the Tasks in the Tournament was supposedly going to be out on the Lake, on a sinking fucking island. She should...probably do something about that.
Oh well, if it came down to it and she fell in the water and started drowning like an idiot, the organisers could just take that as her being knocked out and rescue her. That would probably be less stressful overall than actually going through the process of learning how to swim — especially since she'd need someone to teach her, and she had no idea how she'd go about that. Yeah, on second thought, let's go with that, problem avoided for now.
(It was probably a good idea to learn how to swim eventually, just in case, but she'd rather leave that until after she wasn't obviously disfigured anymore, thanks.)
She was sitting on her own for...she didn't know, a while, anyway — she'd needed to cast a warming charm on her coffee at least once, and it was empty now, so. The gazebo did have environmental wards over it, but they weren't dense enough to completely cut off external magic, she could feel someone coming. Crawling tendrils of cool light magic — not unpleasantly frigid, like a lot of light magic could be to Liz, but still with a noticeable chill — carried over it a hot bundle of nerves and anticipation and worry. Liz reflexively tried to block it off, but the feelings seemed to come from inside — she could feel them on the magic around her, yes, but even pulling her mind in the anxiety still bubbled up Liz's chest anyway, making her stomach churn.
Veela — the mind was familiar, that would be Fleur. Grimacing, Liz focussed, tried not to breathe in the odd soul-magic compulsion. It didn't work very well.
The centre of the magic neared, standing behind Liz's chair, cool and bright and loud, the way veela and lilin could be. "Good morning, Liz," came Fleur's now-familiar voice, speaking in French.
"Hey. Looking for me?" She'd caught a vague fragment of thought from Fleur's too-open mind, but it hadn't been super clear.
Liz's back was to her, so instead of nodding Fleur's mind pulsed with a warm sense of agreement, which Liz guessed she was meant to pick up on. "It is time for breakfast — I volunteered to retrieve you."
"All right." Unfolding her legs and quick popping to her feet, she turned around — and paused for a moment, eyes running down and back up Fleur's outfit. Since they would be in an arena alone with a bloody dragon, the organisers were taking safety precautions, including the clothes they'd be wearing. They hadn't actually been told what the Task was — it was supposed to be a surprise, but Liz suspected all the Champions already knew anyway — just that the provided uniform was required. In her closet in her room Liz had found trousers and a hooded jacket in black and silver with accents in Slytherin green, reminding her of the duelling team uniform. The material was heavier, wool and leather, and thickly enchanted, enough she could feel the prickly tingle on her skin and at the back of her throat. Not a surprise, dragon fire was magical, protecting against it took some pretty serious enchanting work. Liz would guess getting nailed with a direct hit would still hurt like hell, but wouldn't actually result in them instantly dying, so. Fleur's version was basically the same thing, the jacket closed and the hood up against the chill ocean wind, but in white and pale Beauxbatons blue.
She looked much better in the bloody uniform than Liz did, naturally.
Feeling unaccountably self-conscious, Liz circled around her chair, walked past Fleur, left the gazebo with a few bouncing steps down the stairs. "Let's get this disaster over with, then."
Fleur followed silently after her, hovering behind Liz's shoulder, a thick cloud of veela magic surrounding them, making it slightly hard to breathe. The nerves weren't really helping, anxiety tightening Liz's chest and concern turning her throat hot and hard, ugh, stop it. Liz understood that veela couldn't really help throwing their shite at people all the time, and Liz was probably more sensitive to it than most people, for mind mage and Seer reasons, but it was still very annoying. Of course, it wasn't only anxious anticipation going on in there, Fleur was also somewhat miserable just being outside — she hated the weather in Scotland — a tension in Liz's shoulders, by the way her thoughts ticked along wondering if she should say something to fill the silence, but it was mostly nerves, they would be put in an arena with a dragon, worry that—
As at least one thing Fleur was thinking about finally clicked, Liz hitched to a stop. Frowning up at Fleur, Liz said, "I know it's a dragon, Fleur. I have a plan, I'll be fine."
"Oh, good. I did worry."
"I noticed." Liz turned her back on Fleur again and kept walking, shaking her head to herself. She didn't know why Fleur gave a damn what happened to her, but fine, whatever. The suffocating nervousness Fleur was pushing at her was significantly reduced now, at least.
It was probably one of those must protect the tiny child impulses. Or at least, that did seem like the obvious guess — Liz was stupid short, and wasn't exactly very put-together and glamorous or whatever, so sometimes people assumed she was even younger than she was — but she'd kind of kicked arse in the first event, she would think some of that should have worn off by now. Didn't make a lot of sense to Liz, but fine. If Fleur could tamp down the anticipatory nerves a bit, that'd be great — being hit with other people's anxiety always made her uncomfortable, all jumpy and itchy, and she already didn't like wearing bloody trousers...
By the time Liz and Fleur got there, pretty much everyone else was already in the dining room. Instead of a single big table, the big overly fancy room — dark and moody, the floor black marble and the walls hidden with deep red curtains, lit with a fire fitfully flickering in the hearth and silver candlesticks dotted here and there — contained multiple smaller tables, each seating six people or so. The Champions were expected to have family here during their day of isolation, at least one person with them — so far, it'd always been the same person for everyone, the parent who Liz assumed had the fewest obligations so could most easily waste a day hanging around here. For Cedric, Fleur, and Viktor, that was their mum, but for Artèmi and Ingrid that was their dad.
Liz quickly spotted Severus sitting with Ingrid and her dad, went over to join them. The food they had here was generally pretty nice — there were a handful of human cooks, Liz had seen them in passing — but sometimes not in a way that Liz could appreciate, because she could be picky like that. After a few days here, she'd already figured out there were supply issues, but inconsistent ones — the beef was kind of gross, but the dairy was fine, the chicken and eggs were bad, but the duck was good, the pork was fine and the seafood was, naturally, good. Seer issues, she meant, semi-consciously picking stuff up by eating the thing the echo was attached to. She suspected fish and the like just weren't smart enough to be a problem for Seer reasons, and the duck was probably magic-raised. The pork could be magic-raised, or could just be from a less shitty muggle producer, same with the dairy, but the beef, chicken, and eggs were definitely muggle-raised. Or, she thought so, anyway. It wasn't a huge difference, like, she could eat the bad stuff, it was just vaguely unappetising.
In retrospect, Liz wondered how much her not eating enough when she was younger was just because she hadn't liked to, for Seer reasons. She hadn't been consciously aware of Seer stuff back then, but it had still been there — it would make a weird kind of sense. Didn't really matter, she guessed, just weird to think about.
Breakfasts in particular could be a problem, because they tended to have a lot of pastries and the like. (Very French, she suspected the cooks were either foreigners or muggle-trained chefs.) The pastries and stuff, naturally, were made with sugar. Even the ones that weren't too sweet for Liz were still, just, unpleasant to try to eat — honestly, vaguely unpleasant just to be near, though she wasn't sure how much of that was just her normal discomfort whenever there were more than a few people around. (The psychometric echoes on food should be present all the time, not just when she was actually eating it, but the noise from people's minds was loud enough it was hard to tell.) Luckily, the pork wasn't so bad, and the coffee was grown by Arab mages — which was good, because it turned out a lot of muggle coffee was grown and processed with what amounted to slave labour — so every time she ended up just munching at sausages and sipping at coffee, mostly ignoring the conversation around her and waiting for the bloody Task to start.
And today wasn't any different — Liz sat down, a couple good mornings traded with Ingrid and her dad (she'd already seen Severus earlier, because he never fucking slept), poured herself some coffee, and waited impatiently for them to just get on with it.
Honestly, the worst part of being forced into this bloody thing was everyone going mad over her all the time — she'd already gotten more than enough attention before, thank you — and the worst part of the Tasks themselves was waiting for the bloody things to start already. Liz wasn't the most patient person in the world, sitting around waiting to face off with a dragon just fucking sucked.
Sitting at the table through the breakfast hour was mostly just tedious, since everyone had learned to leave Liz alone by now. She ended up pulling her book back out before too long, reading silently at the table, partially to alleviate the boredom and partially to distract herself from her nerves — she didn't expect the Task to go badly, but she didn't like walking into danger like an idiot. (Fucking nesting female dragons, honestly.) It worked better than it might have, thanks to Säde's books actually being rather interesting.
If super super complicated, naturally. The main main character — there were multiple point-of-view characters, but one of them definitely felt like the protagonist to Liz — was a sorceress born in some random Finnish village...though, Säde didn't actually use the word Finnish, but Liz was pretty sure they were? The book used old tribal names, referring to a particular location or a famous ancestor or the like, there were a whole bunch of different groups who Liz thought were all technically Finns — at least, the German and Slavic point-of-view characters referred to them all as Finns (or just pagans). Liz suspected the concept of a unified Finnish people simply hadn't existed yet at the time. Of course, that was further complicated by there being other pagan groups around too — mostly Baltic tribes, presumably the ancestors of modern-day Lithuanians, but there were also still a few pagan Slavs kicking around — who main character girl's people thought of as completely foreign, but still allies against the invaders attempting to conquer their homeland and forcibly convert them to Christianity.
Two entirely separate crusading groups, it turned out — Catholics from the west, mostly speaking Swedish and German, and Orthodox Christians from the east and south, speaking a Slavic language Liz was pretty sure was Old Russian or something? So, they were pinned between the two different kinds of Crusaders, and there were a bunch of other Baltic and Slavic groups around, and even the inter-clan tribal politics between the Finns could get super complicated too, just, it was a huge fucking mess. Main character girl's story was mostly concerned with just trying to keep her and her family alive, the large-scale war that was going on background noise to her life stuff and tribal politics and...
It was super super complicated, was the point. Liz had to wonder how much of this was actually historical, and how much Säde had made up. There'd been an appendix in the first book, which included a brief essay about how written records from the time were extremely fragmentary — records from that period could be spotty in general, but much of the documentation that had existed had been lost in various subsequent wars, and the natives hadn't even really had a written language at all yet — so it took a bit of guesswork to make a complete picture, piecing together this and that from incomplete Swedish, Russian, and Teutonic records and oral history collected after Secrecy, a good five hundred years after the fact. Säde had included a list of sources she'd borrowed from, so Liz could theoretically look up for herself how much was real and how much was fiction...but they were mostly in Finnish or (Novgorod) Russian, so she wouldn't be able to read any of it, even if she could get her hands on copies from all the way in Scotland. Not really worth the effort that would be necessary, just vaguely curious.
And Liz's guess that the battle scenes would be good, since the author was a professional duellist and everything, had been spot on...if very hectic and confusing at times. Turned out, full-scale mediaeval battles and sieges and shite had been fucking messy. There were only a few large battles, most of the action scenes to do with raids against the natives or the occasional tribal dispute, which were also chaotic, but written all quick and exciting (and also super brutal, because mediaeval warfare). Main character girl — confusingly, she actually went by different names sometimes, but it was mostly Helmikki — was mostly like...Liz thought it was some kind of priest, healer...thing. She'd still been a teenager when the story started, still in training for whatever that was, when things in the area had started getting really bad, and she'd ended up being pulled into the fighting, slightly controversially — the pagan tribes in the area were less openly misogynistic than the Christianised Germans and Slavs, but women fighting was still unusual — and it seemed like she was slowly turning into some kind of local leader type, but it was still early at this point, hard to say.
They didn't have wands yet — or at least the natives didn't, some of the Crusaders did — using a smattering of much more limited foci and, just, ritually enchanted melee weapons. It could get really messy and unpredictable because, the thing about wands was that everyone had the same basic set of skills, so the shape of a fight was more predictable, but, in this setting, when you end up in a fight with someone, you had no idea what they might be capable of. You might not even realise they have some kind of focus that lets them cast curses at range until the spellglow was already flying right at your face. Helmikki's family and allies were normally less well-equipped than the Christians (the occasional fight with other pagan groups far more evenly matched), so, they either had to outnumber and overwhelm the attackers, or ambush them, or get really clever...or sometimes just very lucky.
Liz was in the middle of a meeting between a bunch of different clans talking about a response to the raids, Helmikki dramatically showing up partway through — she'd been temporarily captured by the Teutonic Knights (German Crusaders) and assumed dead...or at least permanently out of their reach. (Apparently capturing pagan women and keeping them as what were basically sex slaves was a thing that had happened. Helmikki's escape was actually enabled by being dragged off alone for an attempted rape, after they were out of sight exploiting blood magic to kill the man and sneak away.) Anyway, she was in the middle of reading a long politicking session when a Hit Wizard walked into the dining room, told them it was time to go. Liz quick ran back upstairs to tuck her book into her bag — someone would move their things back to Hogwarts for them during the Task — joining back up with the rest of the group in the dead gardens.
From the details that were still decipherable, Liz suspected this had once been a courtyard around a fountain, ringed with rose bushes. Had probably been rather pretty in its time, but now only a couple of the bushes remained, the tile cracked in places, the fountain dry and weathered. They'd fixed up the inside of the house, at least, but the gardens could really use some work.
A brief portkey trip — thankfully they weren't strapped onto the thing, each just gripping their part of the branching, almost snowflake-shaped rope — and they landed back in Hogsmeade Valley. Liz glanced around, they weren't on the school grounds, but in the space between Hogsmeade and the new village — it looked like they were reusing the arena from the First Task. But Liz only had a few seconds to take in details before they were being shuffled into a long, low building made mostly out of local wood. The inside was largely empty, some furniture here and there, a table with drinks sitting out, the only decoration banners of the three schools hanging on the walls.
Liz recognised this, it was the same place they'd waited while the stands filled up before the First Task. It seemed a lot emptier without the rest of their teams in here.
And it got emptier as the Champions' families said their goodbyes and good lucks, slipping out to join the rest of the crowd in the stands. Severus seemed slightly nervous, honestly, and Liz didn't think it was her imagination — but she would be standing face-to-face with a fucking nesting female dragon in not too much longer now, so, being a little nervous was perfectly reasonable. It was just odd for Severus to actually show it, was all.
(It hadn't stopped feeling slightly weird that he actually gave a damn what happened to her, but she realised that was fucking absurd at this point, with everything that had happened. Apparently abused kid brain could be stubborn like that. She was trying to just ignore it.)
"All right, everyone, gather around," Blaise's mum called, waving the group of Champions closer to herself. Mirabella Zabini tended to dress very very fancy, and somewhat risqué by magical standards — though not really that bad by muggle standards, and supposedly she was in business on the muggle side too, so — but this time she was just in normal formal robes. Expensive ones, yeah, the material all colourful and shiny and glittery, wouldn't look that out of place next to magical noble types. Probably dressed with needing to sit outside for the Task in mind, Liz guessed. There were a couple assistants with her (looking much less fancy, working types), and also a cameraman. There'd been articles on the last two Tasks too, Liz wasn't surprised they wanted to grab a couple shots before the event — irritated, but not surprised.
She also wasn't surprised to spot Rita standing next to the cameraman, looking as colourful and gaudy as always. Rita had been a co-writer on the pieces for the last two Tasks, so. Noticing Liz was looking her way, Rita gave her a slow wink, wide grin showing teeth.
Liz wondered if Skeeter was so obvious about her other sources...but she guessed she couldn't be, considering she could still get at secret Ministry documents seemingly whenever she wanted.
"Everyone's here? Good." While Zabini spoke, one of her assistants handed her a sizeable platter, six plain canvas bags arrayed on it, each about fist-sized. It might be Liz's imagination, but she thought they were moving, poked at from inside just a little, as though something alive were trapped in there. "As you recall, you were given no information about what you will be facing for this Task. These bags hold the answer. Everyone go ahead and pick one."
The Champions glanced at each other for a second — Liz was pretty sure everyone already knew what the Task was anyway, because obviously they were all cheating — before reaching to grab for bags all more or less at the same time. The platter was too small to fit all of them around it at once, they had to step forward in turns. Once Liz had her bag, she undid the knot holding it closed, tipped the bag upside down over her palm — something fell out, the hard material feeling vaguely like ceramic, sharp edges poking into her—
Oh, that was neat! It was a little figurine of a dragon, a few inches long, and it was animated — as she watched it righted itself from where it'd fallen on its back, curling low against Liz's palm, and warily looking around, its sinuous neck curling. The camera was snapping, probably getting shots of the Champions' reactions to their dragon figurines, but Liz wasn't paying attention, examining the little thing. She thought it might be made out of ceramic, but with countless tiny pieces, the motion smooth enough she couldn't make out the articulation of the underlying structure at all, there were even countless miniscule chips for individual scales, the detail was amazing. She wondered how they did that...
Anyway, her dragon was a pleasant blue-silver colour — vaguely reminding her of patronus light, but darker, more blueish — the horns and spikes an almost bronzeish off-white, the default colour on most dragon breeds, the eyes a bright, vibrant blue, slitted like a cat's. The wings were long relative to its body, but narrow and sharply angled, suggesting this was a highlands dragon — dragons that lived up in the mountains tended to be smaller than lowland dragons, but were quicker in the air and much more dextrous and graceful on the ground, so were often considered more dangerous despite their lesser size. The snout was rather flat, the jaws curving off instead of narrowing down to a long point like some breeds, making the head look somewhat blunt and square.
There were a couple different short-snout breeds, but with the blue-silver colour and the thick armour over its chest, this must be a Swedish short-snout — ranging through the southern end and along the inland side of the Scandinavian mountains, it was known to sometimes wander into the lowlands of the Dales of Sweden, hence the name. (When British mages said "Sweden" they meant historical Svealand, a band in the middle of the country that the old kingdom had started from, which not coincidentally included the modern capital city, and also Durmstrang.) It was one of the more fast-moving, dangerous dragons, in particular feared for its fire, so hot it burned blue-white. Supposedly, its breath could kill instantly, after only a couple seconds the body reduced to ash and fragments of scorched bone — if they thought it was at all safe to put her alone in an arena with one, there must be some serious safety enchantments in place.
Belatedly, Liz noticed a number three painted in black along its back. Oh good, she wouldn't have to wait her turn through the whole bloody thing...
Once they all had their dragons, Zabini continued giving them instructions — get the golden egg, points awarded for speed and cleverness, taken away for injuries or for breaking the other eggs, some talk about the safety precautions, blah blah. Liz wasn't listening that closely, looking around at the other Champions' dragon figurines, tipping up on her toes to get a better angle. They came in a variety of colours, but they mostly all looked like more highland dragons. There were two different ridgebacks, in Cedric and Artèmi's hands, but Liz couldn't be more specific without getting a closer look. Viktor had gotten a British green — the smallest and tamest of dragon breeds, lucky him — and she thought Fleur's was a Pyrenean Sundragon, which were super pretty, but also deadly, their fire-breath with a longer range than most...though, Fleur was a veela, so the fire probably wasn't a problem for her, was it. None of them seemed surprised they'd be facing dragons, all of them looking stoic and determined — or curious, poking at the little enchanted constructs, which were very neat — except for Ingrid, who'd gone pale, staring wide-eyed at her dragon.
Unless Liz was mistaken, that was a Hebridean black. Most lowland dragons lived on plains or the steppe or the like, but the Hebridean black was unusual in that it ranged over the water, nesting on the dozens of islands in the north. They mostly ate deer and sheep and stuff, but they'd also hunt marine animals sometimes — they were even known to opportunistically hunt whales, which was just absurd. It was built like a lowlands dragon despite the mountainous terrain of the region, all thick and bulky and big, easily the largest of the six dragons, probably by more than fifty per cent in some cases. They were also intelligent by dragon standards, and aggressive and stubborn, in previous centuries infamous for pursuing boats carrying people who'd annoyed them across hundred of kilometres. In a few old stories they'd even followed vikings all the way back home, and there must be some truth to that, because there was a small population of Hebridean blacks along the Scandinavian islands of the Norwegian Sea coast to this day.
It was a very dangerous dragon even by dragon standards, was the point — Ingrid had definitely drawn the short straw this time.
"Any last questions for me before we get started?"
"Can we keep these?" Liz asked, pointing at her dragon figurine. "How long will the spells on them last?"
Zabini's lips twitched, Fleur's super noisy mind failing to hide the sudden ringing of amusement. "Those are yours to keep, yes. They're properly enchanted, the spells should last so long as the runes aren't damaged. Anything else?"
There was a little bit more chatter before Zabini and the staff people streamed out of the room. Rita's cameraman — not Bozo, must be some other Daily Prophet bloke — snapped a few more shots of the Champions, Rita wishing them all luck — including a very inappropriate flirty comment directed at Cedric, he and Viktor were more than slightly creeped out, but Liz could tell it was just a (poorly delivered) joke — before they were gone too, leaving the Champions alone. Liz dipped by the toilets quick, before picking a chair and settling in to wait, poking at her little dragon.
It was very neat enchanting work, slithering over her hand, crouching down defensively and snarling up at her. Liz didn't think it could fly, but it could breathe fire, streams of blue cooling to gold and orange as it spread out — not real fire, no heat, just an illusion. She wondered how the hell they'd made this, and why didn't she see more figurines like this, it was so cool...
(Runes dancing behind her eyes, curiously poking at the joints, it also worked as a very convenient distraction, Liz almost completely forgot to be nervous.)
Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes later, the back door leading further into the arena complex opened, an unfamiliar man called for Ingrid. The poor girl suddenly looked very green, the air around her thickly churning with dread — honestly, Liz was surprised she didn't sick up right then and there. After a brief moment standing frozen, she sucked in a deep breath and lurched into motion, her steps wooden and clumsy. Liz noticed her fists were shaking at her hips.
Yeah, Liz was going to go out on a limb and guess that wasn't going to end very well.
The room descended into tense silence, the four remaining Champions (plus Liz) sitting quietly in their own seats, the only sound the occasional shuffle of shifting cloth or the tap of a shoe on the floor or a cup on a table, a clearing of a throat. Their minds were much noisier, crackling with anxiety, reciting their strategies to themselves — Liz pulled herself in as much as she could, focussing all her attention on her dragon figurine. It mostly worked? She did feel a little jittery from vicarious nerves, her stomach twisting, but it was manageable at least.
There wasn't a clock in here, but it must have been ten, fifteen minutes later when the door opened again, the same man calling for Artèmi. Her mind going smooth and cool and placid — occlumency trick, Liz was so jealous, she could never get that shite to work — Artèmi's posture was much more relaxed, her pace smooth and casual. "Don't die," Liz said as Artèmi passed by where she was sitting. "You still owe me a rematch."
Her step hitching for a second, Artèmi glanced at her, an initial flicker of surprise quickly taken over with a subtle sheen of amusement. "I thought you'd decided you got your rematch in the First Task."
"I thought you said that didn't count." Liz had had backup, hadn't been an even match.
"True. I suppose I'll be careful, then — if only for the sake of our rematch, of course."
"You better."
After the door closed again, Liz felt the eyes of the other Champions on her, curious, but she just ignored them, focussed on the figurine again.
Some countless minutes later, the door opened again, and the same man called for Liz — show time. She stuffed the dragon figurine in her pocket and followed him out. As soon as she crossed through the doorway, she could suddenly hear the noise of the crowd, hundreds of people shuffling and muttering. She could hear the announcers from here, but she couldn't understand it at all. There were three separate announcers, commentating in English, French, and Danish, the stands would be divided such to project only one of them; standing out here, she could hear all three of them, overlapping. She spoke English and French just fine, of course, but the three commentators babbling over each other was very confusing, it was hard to pick anything meaningful out. It sounded like they were giving some basic information on the Swedish short-snout, the French person saying something about the tricks the wranglers were using to get the dragons and their nests in and out of the arena, but Liz didn't catch very much.
They were still out of sight from the stands here, shielded by an over-large canopy. It was mostly empty, but there were some workers bustling around, Liz remembered from the First Task that the healers' station was right over there, she could see the wooden frame of the end of the stands just there to the left. Shortly ahead there was a barrier wall blocking off the arena. There was a door set into it, a collection people standing around or sitting on conjured chairs, waiting — Tournament staff, but there were also a handful of Hit Wizards, Liz guessed to retrieve a Champion in danger or help contain the dragons in an emergency. There was an illusion projecting the inside of the arena on the wall, very similar to Babbling's trick she'd heard they'd adapted for the spectators at the first two Tasks.
Liz was slightly surprised to find Flitwick hanging around with the people here. He must have volunteered to be on hand to help rescue a Champion if necessary — he was a famous duelling champion, and he could zip around absurdly fast if he felt like it, so that made sense. (Liz was getting fast with quick-step these days, but Flitwick could still dance circles around her.) As she neared the door, Flitwick hopped off his chair to meet her. "Hello, Miss Potter," he said, his voice oddly absent of his usual enthusiasm, hard and tense. There was a bit of shimmering shivering to his steely goblin mind, hot wiry needles grasping at her skin — it could be hard to read goblin- and elf-type minds sometimes, but she thought he was concerned for her. Forcing a toothy smirk, "Feeling confident?"
"Confident enough. I'm told dragons are vulnerable to mind magic."
"Ah, well, that is true. They have quite high magical resistance, however, so it would be wise to take it slowly."
He meant to pause to make sure whatever she was doing actually took before getting close. "Right. I'll be okay, I'm not that worried. Honestly, sitting around the other Champions freaking out about it was making me more nervous than the thing itself — though I do hate the waiting, I'd rather just get it over with."
Flitwick let out a low chuckle, his mind letting off warm metallic peals of laughter. "Of course. The door will open when they're ready for you, the timer will start the moment you set foot in the arena. We'll be here watching, to jump in in case anything goes wrong."
"I guessed as much. Has anything gone wrong yet?" She did wonder about Ingrid, she had a feeling...
So she wasn't surprised when there was a flinch in Flitwick's head, face twisting with a toothy grimace. "Miss Ingrid failed to retrieve her egg — she'll be stuck with the healers for some days at least, but I'm told she's expected to make a full recovery."
Called it.
One of the Hit Wizards was saying something about how they technically weren't supposed to tell the Champions how anyone before them had done — not actually annoyed with Flitwick, sounding more amused than anything — but before he could finish there was an audible click, the door swinging open on its own. "And here we go." Flitwick's hand came up, gripping her arm under the shoulder for a second, his mind pressing up hard and smooth against hers. "Good luck, Miss Potter."
Not sure what to say, Liz just shot him a quick smile, and slipped through the door. The arena was different from the last time she'd seen it, the thin forest landscape replaced with what looked a lot like a craggy mountaintop — or, what Liz thought such things looked like, she'd never been on the top of a mountain before. The ground was rock, uneven and jagged, poking up in a small pillar here, crumbling to rubble there, rent through by ridges in intersecting stripes. It would mess with footing, but Liz guessed it would also work as cover against dragonfire. While the ground was uneven, it slowly trended upward, highest at the centre, a somewhat smoother dome supporting the nest right at the middle.
Liz spotted the dragon immediately, of course. Curled up hugging close to the ground, shielding the nest from view, a mass of blue scales, shimmering silver in the sunlight, bristling with deadly-looking spikes, curved serrated claws grinding jagged gouges into the rock. She'd known, intellectually, that dragons were big, but actually seeing the bloody thing was something else — it was crouching low to the ground, probably not that much taller than Liz herself, but even curled up over the nest it could still cover the whole roof of a modestly-sized house. Like, Liz was guessing at the size, and she thought of Severus's house, if you knocked out all the internal walls it'd probably fit inside, but it'd be bumping against the external walls every time it moved, fucking hell, she hadn't realised how long the serpentile tail was, dragging hissing and cracking against the ground, did they not include the whole tail in length measurements? Because she remembered the book saying the Swedish short-snout got up to around twenty-three or twenty-four feet — in the mages' units, it was like a foot shorter than that in Imperial, worked out to a little under seven metres — but just looking at it, there was no way that was only seven metres long, including the tail it was way longer than that, they had to be excluding the tail...
And not just that, she could feel it. Despite herself, she hitched to a sudden stop just a couple steps into the arena, the dragon's magic enveloping her, like a heavy wave crashing down on her head. Thick and hot and crackling, smoke and lightning on the air, but also big — somewhat reminding her of Hogwarts? But where Hogwarts had a calm, steady, solid feeling to it, this felt more wild, like a thunderstorm or forest fire, magic constantly shifting and swirling and crackling, filling her chest with each breath and itching along her skin, like a potion just on the edge of exploding, but huge, towering over her, making Liz feel uncomfortably exposed and terribly small...
...and she was going to try to control this thing? She'd maybe underestimated how difficult this was going to be...
A sharp shock of something shot through the overly-energetic mind — the dragon knew she was here. Its sinuous neck shifted, its head angling, turning one eye to find her. Even from this distance, she could make out the bright blue of its eye, so intense it almost seemed to glow, its alien stare fixed unblinkingly on her, mind as sharp as a knife against her throat, attention on her skin hot and jabbing...
Right. Let's get this over with.
Liz didn't bother drawing her wand, since she didn't need it for the mind magic...also she was pretty sure she couldn't cast a strong enough anti-elemental shield to block dragonfire anyway. Digging in her feet, she leapt into a quick-step, the arena blurring around her, reappeared atop one of the ridges rent through the ground. Her boots slipped a little — the high-traction, enchanted material didn't do her any good if the pebbles she landed on were free to skid against the ground proper — it took a couple seconds to get her footing again, the dragon's mind frothing with surprise, hostility pelting her like a hundred scattered sparks. She quick-stepped again, moving on a diagonal in case the dragon tried to take a pot-shot at her, and then again.
There was a harsh scrape as another pebble slipped under her foot against the rocky ground, Liz grinding to a halt on the dome in the middle of the arena. She immediately bore down on the dragon's mind, pushing hard enough she felt a hot-cold numb tingle at the back of her neck, copper sizzling on her tongue and illusive sparks of colour dancing in her eyes — forcing herself deep in the dragon's mind, stop stop stop, commanding it to stay still.
She was standing maybe five feet away from the dragon's head, the air around her smelling like smoke and charred meat and some musty smell she couldn't place, hot and stinging, its magic thick as soup around her, like sinking into a bath, smooth and frothing and fluttering. The atmosphere making her head spin, she nearly lost focus, leaned back into the compulsion hard, glaring right into the dragon's incandescent blue eye, the base of her skull tingling and her heart throbbing...
Fighting to keep the compulsion in place — the dragon resisting her hold much more than she'd expected, its mind wrenching and snarling in her grip, its body occasionally twitching as it nearly slipped free — it took far too much effort just to keep her attention from wandering. She'd never seen a dragon in real life before, of course, just read about them and seen pictures in books, but it...
It was big, naturally, and it was well enough to know the facts, but in person it— Even hugged close to the ground, its spine was well above her height, the boxy head larger then her torso, it was hard to say with it curled around to look at her as it was, but she thought the sinuous, surprisingly delicate-looking neck had to be eight feet long, bat-like wings spread partially open to shield its nest from view, the body mostly hidden by the head and the wings from this angle, only a few glimpses of its curling back showing, from this close the dragon nearly filled her entire vision from left to right, scales and spikes and teeth...
This close, the blue-silver colour of the scales had a sheen to it, each showing a miniscule rainbow band like oil in sunlight. Liz had seen scaled animals before, but they didn't look like normal scales, like, like, more metallic, or like lovingly polished ceramic, smooth and solid and almost fake-looking, more like a statue, like the ones around the Gate at the Greenwood. (Or like the figurine she could feel still wriggling in her pocket.) Hundreds and hundreds of them, a regular mosaic across its surface, they weren't all the same colour, showing a steady gradient trending toward more of a blue at the top and a silvery near-white below. Some scales were small, like tiny chips of ceramic, but others were larger, the greatest of them along the edges of the skull and the rim of its wings, elongated and lifting somewhat away from its skin, glittery and delicate and thin enough that they seemed to rustle just slightly in the breeze, looking like something halfway between scale and feather, sunlight catching gold along the edges...
Bristling with spikes, regularly along its back, looking less like the material antlers or bird talons were made out of, but more like stone in an almost bronzeish colour, not so brilliant as the scales but still seeming to gleam just slightly in the sunlight. Liz noticed one spike on its back was even cracked, a chip missing, the jagged edge looking much more like crumbling stone than...whatever such things on animals were usually made of. There were two long horns extending from the back of the head made out of the same material, nearly the length of Liz's arm, a couple curved claw-looking things at a bend in the wings, despite how awkward it looked the dragon must have some dexterity with those, seeming to grip onto the ground, preparing to spring...
Its eye overlage and overbright, steady on her, the mind bucking and shivering in her grip, it... Alien thoughts whispering away, far more coherent than she'd expected, confused, uncertain where she was, angry — scared, worried her yet-to-hatch eggs were under threat. Looking over the web of thoughts and memories sizzling away in her grasp, she seemed far more intelligent than Liz had expected. Not human intelligent — she wasn't a person, not really — but much closer to it than, say, a cat or something like that. Liz had never gotten close to an ape or one of those birds smart enough to pick up a few words, but she suspected they'd be sort of like this — aware enough to have some idea of what was happening, enough to recognise Liz as another of the same kind of things that had ripped her away from home, enough to be unsettled by the alien surroundings and the noise of the crowd, defensive.
She was frightened, and she was furious.
And the magic was intense, trying to breathe through smoke, hot and tingly, prickling at her skin, making her rather light-headed. The energy seeped into her, kind of like the odd soul-magic compulsion veela and lilin did, but instead of feelings carrying a sense of power — untethering her from the earth, light and bubbling, something seeming to open up in her chest, frothing fire surging up, magic crackling along her skin, it took far too much effort to just hold still and focus on her grip, her breath harsh and hot in her throat, her fingers shaking, her stomach dropping and a wave of something rushing along her skin, she...
(Liz didn't know what to call the feeling, too overwhelming to analyse in the moment, but in retrospect she'd decide this was what awe was supposed to feel like.)
Gradually gathering herself, egged on by the mind magic burning at the base of her skull, she ordered the dragon to back away, off of the nest. But, despite supposedly only being an animal, the dragon managed to resist, mind twisting and bucking and roaring, a surge of refusal (frightened, furious) nearly shaking her loose. Her breath catching in her throat, acting on instinct, Liz grasped for one of her own memories — a year ago now, expecto patronum, a silvery apparation of a bird of prey gracefully sweeping through Severus's library, not fuelled by happiness but by safety — harnessing the feeling that'd gone into the moment, but that took some of her attention, her grip cracking, stone grinding as the dragon started to move, a low grumbling growl building—
But before she could do anything Liz slammed down on her mind again, the base of her skull burning and fizzy blood on her tongue — leading with the feeling this time, driving it as deep into the dragon's head as she could, safe safe safe, Liz wasn't going to hurt the eggs, you're safe here. It sort of worked, the compulsion taking enough for the fear and the fury to ease somewhat, but the dragon still didn't trust her, slitted eye focussed unblinkingly on her, simple alien thoughts simmering with suspicion and unease. The dragon was intelligent enough to recognise Liz was doing something to it — which was curious, animals generally didn't notice mind magic at all — and while forcing a feeling of safety on her did take the edge off, it knew it couldn't move, that something was happening, and she was confused, and—
It was enough for Liz to get the dragon to move, slowly shuffling back and to the side, one hesitant step after the other. Falteringly, continuing to fight her, Liz occasionally had to firm up her grip and lean in again — but the dragon retreated, slowly, revealing the nest inch by inch. Built of chips of stone and what looked like bone — from some prey animal, presumably — the nest was smaller than she'd expected, not to scale with the size of the dragon. The eggs were huge, though, Liz would need both arms to carry one, the shells as smooth as polished stone a deep rich blue, like the sky at twilight.
Save for one, at the centre of the nest, surrounded by a single ring of real eggs, glinting gold in the sunlight.
But Liz didn't look too closely, maintaining eye contact with the dragon, focussed on holding the compulsion in place. The dragon was fully off of the nest now, curled up and tense, as though ready to pounce — she was still fighting Liz, if she let go for a second she probably would, the enforced feeling of safety enough to get the dragon to uncover the nest but not enough to actually relax. Digging her mental fingers in a little further, holding the magic tight (trying not to notice the cool numb throb building in her jaw, the back of her neck burning), Liz started to move, her attention on the mind magic making her feel clumsy, each step wooden and numb, slowly walking to the nest. The dragon's mind surged and flailed (frightened, furious), she twitched with restrained motion, Liz tightened her grip, and took another step, another.
By the time she actually reached the edge of the nest, holding the compulsion was taking so much effort she could barely even see, her peripheral vision blurred and grey, narrowed down to the big bright blue eye, the previously slitted pupil now blown wide and round, alien anger frothing in its depths. Stiff, shaky, Liz crouched over the nest, reaching almost blindly, the dragon's mind surging again, Liz grit her teeth but she could hardly even feel it, deadening pain pulsing through her head and neck, rainbow sparks dancing behind her eyes. The metal cool against her skin, some kind of enchantment tingling, thankfully the surface of the false egg wasn't perfectly smooth, there was a rim a few inches down from the top, deep enough for Liz to find purchase, lift it with a single hand — carefully straight up, to avoid banging it against the real eggs. Dragon eggs were rather sturdy, hard to break on accident, but just in case.
Curiously, once the egg cleared the nest, the intense storm of wild emotion pummelling her (frightened, furious) cooled somewhat, faltering with indistinct, simple confusion. There must have been some kind of illusion over the eggs, to fool the dragons into thinking they were theirs — it must have broken when Liz picked it up. Of course, no matter that the dragon realised this wasn't one of her eggs now, Liz was still far too close to the real ones, and she was still confused and scared, she would still kill Liz given half a chance, in a blink.
The egg firmly hugged in both arms, Liz hesitated. It was taking far too much effort to hold the compulsion in place — given how much her head hurt, she was already in serious danger of badly overchannelling — and while eye contact wasn't necessary for mind magic, the focus did help. If she turned away, she'd probably lose her grip, and the dragon would attack. She could back away, but the ground was so uneven, if she tried that she'd probably trip and fall, and then she'd definitely lose her grip, the dragon would be on her before she could even get up again.
So, after a second of thought, Liz did something very stupid.
She let go.
The dragon lurched, claws scrapping against stone, unbalanced at finally finding itself in control again, Liz spun on the balls of her feet, crouched, and jumped straight into a quick-step. She landed in a slide, boots sending pebbles bouncing into a nearby ditch, the air around her ringing with a high, grinding, ear-piercing roar. Liz dug in her feet and quick-stepped again, moving at an angle, landed in another slide — the door was that way but she couldn't go straight there, who knew how far the dragon's fire would reach. So Liz jumped off at an angle again, upon landing was blasted with searing hot wind tearing through the arena, like opening the door of an oven, specks of sand stinging at her skin. She glanced over her shoulder, the spot she'd been standing a second ago had vanished in a stream of blue-white fire, intensely bright, like looking straight into a light bulb but much larger, the river of flame jetting out two dozen metres before losing its shape, rising in billowing curls, fading into yellows and oranges and reds, the cloud stretching over Liz's head...
The fire let up after a couple seconds, the dragon realising Liz wasn't there anymore, a harsh snarl cutting through the air, head turning — but Liz was moving already, whipping back around and leaning into another quick-step, the arena blurring around her, her heels skidding on the stone, there, she jumped again, shadows yawning up in front of her, figures shifting in slow motion, her vision tunnelling—
The bubble broke, Liz overbalanced, falling to skid on her knees — but she'd made it, she was under the canopy again. There was a slamming noise behind her, she glanced over her shoulder to see one of the Hit Wizards had closed the door, the dragon let out a harsh, frustrated roar.
Slumping over the golden egg in her lap, Liz let out a long, shaky sigh, the metal clutched cool in shaking fingers. Fuck, that was a hell of a thing...
Liz spent a moment kneeling on the ground bowed over the egg, forehead pressed against the cool metal surface, trying to get control of her breathing. There was a sharp hot burning at the back of her head, shooting twinges spanging down her neck, her heart pounding in her teeth and her forehead — and fuck, she had a headache, slowly building as she sat here, like a dull pressure building in her skull, making her vaguely nauseous. Yep, definitely overchannelled a bit, oops. In her defence, she'd been told dragons were vulnerable to mind magic, she hadn't realised it would take so much. Blame Dumbledore for that too, she guessed.
But the headache wasn't the only reason she was sitting here with her head down. It was hard to breathe, choked by a storm of feelings swirling and fluttering in her chest, her eyes stinging — she had no idea what feelings, of course, because she was shite with that sort of thing. Standing right in front of a dragon like that had just been a lot, that was all.
She twitched at the hand on her back, but relaxed a little when she recognised the smooth-cool mind against hers as Flitwick. "Liz, are you hurt?"
...Had Flitwick ever called her that before? "I'm okay, it didn't get me." Liz straightened, tense muscles in her back protesting, took a quick swipe at her eyes. "I'm fine."
She looked up at Flitwick in time to catch a sceptical look cross his craggy goblin-ish face, mind tinkling with concern. "You'll be seeing the healers either way, if something's bothering you you might as well say so." He'd noticed the tears, of course, Flitwick wasn't stupid. House of Wisdom and all that. Not that Liz really had any good explanation for that.
(She was beautiful.)
"I have a headache. I might have pushed the mind magic a little hard."
His mind ringing, Flitwick let out a little huff. "What in the world possessed you to attempt to dominate the mind of a dragon anyway? Come on then, let's get you to the healers..."
The entrance to the healers' station was also under the canopy, down a bit to the left, opposite the way the Champions had been brought in. It was another plain wooden building, but the inside space had been divided into multiple sections by heavy green-black curtains, so heavily enchanted with privacy spells and the like that Liz could feel a faint crackle passing by. Most of the sections were still hanging open, only one was currently occupied, a tangle of multiple minds slipping through into the waiting area. One of the healers waved Liz in, leading her into one of the empty sections.
As she passed the occupied one, she heard chatter in what she assumed must be Aquitanian — it sounded vaguely similar to French, but she couldn't quite follow it — she spotted a familiar girl in the uniform they'd been provided for the event, pale eyes flicking up to meet hers for just a second before Liz was led past. Looked like Artèmi had gotten through the Task just fine, no surprise there — she'd probably used some mind magic trick too. All the other sections were unoccupied, though, Ingrid must have been injured badly enough to be evacuated to Saint Mungo's.
Liz was waved into one of the sections, the healer drawing the curtains closed behind them, shutting out the rest of the building thoroughly enough Liz couldn't feel it at all. The room was pretty plain, cabinets and walls and slanted ceiling all made of wood, floor and countertops out of some kind of off-black ceramic. There was a plain bed with stiff, white sheets — the same alchemically-altered, sterile sheets Pomfrey had in the Hospital Wing — a two-seat sofa in the corner, a few padded chairs scattered around. Obviously meant to be temporary, but not super cheap-looking either. There was a one in six chance this was the same space she'd woken up in after the First Task, but it was so bland and featureless, it was honestly impossible to tell.
"Go ahead and sit on the edge of the bed, and I'll take a look at you." Her healer today was an unfamiliar woman — in the run-up to the First Task, she'd told the organisers she preferred women for healers (technically Severus told them for her), which they'd respected so far — young, probably still in her twenties. Rather plain, brown hair cropped short, there was a noticeable accent on her French, Liz's Valérie instincts marked it as eastern European. Probably one of the volunteers Durmstrang had offered to help run things, but Liz guessed she could be a Beauxbatons alumna instead. Liz let out a huff, but obeyed, hopping up onto the bed (so bloody short), started undoing the buttons of the jacket — the enchantments would definitely interfere with standard healers' analysis spells. Having retrieved a cloth bundle of some kind out of one of the drawers, the woman started toward Liz, her wand appearing in her hand with a flick. "We were watching the Task, and it didn't look like you were hit. Is anything in particular bothering you?"
"Yeah, my head." Liz shucked off the jacket — thankfully, she'd thought to wear a tee shirt under it, so it wasn't awkward at all. "I might have... What do you call it in French, when you channel too much power?"
The woman frowned. "Traumatisme thaumaturgique." Shite, okay, that was definitely the proper academic term for it — it was "thaumaturgic stress" in English — there must be a more colloquial term for it normal people used, but whatever. "You channelled too much mind magic."
Liz nodded. "A bit."
A stomach-dropping, unsettling wave of concern pulsed off of the woman, and she gave Liz a deep frown. Which was fair enough, overchannelling mind magic could be very very bad for you — like, electrical burns in your brain stem and spinal cord that technically counted as curse damage bad. There were reasons childhood mind mages often didn't survive to adulthood, and accidentally frying their brains from the inside was one of them. Children generally weren't known for restraint, after all. Breaking their own minds and driving themselves permanently insane was probably more common, but, yeah, still a thing that happened.
Severus and Pomfrey were used to Liz being fucked up, and she didn't meet new healers very often. (Well, the ones at duelling tournaments, she guessed, but they just patched her up and moved on, never stopped to chat.) Honestly, it hadn't even occurred to her that her mind magic stuff might be considered a serious problem until Artèmi had kind of freaked out about it at the Weighing of the Wands, it'd just been academic before that. Like, things she just knew about childhood legilimens, not something that mattered to her. Maybe it should have occurred to her that a healer who wasn't accustomed to her nonsense might take it more seriously than was called for.
Though, her head was starting to hurt pretty badly, so she guessed she wasn't complaining about the urgency too much.
"Tip your head forward, chin to your chest, please." The healer moved to the side of the bed, worked Liz's hair out of its plait with a charm — which she had to cast multiple times, because Liz's hair was impossible like that. Once it was loose, she gathered it up in one hand — Liz tried not to wince as her fingers brushed against her neck, the healer's mind bumping against hers cold and prickly — held it over Liz's head, cast some kind of charm. Liz suspected that spell was supposed to hold her hair up out of the way, because the healer let go, Liz's hair hanging for a second before flopping to scatter all over her neck and shoulders. "Oh dear, what...?"
"Yeah, it does that. Do you have the tie?" she asked, holding her hand over her shoulder palm-up. After a second the healer dropped the little stretchy loop in Liz's hand — muggle-made, part of the set she'd picked up ages ago now, maybe the summer she'd lived with Severus? Liz gathered up the huge wavy fluffy mass of her hair, once she had more or less all of it put it through the hair tie, and then pulled it through a second time, cinching the stuff together roughly halfway down its length. She drew her wand with a flick of her wrist, and cast a levitation charm with a tap — on the hair tie. When she let go, the impossible mess of her hair was kept held over head, well out of the healer's way. "There. My hair's magic, spells don't work on it very well."
"How interesting. I don't think I've ever heard of the like before."
"Runs in the family, I'm told. It's extremely frustrating, honestly, the shite never does what I want it to, just gets in the way."
A little shiver of amusement worked its way through the professional concern thick in the healer's mind. And she immediately got to work, spells beginning to fall over the back of Liz's neck. Definitely analysis spells, grasping and clawing their way under her skin — not only were they super uncomfortable, but they were also making her headache worse, her whole head throbbing and her neck and jaw aching. She grit her teeth, trying not to fidget.
After only a few spells, the healer stopped, letting out a thick sigh. "You need to relax, sweetie. These spells don't work correctly if the patient is actively amplifying their mind."
"Yeah, I literally don't know how to do that."
"...I'm sorry?" The only reason the healer wasn't completely horrified was that she thought Liz must have misunderstood.
Liz rolled her eyes. "Can you just go get Pomfrey? Or Severus, I guess, if he's down here. They're used to dealing with my weird childhood mind mage -related medical issues."
There was a flicker of realisation from the woman — she had read something somewhere that mentioned Liz was a childhood legilimens. She'd never actually encountered one before, so it hadn't occurred to her, but she was aware from the literature that treating them could be...complicated. "Of course. Healer Pomfrey should be in our tea room, watching the event, I'll go retrieve her. Do you need anything before I go?"
"Some water would be nice."
After calling for a pitcher of water — just speaking to the air, an elf must be listening — the healer promised Pomfrey would be right along, drew the curtains closed behind her as she left. Liz waited, trying to ignore the burning hot-cold pain and the throbbing numbness in her head and neck, her feet fitfully swaying in the air, sipping idly at her glass of water. She probably looked ridiculous, her hair all floating over her head, but Pomfrey would need the stuff out of the way anyway, she didn't bother undoing it.
Thankfully, it was only a couple minutes before the curtains were opening, the familiar short, tense figure of Madam Pomfrey stepping inside, the curtains yanked closed again behind her. Pausing at the threshold, Pomfrey turned to give Liz a sharp, intensely exasperated frown, her mind sizzling with concern and anger — the anger and sharpness wasn't directed at Liz, at least, the feelings failing to cling at her, the look meant to be more commiserating than accusatory. Her voice low and hot, she hissed, "Dragons."
Despite herself, Liz felt her lips twitch. "Dragons."
"I don't know what these fools were thinking," Pomfrey snarled, "putting you children in an arena with nesting mother dragons. Poor Ingrid will be lucky to not find herself horribly scarred, and if the gods are feeling merciful today no one will die." Her voice turning softer, a hand light on Liz's shoulder, "Head down, dear."
Liz pressed her chin against her chest, as ordered — and tried not to grimace as analysis spells started clawing at her again. Pomfrey's came slower, both in that there was more space between castings, but also the prickly clinging uncomfortable magic seemed to take longer to spread through the back of Liz's head and neck. Probably a more delicate, specialised set of spells. They were still extremely unpleasant, though. At least partly to distract herself, Liz said, "Ingrid lives on the Continent, she shouldn't have any trouble finding a blood alchemist to fix the scars."
Pomfrey grumbled. "I suppose that's true — small mercy, that. She'll be in for an unpleasant recovery regardless. Could you cast a spell for me, dear? It doesn't matter what, so long as it isn't mind magic." It was a little hard to concentrate, Pomfrey holding a skin-itching, bone-shivering spell of some kind inside Liz's head, but she managed to cast one of her pretty balls of light, blooming from her fingers only a little more haltingly than usual. "Ah, very good." There were a couple low tingles of magic on the air, one of the cabinets swung open, a glass bottle zipping across the room to Pomfrey's hand. She vanished the stopper with a tap of her wand, held it out in front of Liz. "This one is for the damage to the nerves caused by overchannelling — I believe the one potion should do it."
It was a familiar potion, Liz had brewed something in the same class for herself while recovering from subsuming Valérie, an odd creamy orange-violet. This potion was slightly easier to get down than Liz's attempt, without the chalky sour aftertaste, but it was still somewhat unpleasant, Liz quick washed her mouth out with a gulp of water. The potion worked very quickly, the worst of the burning at the base of her skull easing away, the cool numbness ended with an almost ticklish pins-and-needles feeling. Liz barely managed to hold in a sneeze.
"Head down again, dear." Pomfrey cast a couple more spells, then had Liz cast something again, the examination slightly less aggressively uncomfortable now that the area wasn't quite so sensitive anymore. "Much better." Another tingle of magic, Pomfrey summoned two more potion bottles, held the first in front of Liz, the potion inside a deep green. "This is a generalised healing potion, to patch up any damage to peripheral tissues. I didn't notice anything too concerning there, but in cases of overchannelling it is wise to be overcautious." Right, any damage they missed could swell up and cause problems if left untreated, Liz was aware — this potion tasted much worse, harsh and mildewy and nauseating, she immediately chased it with a big gulp of water. "This one," Pomfrey said, holding up the second bottle, the potion inside a clear blue, darker than her calming potion, "is for the pain. This is the only one you're getting, but it should help."
This potion was much better, smooth, tasting vaguely of lavender and mint. Instantly, her headache greatly diminished, after a couple seconds only a vague sense of pressure left, an indistinct dull warmth at the back of her neck. Liz sighed. "That's much better, actually. Thanks, Madam Pomfrey." She reached up to pull the hair tie out, letting the frustrating mess attached to her head fall again.
"Of course, dear," Pomfrey said, patting her shoulder. "Dragons, honestly. I didn't notice any serious issues, in the short term, but you may want to have your blood alchemist take a look."
Liz twitched, glanced up at Pomfrey. Had Severus told her she'd be having an appointment later in the spring? It wasn't a big deal if he had — that kind of magic was technically illegal in Britain, but healers often didn't care, and the possibility of going to have it done on the Continent had first been mentioned by Pomfrey anyway — she just hadn't known. She assumed Severus kept Pomfrey informed about her medical stuff, just in case something came up while he wasn't around, it, just, wasn't one of those things she really thought about when she wasn't reminded. "Why?"
A shiver of discomfort running through her mind, Pomfrey's eyes turned up to the ceiling for a second, a breath let out through her nose. "I don't know if Severus told you much about the physiological effects of prolonged use of mind magic. To boil a very complicated subject down to the basics, channelling magic alters the development of the nervous system — in the case of mind magic, this results in slow changes to neural pathways in the brain, particularly in the cerebellum and the brainstem. In childhood mind mages, the gross structure of the brain is sometimes noticeably altered. It's mostly harmless but, well, sometimes there can be complications."
"...Oh." Somehow, Liz hadn't realised that using mind magic was slowly rewriting her brain. She should have, though, that was kind of obvious in retrospect.
There was a little bit of warm tingling, Pomfrey seeming vaguely amused by Liz's response. "Oh. Now, when Severus and I were dealing with that curse causing an eruption of the magics bound to your scars, back in your first year here, we did take the opportunity to check for signs of remodelling. Or what little we can do in the school Hospital Wing — as we discussed when you saw me last spring, standard analysis charms have limitations." When Pomfrey had explained why she couldn't do a fucking thing about Liz's periods being shite, she meant. "There are some subtle signs, but not enough to truly be concerned. And the symptoms of serious issues would be obvious enough that they wouldn't go unnoticed, so, as long as you continued to seem well enough, we tabled the subject for later. Your blood alchemist will do a much deeper scan than we can manage here, though, so you might as well ask them to check for significant remodelling, just in case. Any issues will be far more easily addressed if they're found early."
Pomfrey was maybe understating how difficult addressing issues to do with the fundamental structure of her brain would be — healing magic directly affecting the nervous system was very difficult. But, well, the more time the problem had to get worse, it would gradually get more difficult to fix, so, yeah, that made sense. "What kind of symptoms?"
Letting out a little hum, Pomfrey's head tilted thoughtfully to the side. "Numbness, dizziness, loss of coordination, forgetfulness, confusion, losing time, issues with emotional regulation... Plus a whole plethora of other neurological issues, it's a complex condition."
Oh, well, most of those weren't a problem, obviously, but she did... "Emotional regulation?"
There was a flicker of feeling in Pomfrey's head, something thick and warm and squirmy. Thankfully, her mind had mostly gone back to smooth cool professionalism by the time she lightly set a hand on Liz's arm. "Pardon me for being blunt, Miss Potter, but your difficulties are psychological, not neurological. This isn't my area of expertise, but Severus is very certain of that much."
...Right. Never mind.
"I should get back to the other healers," Pomfrey said, her hand lifting away. "Has the pain or the numbness come back?"
Liz shook her head. "Nope."
"Good. If the pain does return, or you develop any stiffness in your neck in the next few days, please come see me in the Hospital Wing." Pomfrey didn't say aloud that there was a small risk of runaway inflammation with insufficiently healed mind magic overchannelling that could get very bad very quickly if not caught, not wanting to worry Liz unnecessarily, but she caught the thought anyway. But, since she could tell Pomfrey didn't think the possibility was worth worrying about, Liz decided to ignore it. Also, Liz had overchannelled her mind magic several times with no treatment at all and never had any serious problems — never quite this severely, she didn't think, but still. "Did you need anything else before I go?"
"No, I'm fine. Thanks, Madam Pomfrey."
"Of course, dear." A last gentle pat on her arm, another frustrated hiss of dragons, and Pomfrey walked off, leaving the curtains partway open behind her.
...Liz was slightly surprised when Severus didn't walk in as soon as she was gone — it was obvious that Artèmi had been joined by her family in only however long it took for Liz to take her turn and, well, Liz didn't have anyone else. Sirius, she guessed, but Liz assumed he would be up in the stands with Dorea. But, when she thought about it, he was probably with the teams ready to go in to evacuate a Champion in trouble, or maybe working with the healers, he was—
No, wait, Severus wasn't here at all. She meant, not in the Valley, he was nowhere near the arena. She couldn't explain why she suddenly knew that, she just did, Seer stuff. (Being a Seer was very very weird sometimes, she just tried not to think about it too hard.) He must have gone along to Saint Mungo's to help with Ingrid. Burns from dragonfire were technically considered cursed, in that they resisted healing, and Severus was skilled with that kind of healing in particular — Saint Mungo's had their own experts, of course, but Liz didn't doubt that they'd welcome his help.
Nor that Severus would volunteer it, honestly. As much as he might like to pretend otherwise when people were looking, he could be a big damn softie. Since she just planned on compelling the dragon anyway, so was unlikely to get in too much trouble, that Severus might think he could best make himself useful by helping with Ingrid made perfect sense.
Liz was a little disappointed, but mostly just because sitting here on her own was boring. She made it maybe only a minute or two before calling for Nilanse — her things should have been moved back to her room by now, if Nilanse could go fetch her book that'd be great...
Nilanse was completely unsurprised that Liz had gotten through her encounter with a dragon without a scratch, her only comment on the matter that Liz's use of quick-step was getting so smooth and graceful-looking. (She must have been watching somehow.) Honestly, Liz was a little blindsided and unexpectedly flattered by the compliment, just bluntly changed the subject to asking for her book.
(By the little smirk on Nilanse's face, the musical tinkle of amusement, Liz was positive she knew exactly what had happened there, but she tactfully played along. This girl, honestly...)
Hints of minds leaked through the gap in the curtains Pomfrey had left behind, by that time there were already rather more people in the healers' station than when Liz had arrived — though it was impossible to say who or how many, too much distortion from squeezing through two gaps in the enchanted curtains to pick out details. Liz was a few pages into her book when she felt another new mind enter the building, somewhat more clear for only having to squeeze through a single gap, but even then it was hard to say. Maybe Viktor? Cedric, Fleur, and Viktor should be going after Liz, and of the three options that felt most like Viktor. Also, she was pretty sure there were already veela in the building, so Fleur must have finished already...
Some time later, Liz thought she was approaching the end of the meeting the various native groups in the area were having — the event was a pretty big chunk in the middle of the book, all the cultural stuff and inter-clan politics and shite made it surprisingly busy — Helmikki having a private talk in the middle of the night with some mostly new characters Liz was very sure were going to be important later. Given how the whole thing seemed to be starting to wrap up, it was actually a pretty bad time to be interrupted, but the people running the show weren't taking her reading into account. There was a call of an unfamiliar voice, in French, the sound magically amplified — Liz missed the words, but she didn't miss the curtains being yanked further open. Must be time to go.
She did catch that the eggs would be moved up to their rooms for them, okay then. Liz slipped her bookmark into place, and pulled her jacket back on before walking out — she didn't have anywhere else to put her book, so she guessed she was just carrying it for now. Right outside of the curtains she nearly ran straight into Cedric. "Oh, sorry, I— Woah, shite." Cedric was very visibly injured, white bandages with a faintly greenish tinge to them plastering the right side of his face, most of his cheek and jaw, extending back along the side of his head. Much of his hair on that side had been burned off (or else removed by the healers to get at the injury), the missing hair and the bandages making him look oddly lopsided. "That looks painful as hell. You okay?"
With a bright grin, showing his teeth, an odd slow dribbling of something leaking from his mind, Cedric said, "Oh, it's not so bad. I've been informed the ladies 'dig' scars," with an obvious note of humour, actually including the air quotes. It was muggle slang (even American muggle slang), must have picked it up from a muggleborn friend.
Liz just scoffed, rolling her eyes. Yeah, maybe that worked for boys, she was pretty sure the same principle didn't apply to girls.
They were being waved toward the door out, the other three Champions moving that way. Cedric, the movement visibly unsteady, threw his arm around her shoulders — his oddly swirly and unfocussed mind slamming down against hers, she barely stopped herself from shoving him away — started swaggering off toward the door, pulling her along. Um, okay then... "Honestly," voice in a low, conspiratorial hiss, "I think the hit to my pride hurts more than the burn. I had the dragon distracted, already stole the egg. I was almost out, but I heard a noise, instead of hitting the dirt I turned around to look — fwoosh!" his free hand waving in toward his bandages. "Fire, right in the face. Stupid."
...Honestly, the damage was relatively minimal, he must have reacted quickly enough to save himself serious harm. But, yeah, he should have dove to the ground and kept moving, from the sound of it. All things considered, she didn't think there was too much reason to be beating himself up for it, but what she said aloud was, "You're on a tonne of pain potions, aren't you."
Cedric grinned down at her, his too-close mind gently shivering. "I don't know if it's a literal tonne, but they gave me a few, yeah."
"You're high."
"Yep! Sure am!"
Liz rolled her eyes, fighting a smile.
The five of them — they were missing Ingrid, Liz suspected she'd be at Saint Mungo's for at least a few days — were led under the canopy and back through the door into the arena. They were immediately met with shouting and cheering from the crowd, shockingly loud. Liz had entirely failed to notice them during her turn, she thought maybe there'd been a noise-cancelling ward of some kind up during the Task, so the Champions weren't unnecessarily distracted. Like in the First Task, the rows and rows and rows of seating rising up over their heads didn't wrap all the way around the arena, just on the one side, to the left of the door, but there was still room for an honestly absurd number of people, who knew how many come in to watch, thousands easy, not just from Britain but their guests' home countries too. Seemed like a lot of effort for a silly school event, especially since the Task couldn't have lasted more than a couple hours, but what did Liz know.
She felt uncountable eyes crawling over her skin, blunted somewhat from the wards around the arena and fuzzy from distance, but still uncomfortable. (The noise-cancelling ward must have been heavy enough to at least partially block her psychometric horseshite too.) It wasn't that bad, there were other places for people's attention to go — it even occurred to Liz that it was probably good politics for her and Cedric to walk out looking all friendly, since he hadn't let go of her yet — but the combination of the eyes on her skin like ants and Cedric's arm still around her shoulders and mind pressed close against hers was quickly setting her on edge, she shrugged his arm off of her and took a couple steps away.
There was a flicker of regret from Cedric, belatedly realising that he'd just been hanging all over a Seer like a thoughtless boor. Unlike what had happened when people found out she was a mind mage, the fact that Liz was a Seer being publicised had actually had a pretty big up-side. See, magic-raised people had grown up with stories about how awful being a Seer could get — taking precautions to not overwhelm Seers whenever possible was the done thing, for traditional culture reasons that went all the way back to ancient pre-Christian times. (A lot of pagan priests had been Seers, it was a whole thing.) Cedric even considered apologising for a second, before deciding this wasn't the time or place, and turning to smile and wave at the crowd instead, instantly causing a noticeable uptick in the noise.
He looked at ease, the big toothy grin and the waving, but Liz could feel his embarrassment radiating out of him like standing too close to a fire. Without looking more closely, Liz couldn't see why. Cedric was a very Hufflepuff-ish sort of bloke, and would probably forgive her if she intruded — especially after his own must-go-easy-on-the-Seer faux pas — but it wasn't like it was actually important for Liz to know what was going on there, so she just brushed her own curiosity off and ignored it.
The five of them were led to the middle of the arena, zig-zagging over the craggy terrain, up the little rocky dome that had once been topped with a dragon nest. The crowd was cheering all the while — honestly, that just sounded unpleasant, weren't they hurting their own throats at this point? When they reached the middle, they were lined up in what Liz assumed must be the order they'd faced the dragons, Artèmi on the right (left from the perspective of the stands), and then Liz, Fleur, Viktor, and finally Cedric on the far left. Besides Cedric, all of them seemed uninjured, one of the legs of Fleur's trousers a little scorched the only other sign of damage she noticed at a glance.
Fleur noticed her looking, shot her a smile, relief cool and tingly on the air around her — for getting through without too much trouble herself, of course, but she'd also been inexplicably concerned for Liz too. Or, Liz guessed she shouldn't be too confused by that, the people who would want to see a fourteen-year-old girl get completely fucked up by a dragon were probably pretty few. Still didn't really get why Fleur seemed to take it personally, was all.
(One of her aunts was born a Potter, which Liz guessed meant they were sort of cousins by marriage, but they'd never actually met before, so she was pretty sure that shouldn't count.)
It seemed like Zabini was trying to get the crowd to shut up, but it might take a while. Shaking off the weirdness of Fleur giving a damn, Liz glanced at Artèmi on her other side. "I see you didn't die."
A smooth cool prickle on the air, Artèmi drawled, "Of course. After all, I'm told I owe someone a rematch, and I couldn't possibly disappoint."
...There was something funny on her tone, a slant to her head, Liz wasn't... "Are you flirting with me? again?"
"You go so red every time. It's funny."
Liz scowled. Yeah, she'd suspected Artèmi was teasing her — nice to have it confirmed at least, she guessed. "Go to hell, Cæciné."
"Meet you there, Potter."
Before Liz could figure out what the hell she was supposed to say now, if anything, the crowd was finally settling down, Zabini's magically-amplified voice ringing out through the arena. There was a quick overview of what was going on, how the scoring worked, blah blah, Liz was only half paying attention. It seemed they were doing the scoring right here and now, which did make sense — unlike the First and Second Tasks, there wasn't a whole lot of material to pour over and discuss. Explained why they didn't just let the Champions go back to the school, then, but she'd rather they just get it over with...
Thankfully, before too long, Zabini was moving on into an overview of their first Champion's performance. While she spoke, an illusion appeared overhead, between the Champions and the crowd, where they could both see it — one of Babbling's neat display things, but huge, dozens of metres across. Ingrid stepping out into the arena, the thick, enormous figure of the Hebridean black crouched threateningly over the dome. Ingrid had moved quickly, peppering the arena with light- and noise-making charms, illusion after illusion — mostly of other people and animals, dogs and sheep and the like — even a weather charm for some reason, a light rain appearing out of nowhere to patter against the stone, Liz didn't know the hell she—
Ooohh, to interfere with the dragon's sense of smell, she got it — Ingrid ducked behind an outcropping of rock and covered herself with a disillusionment charm, vanishing from sight. Though the illusions had maybe been too much, the dragon overwhelmed with too many things threatening to approach her nest, sending out bursts of fire seemingly at random, claws grinding against tone and tail whipping back and forth in agitation. Ingrid suddenly appeared out of nowhere, bent in half at the waist and flying backward, slammed full-on by the tail while trying to approach the nest. The footage cut to show Ingrid's wand bouncing along the ground, landing well away from where Ingrid crashed roughly against rock, cutting back to show the dragon had spotted her, sent a wide burst of fire in her direction. Ingrid actually managed to mostly dodge the worst of it, rolling into a nearby fissure, but she was still badly hit, her clothes and hair catching alight. She'd maybe only burned for a second or two before adults were already there, a team holding back the dragon and another instantly dousing the flames licking away at Ingrid, and then the illusion winked out.
Zabini explained that Ingrid was the only Champion to fail to recover the egg, and had also gotten the worst injuries of the six. (Obviously, she was the only one not standing here now.) For those reasons, she'd been given the worst scores of the lot. Rather than go through one by one, the judges simply raised their wand to cast an illusion of a single number over their heads — mostly ones (the lowest possible score), a couple twos and threes. Dumbledore actually gave her a four, presumably out of pity for how badly she'd been hurt...though her strategy hadn't been that bad, honestly, just laid it on too thick and got unlucky. Zabini said that the average had worked out to an overall score of two.
Artèmi was next. While Zabini summarised, the illusion appeared again, showing Artèmi calmly walk into the arena, a blueish-green highlands dragon now on the dome. And she kept calmly walking, approaching the dome, but the dragon wasn't reacting to her presence at all — visibly nervous, crouching low over her eggs and shooting the stands suspicious glares, but Artèmi went completely ignored. When she reached the base of the dome, the dragon moved, backed a little bit off the nest and...gripped the golden egg in its teeth...and spat it away, bouncing off down the dome to rest in a rut some distance from Artèmi. The dragon shot a blast of fire at it, seemingly just because, before returning to its spot over her nest, and continuing to glare up at the audience. Artèmi calmly walked over to the egg, drew her wand to cast a couple spells at it — cooling off the egg and the stone around it, Liz guessed — picked it up, gave the audience a jaunty wave, and then turned to saunter back to the exit. The dragon never once even glanced at her.
"What...? How did you do that?"
A shiver of confusion in her mind, Artèmi shot her a frown. "I turned its attention away from me, and convinced it the golden egg was a threat to the real ones."
...
"Son of a bitch."
Artèmi twitched. "What?"
Liz just felt seriously fucking stupid, that was what. In retrospect, compelling the dragon to ignore her and to take care of retrieving the egg for her would have been much easier, and wouldn't have resulted in nearly frying her own brain like an idiot — it simply hadn't occurred to her at the time, she'd thought— Fuck, that was all, just, she was such a moron sometimes... "You'll see in a minute."
For her completely flawless performance, Artèmi had gotten sevens across the board, with the sole exception of Karkaroff, who gave her a six. But what mattered was the average, and they rounded it off to the nearest point value, so Artèmi had come away with a perfect score. Because of course she did, she wasn't a fucking idiot...
The whole time Zabini went through Liz's turn, the recording playing overhead, Liz felt hot frustration clawing at her throat, embarrassment prickling over her skin. She was certain she was blushing, her face feeling uncomfortably warm. What Dumbledore had meant by telling her dragons were vulnerable to mind magic was fucking obvious in retrospect, she'd been thinking of the problem as getting the dragon out of the way so she could physically retrieve the egg herself, not— She felt so stupid, that was all.
Artèmi's dumbfounded confusion coming from right next to her was not helping. "You... You directly dominated the dragon's mind?"
"Shut up."
"Why would you even try that?"
"I'm an idiot, obviously."
"No, I mean— How? Dragons are intensely magical creatures, you know, their resistance to— Just compelling it was difficult enough, I couldn't channel nearly enough mind magic to do that." Artèmi did seem a little impressed (if also somewhat horrified), which Liz guessed was a little gratifying.
Didn't make her feel that much better for being a fucking idiot, though. "I said shut up."
Liz had ended up with four sixes and three fives, but two sevens. They'd all receive a letter the next morning, where each of the judges had written them a brief statement that explained their reasoning — the general consensus was that Liz had done very well, finishing quickly and without injury, even though her plan had been extremely foolish. (Yeah, thanks, she'd belatedly figured that out for herself.) Artisa had marked her up to a seven mostly for style, thanks to her graceful use of quick-step — and also just staring down a dragon like a badass, because Aritsa was a weird judge — and she suspected Dumbledore had given her a seven just because he was still trying to get on her good side. Her score averaged out to a six, which was still pretty damn great, she just wished she didn't feel so bloody stupid...
Fleur's turn had gone about as smoothly as Artèmi's and Liz's, herself using somewhat exotic magic to pull it off: Fleur had sung at her dragon. (The Sundragon's scales brilliant yellow and red, practically glowing and throwing chinks of reflected light all around, very pretty.) Liz was aware that it was possible to use music to cast spells — the music sort of replacing a spoken incantation, meaning doing it with just your voice and not an instrument was a lot harder, the equivalent of wandless magic — but she'd never actually seen it done before...except possibly at the Greenwood, but she'd been super drunk and didn't really remember. The illusion didn't reproduce the sound, but it was obvious that's what was happening, Fleur's mouth moving with the words, slowly swaying back and forth on the balls of her feet. Within a minute or two, the dragon was asleep.
Fleur did the veela flame-walking thing right up to the nest — the dragon was asleep curled around it, one wing spread over like a tent, shielding the eggs, so she still had work to do. Singing all the while, careful spellwork gently lifted the wing off the nest, she gingerly stepped closer, coming within inches of the dragon's side, and retrieved the egg. Slowly setting the wing back down again, the dragon shifted in its sleep, letting out a heavy sigh; a stream of flame came out with its breath, Fleur leaned out of the way but was still caught by the very edge of it, a quick water charm immediately put out the flames crawling up her leg. Fleur flame-walked straight back to the exit, and she was done.
Personally, Liz thought Fleur deserved full sevens for that. She wasn't an expert with this music magic stuff, but given what dragons' magical resistance was like, managing to get one to go to sleep must be pretty fucking impressive. Not to mention casting charms while keeping the music up, and walking right up to the thing, seriously, she could have reached over and easily rubbed the dragon on the belly, ridiculous. Sure, she had gotten hit with some fire, but barely, and she'd put it out immediately, pretty minor all things considered.
The judges, it seemed, disagreed with Liz. Most of her scores were a smattering of sixes and sevens, one five from Dumbledore, and a three from Karkaroff — that was so manifestly unfair that the crowd immediately erupted into shouting, it took a few minutes for Zabini to get them quiet again. Fleur ended up with a final score of six, tied with Liz, which, well, Liz felt stupid, that didn't seem appropriate to her.
She would later learn that Fleur's song had leaked — the wards around the arena hadn't properly contained the effects, she'd nearly put the first several rows of the stands (including the judges) asleep by the time she was done. That would explain Dumbledore marking her down, he didn't like this kind of magic for political reasons in the first place; Karkaroff probably just used it as an excuse to try to drag down some of the people at the top, since the Durmstrang Champions were both comfortably at the bottom now. She guessed that sort of made sense, but it didn't really seem fair to her? Like, her music magic stuff leaking out was because the people who'd put up the wards had done a shitty job, not really her fault...
Viktor, facing the small but graceful-looking British green, took the direct strategy, trying to force his dragon away from the nest with offensive charmwork. Now, that might be a decent strategy in some other situation, if you knew the spells necessary and were confident in your ability to dodge, but he was facing a nesting mother — she very much did not want to leave the nest open. There were a couple minutes of shooting spells and dodging, Viktor surprisingly light on his feet, once even deflecting away a stream of fire, which was honestly impressive for a student to be able to pull off. Aching from a few hits here and there — actually seemed to do minimal damage, must be dark (or light) curses — the dragon was getting very angry, standing between Viktor and the nest, but he couldn't move fast enough to get around, the dragon cutting him off.
And then Viktor hit the dragon right in the eyes with a curse, which was, just, absolutely amazing aim, that was all. The dragon reared back, neck and wings flailing and letting out a long screech — no audio, but Liz was guessing from the way her jaw gaped open — and the dragon fell backward...onto the nest. Liz heard a couple of the other Champions gasp or curse, and she felt herself make some kind of noise too — it was hard to tell for sure how many, with the dragon still rolling around in agony, but at least some of the real eggs had definitely been smashed. Viktor managed to retrieve the golden egg while the dragon was disoriented, coming away with his prize in a relatively short span of time and without serious injury, the scrapes he was showing now just from rolling across the rocky ground.
However, for all that he'd accomplished the goal well enough, Zabini said all but one of his dragon's eggs had been lost — since preserving the real eggs had been one of the conditions of the Task, he'd been severely marked down for that. Mostly threes and fours, a two from Vebjørn, ones from Dumbledore and Aritsa...but Karkaroff gave him a five, probably the highest he could justify under the circumstances, because he wasn't even trying to seem fair anymore at this point. He'd still only averaged out at a three, though, only beating Ingrid by a single point and still well below Liz and the Beauxbatons girls. Glancing at Viktor as the scores were given out, he seemed entirely unsurprised, just grimly nodded — Liz would guess he'd expected the accidental destruction of the eggs would fuck him.
Cedric was last, facing a mottled greenish-brownish highlands dragon Liz immediately recognised as a Norwegian ridgeback. Liz wasn't a big dragon expert or anything, but, back in the Dark Ages there'd been some infamous Scandinavian sorcerers who would ride dragons into battle — the highly mobile, venomous local ridgeback had been a favourite breed for the purpose. Supposedly one of the battles the Founders had fought before Hogwarts was converted into a school had involved a few Norse Dark Lords on dragons, Liz had seen drawings, enough detail in the more modern depictions that Liz could actually recognise the same dragon breed in real life.
Cedric conjured a whole fucking menagerie of animals, which was seriously fucking impressive for a sixth-year — he was in the senior division duelling team, so Liz was aware he used a lot of complex conjuration, but still, fucking hell. Wolves and large wildcats and the like, for the most part, predatory animals that could run around the dragon and keep it distracted, falling to bursts of fire or slashes of claws or smacks of its tail only to be replaced again. The sheer mass Cedric was conjuring was kind of a lot, way more than Katie could manage, Liz hadn't realised he was that powerful of a mage.
The animals running around and making swipes at her had the dragon rising to meet them, leaving the nest partially uncovered in the process. One of the wolves zipped through while the dragon was distracted, grabbing the egg in its mouth — but before it could get very far, the dragon painted the whole nest with fire (it wouldn't harm the eggs), the conjured construct dissolving into nothing. But, it'd managed to move the golden egg far enough in a couple seconds that it went bouncing free down the side of the dome, not quite straight at Cedric but in his general direction.
Cedric ran for the egg, he was just reaching it when the dragon leapt after it too — the illusion hiding it must have broken as soon as it left the nest, but she was probably just angry at this point. (Besides, the stories about dragons hoarding treasure weren't entirely out of nowhere, they did like shiny things.) Cedric got there first, but not by very long, the dragon crashing down from overhead to pin him against the ground. In the seconds he had to react, Cedric dropped to his knees, tapped his wand to the stone at his side and brought it swirling up in an arch — the rocky ground was transfigured up in a wave over his head, directly in the path of the dragon. The obstruction appearing too quickly for the dragon to react, she slammed into the transfigured wall face first, hard, the force enough to send dozens of cracks through it, but it held. While the dragon was disoriented, shaking herself out, Cedric ran for the exit, weaving and ducking behind obstructions along the way.
Obviously very angry, the dragon swept a torrent of fire over her surroundings, burning up the remaining animals nipping at her heels. She hopped after Cedric, moving shockingly quick for something so large, landing atop a small pillar of stone, chips knocked free by her claws sprinkling to the ground. The long sinuous neck angled back toward her nest, clearly not willing to leave it too far behind — so she sent a narrow jet of fire off at Cedric instead of chasing him, seemingly out of spite. Instead of dropping, Cedric turned to look, and got a face full of fire for his trouble. He did try to lean out of the way, it could have been worse, but it was clearly a nasty hit, his hair immediately catching on fire. A quick charm doused himself with water, quenching the flames. The rescue teams had actually come in, but Cedric just waved them off, kept jogging for the exit — tense and unsteady and obviously in terrible pain, but still moving under his own power (tough bastard) — the dragon retreating to the nest.
Cedric had done pretty fucking well, all things considered, but getting burned in the face like a bloody idiot had cost him. He ended up with mostly fours and fives, a single six from Dumbledore, averaging out to a final score five. Which was pretty respectable, honestly, only one point down from Liz and Fleur due to actually getting injured felt fair enough. She thought Cedric actually seemed pleasantly surprised, after a couple seconds blinking at the judges was left grinning, gave the crowd a bashful sort of shrug.
(Which caused another uptick in the noise, of course — Liz actually heard girls squealing from all the way the fuck out here, because people were very silly about Cedric for some reason.)
Now that they'd gone through all the Champions' performances, after letting the crowd get some of the cheering out of their system, Zabini went through their running scores, starting at the bottom and working her way up. The Durmstrang Champions were in last and second-to-last place, Ingrid at ten points and Viktor a little above her at twelve. Before today, Cedric and Viktor had been tied for second-to-last — and Viktor had actually been in first place after the First Task, he'd flubbed the Second Task that badly — but Cedric had pulled a couple points ahead now, in fourth place with fourteen points.
Zabini was explaining that the top three were only a single point removed from each other, the competition for the lead very tight — while she was at it, Liz did the maths in her head. With Artèmi getting seven and Liz and Fleur getting six, after the Second Task their scores had been— "Oh, you're fucking kidding me."
She felt the flickers of surprise and confusion from both Beauxbatons girls, turning glances at her. "Pardon?"
"I'm still in first place." She'd been in the four-way tie for second place after the First Task, and her perfect and Viktor's shitty performance in the Second Task had put her in the lead. But she hadn't expected that to last — the older Champions knew far more magic than she did, it wasn't really a fair competition.
Zabini was going through their scores now, the Beauxbatons Champions in third and second, Fleur with sixteen points and Artèmi with seventeen...
Artèmi scoffed — trying to sound irritated, but Liz could feel the amusement ringing in the air around them. "Try not to sound too disappointed."
And in first place at eighteen points, Zabini making a whole production about it, talking her up — hundreds and hundreds of eyes falling on her making her cringe...
Her voice shaking with frustration even to her own ears, "I'm not even supposed to be in this fucking thing! Do you have any idea how much shite people have been giving me for beating Cedric, the hate mail I've been getting, actually winning is just going to make it worse! Honestly, could one of you please kick my arse in the next one?"
While Liz ducked under the noise of the crowd — mostly cheering, but she did hear some booing in there too, as expected — trying to stay calm under the feel of thousands of eyes clawing at her skin, gritting her teeth hard enough it hurt...Artèmi and Fleur just laughed at her, high and bright and warm. Because of fucking course they did.
Well, at least someone was having fun with this mess, she guessed...
Poor Liz, who would have thought being bad at losing could be such a pain? Don't worry, the next one's healing magic, and you suck at that.
The scores so far in the Tournament look something like...
First Task:
Viktor — 7
Artèmi —5
Fleur — 5
Ingrid — 5
Liz — 5
Cedric — 5
Second Task:
Liz — 7 → 12
Artèmi — 5 → 10
Cedric — 5 → 9
Fleur — 5 → 10
Ingrid —3 → 8
Viktor — 2 → 9
Third Task:
Artèmi — 7 → 17
Fleur — 6 → 16
Liz — 6 → 18
Cedric — 5 → 14
Viktor — 3 → 12
Ingrid — 2 → 10
Viktor really squandered his strong start there, didn't he? xD
Bluh, I'm done, bye.