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December 2002
The Ancient One's private study in the highest tower of Kamar-Taj was a wonderful place to do research, and to sulk when said research led her in unproductive circles.
A smaller, windowless version of her audience chamber a level below, the room was furnished with a Victorian style executive desk that looked distinctly out of place next to the Tibetan meditation maze that covered most of the available floor space. A tall but narrow bookcase stood against a wall to the right of her desk, opposite a tiered wooden altar crowned by a small gong. The other tiers sprouted incense sticks, jugs of water, and boxes of acupuncture needles; everything a guru would need to lose him or herself in deep, deliberate thought. It was designed to be an oasis, deliberately isolating the occupant from the distractions of the outside world.
A place where the Sorcerer Supreme could find inner peace.
The Ancient One didn't feel particularly peaceful at the moment. For the umpteenth time, she silently cursed the lack of information about the last time the Phoenix Force had appeared in the Nine Realms. After combing through her personal archives, the journals of dead sorcerers, and the notes of her predecessors, she had little more than a skeletal timeline.
It was far easier to trace the effects of the Phoenix Host's actions than the details of her life. She'd done great good for many years, from healing old wounds to ending wars, only to disappear from known space. When she returned, it was as an emotionally self-destructing, murderous shadow of her former self. No one had ever found evidence of what had triggered the woman's transformation into a Dark Phoenix. Regardless, her acts were well known.
Appearing in Shi'ar space, the Dark Phoenix had cut a bloody swathe through several inhabited systems, eventually devouring an entire star, then vanished. A few weeks later, a repeat performance occurred in contested Kree/Xandarian space. After consulting the Eye of Agamotto, the Sorcerer Supreme at the time had allied herself with Odin, Hela, and a few other notably powerful beings to confront the Dark Phoenix as it approached Alfheim.
The battle that elapsed then had shaken all of Yggdrasil like branches in a storm. It had cost the lives of the Sorcerer Supreme and the elven king of Alfheim, but in the end, the Dark Phoenix had been killed. Regrettably, the energy ripples from that battle had triggered a cascade of natural disasters across the Nine Realms; it was no coincidence that the year of the Dark Phoenix had also been the year of the birth of Christ.
Not there was any direct connection between the Abrahamic faiths and the Phoenix Force. Yahweh was a known quantity to the Masters of the Mystic Arts, and he wasn't what his followers imagined him to be.
The Ancient One was at the end of her rope. No amount of scholarly research could fill in the gaps in her knowledge, and that scared her. Harry Potter was more than a host of the Phoenix. He was a wizard with intimate personal ties to death itself, a figure of prophecy who had killed an inhuman monster of a sorcerer, the heir to an entire magical culture. If he became a Dark Phoenix, she doubted he could be stopped by anything less than the combined power of all six Infinity Stones.
Whatever force or being responsible for driving the last Phoenix Host into darkness was almost certainly still out there. And until the Ancient One understood what the threat was, its mere existence put Harry at risk. She could not tolerate a mystery like that remaining unsolved.
There was still one vein of information left for her to tap: the witnesses. Everyone who'd participated in the battle and survived to tell the tale was biologically immortal and, as far as she knew, still alive. She'd already sent Odin a request for his and Hela's account, though she knew better than to think they'd respond quickly. Asgardians had such a warped view of time…
Well, I'm hardly any different in that regard, the Ancient One reminded herself. Between the life-extending magic she'd been stealing from the Dark Dimension, the various time loops she'd participated in, the many battles where she'd slowed time around her, her occasional trips to different points on the timestream, and the countless possible futures she'd lived through via the Eye of Agamotto, she probably had as warped a perspective on temporal passage as a human could possibly have.
Impulsively, she transfigured one wall of her study into a mirror and examined her reflection. Without her robes, she wouldn't have looked much like the centuries-old warrior-sage-sorceress she was. Her gray eyes were dark and abyssal in the soft lighting of her study, and aside from her slim eyebrows, she was as hairless as a cancer patient on chemotherapy. Her baldness was a deliberate choice inspired by an incident where a monster had clamped its jaws on her braid and nearly scalped her.
The Ancient One had survived many brushes with death in her long life; such was the nature of her position. As Sorcerer Supreme, she was destined to throw herself into danger on behalf of complete strangers over and over again, and to lose many dear friends as the years passed. It was a weight she'd chosen to carry because to do anything less would have doomed the world. A heavy burden on her spirit, but it was her burden, and if she were somehow sent back to the moment when she took it up, she would have made the same choice without hesitation.
That decision had sent her into mortal danger and horrible tragedy countless times. Beneath her robes and hidden by a glamor on the back of her head, the scars of those of battles to the death. Behind her eyes, a soul that had given away part of its own identity for extended life.
Had that sacrifice truly been worthwhile? She had thought so at the time. Harry Potter had sniffed out her hypocrisy as soon as they'd met. He'd summarized the logic of her actions better than he'd known.
To preserve the garden, the groundskeeper must spend much time with his hands buried in dirt. It was an obscure saying of a past Sorcerer Supreme, but the meaning was clear enough. After following that wisdom for so long, the Ancient One had begun to wonder; was she tracking dirt into the home, that place that was meant to always be a pristine sanctuary?
She wasn't blind to the inner darkness of her students. She knew that Kaecilius, Lucian Aster, and others like them had the potential for great evil, but then, so did all of her students. But had she underestimated the risks of teaching them the Mystic Arts? Had she softened so much as to let compassion blind her to the obvious? Kaecilius's fascination with Harry and the Phoenix wasn't unique, but it was unusual, even disturbing, in its intensity.
Her train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door to her chamber. Transfiguring her mirror into a window that exposed the view of Kamar-Taj and its surroundings, she called, "Enter."
The sliding doors disappeared into the walls, revealing Karl Mordo. He strode in and shut them behind him, then turned. His movements weren't urgent, but they were too brusque to be casual. "We received a letter addressed to you from someone calling themselves Daedalus," he said without preamble. "The man on mail duty expedited its security screening when he saw the seal and asked me to hand it to you personally."
Curious, the Ancient One met her second in the middle of the study and accepted the letter from his calloused hand. She recognized the envelope as the very same she'd encased her original correspondence in, but it had a new wax seal emblazoned with a characteristic pattern of overlapping circles and elegantly curving lines. Celestial circuitry. Turning it over, she saw her own handwriting and, visible only to her eyes, the traces of the enchantment she'd used to ensure the letter found its way to the intended recipient.
"Thank you, Master Mordo," she said. "I will inform you if I need any assistance."
Recognizing the dismissal for what it was, Mordo left without prying. There was a chance he'd deduced the meaning of the new seal on the letter, but that was of little consequence. As her second, he would need to know everything she learned from her investigations at some point. For now, though, he would have to be patient with her, as he had been so many times in the decade they'd known each other.
Sitting behind her desk, the Ancient One turned the window she'd created earlier back into a solid wall, then tapped the letter with a small black knife imbued with a powerful opening spell. The wax seal popped off the yellowed envelope paper. When nothing else happened, she set the knife back in its drawer and pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope. It was the same paper where she'd written her original letter, but a new message had been written on the back side in a precise, blockish hand she'd seen only twice before.
Old One,
We were aware of the return of the Fiery One, but we had no details prior to your correspondence with us. I have spoken with Healer, and she has agreed that we need to discuss the matter face to face. Per your request, I will collect my family's written testimonies about the Dark One and bring them to our meeting. I have also contacted our friend upstairs, and if we are fortunate, he will arrange for the Butcher to join us as well.
Though we went into retirement at the end of the last war, we all agreed long ago to come out of the woodwork and do our part again should the need arise. This situation qualifies.
We find your proposal to meet at the Crash Site during the next full moon acceptable and will make the necessary preparations.
Regards,
Daedalus
The Ancient One read and reread the letter, connecting the coded references it contained to what she knew about the sender and his associates. Once she had both the contents and the meaning committed to memory, she incinerated the letter and its envelope both with a burst of green Flames of the Faltine.
The Ancient One didn't exactly feel lighter, but she was satisfied. Progress. It was slow progress, but it was better than nothing. "Better than nothing," wasn't a good standard to live by, but for now, it would have to be enough.
April 2003
The breeze that ruffled Harry's hair was laden with moisture, heat, and the occasional dead leaf. Each breath through his nose brought with it a variety of scents—salt, plant life, fish oil—not all of them fresh. The smell of life was also the smell of decay. With no solid ground to stand on, he'd had to cast an Aguadurum charm on his boots so that he could walk on the surface of the water. Aside from his breathing, the lapping of the waves against the web-like networks of roots that supported the trees, and the occasional cry of some exotic bird, all was quiet.
In many respects, the mangrove forest looked like any other, but several key details betrayed its true nature. The trees were gigantic, their uppermost branches hanging over a hundred meters above the surface of the water. The water snaking its way through the maze of passages between them was the dark blue of the deep ocean rather than the teals and greens of a shallow, brackish channel. The leaves that shaded it, though green as any healthy Earth plant, were shot through with veins of bloody crimson that pulsed ever so slightly in a steady, unceasing rhythm.
Like a giant's heartbeat.
From Harry's perspective, the mangrove forest felt even more alien than it looked. If Kamar-Taj's magic was a foreign language, the whispers of this place were inhuman. He felt the wariness of the water and the trees when he passed by, as if they desired to cringe away from his presence. He sensed his own body's aversion to the air he breathed, a constant, heavy tugging. It wasn't malevolent so much as reflexive. The stuff of this reality and his own body had no desire to share space, even for the short time necessary to complete his task.
But of course, that was the whole point.
As Harry rounded a tall cluster of roots, he sensed a malevolent shadow in the water behind him. With its size and power, to say nothing of the cold hostility it radiated, he was surprised he hadn't sensed its presence earlier. It flowed toward him with shocking speed, ignoring the surge of panic he tried to drive into its mind with his telepathy. And flow was exactly the right word to describe it.
Harry apparated to the top of the nearest root, facing the way he'd come, just in time to see the water where he'd been standing erupt like a volcano. Tendrils of blue, green, and white froth shot skyward, braiding themselves into a single, massive, grotesque imitation of a merman. A crown of liquid horns topped a main of rapids that substituted for hair, which in turn splashed down over his ever-shifting chest, torso, and vaguely fishlike tail. His arms and torso sprouted huge spikes and plates of armor that churned as he reached for Harry with hands so large they could have used a horse as a stress toy.
Water demon, Harry thought. Not a demon that lives in water; a demon made of actual water. He'd read about them in preparation for this expedition, but that was completely different from actually encountering one. Even without active telepathy, one look at its huge, swirling, disturbingly human face gave him a glimpse of its thoughts. It wanted to drown him, to drag his body so deep under the surface his eardrums and the capillaries in his eyes burst from the pressure, to crush him to bloody pulp with its liquid muscles and dissolve his remains into organic compounds for daring to invade the patch of mangrove forest it had claimed for itself.
How cute.
With a swipe of his arm and a mentally recited incantation, Harry sent a bolt of yellow-white light into the water demon's palm. Its entire hand and forearm burst into a cloud of minuscule droplets under the force of his Drought Charm, like mist from a sprinkler in the wind. The creature recoiled with a shriek that sounded like a combination of a dying elephant and a plunger unclogging a toilet. Harry's second charm blew a massive hole in its chest, leaving a gaping void where its liquid pectoral had been.
Harry was disappointed with himself. The fact that he could do this much damage to a water demon with an incantation intended to vanish puddles was proof of how far he'd come and how much he'd changed. The fact that the water demon hadn't been instantly vaporized by the spell was a sign of how far he still had to go.
The demon's swirling face retracted with an odd sucking sound, as if it were taking a deep breath. Its humanoid head morphed into something resembling a bearded shark, and water surged up from the brackish channel below, giving it the surplus it needed to regenerate the mass Harry had blasted away.
Oh, no you don't. Harry stabbed the air with two fingers of each hand, sending twin jets of light into the descending head and vaporizing it, along with a sizable chunk of its chest. His passive psychic feelers detected a surge of motion behind him, and he pivoted, swinging his right hand around to send another Drought Charm up into the giant, spiny fish's tail of water that was trying to smash him from behind.
As his spell annihilated the tail, Harry turned back to face the demon's humanoid upper torso. With the same motion he'd used to destroy its head, he sent another pair of twin spells into the base of the demon's tail. The sudden loss of its lower body severed its connection to the only source of water it had to regenerate from.
Behind him, he sensed the remains of its tail splashing down, a liquid puppet with its strings cut. Before the remainder of its humanoid body could do the same, Harry caught it with telekinesis, sculpting the living water against its will into a swirling sphere. He crushed it until it was completely pressurized in his grip, then gathered his energies to deliver one last, overpowered charm. The water demon's malevolent consciousness faded as the sphere vanished in a flash of golden light.
Harry scanned his surroundings with his thoughts. The commotion had scared away other wildlife, including local demons. He would have to restart his hunt from the beginning. Irritated, he used his telekinesis to smooth the waters stirred into chaos by the fight, then leaped from the root he was standing on to another sprouting from a neighboring tree.
Ten minutes later, Harry found the trail of the quarry he'd come here to take. The task was almost frighteningly easy, even by his standards. Magic and psychic powers were useful sensory tools on their own. Together, they expanded his perceptions to a degree few could imagine.
Common wisdom held that the human body had five senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste—but in truth, the human brain kept track of many subtler things most people never thought about: the space the body occupied in a given environment, the position of limbs and the state of the muscles, the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream, the perception of up and down. Even the Earth's magnetic poles registered to human senses, if only barely.
As a wizard, Harry had a natural ability to sense deep truths about reality itself and the nature of objects or places he focused on. It wasn't sight or sound, but it was analogous to both. He "saw" the auras and traces of the quasi-living energies that were magic, "heard" the voices of his surroundings and the vibrations that signaled their uniqueness.
With the right spells, Harry could sharpen any of these senses beyond their natural limits, or expand their scope to take in frequencies and stimuli his body wasn't built to detect. The psionics he derived from the Phoenix Force expanded his sensory envelope even further. Telekinesis alone allowed him to "feel" his surroundings without touching them, showing him exactly where everything around him was at all times. Telepathy was essentially a softer, more wide-reaching form of Legilimency, the enveloping hand instead of the stabbing sword. He could passively sense the thoughts and feelings of people around him, actively dive into their heads and view their memories, and manipulate minds even when he couldn't see them.
More, the combination of telepathy and magic opened the doorway to other psychic abilities that blurred the lines between the two: clairvoyance, psychometry, precognition, dowsing. These psychic perceptions were highly limited in scope, yet reliable so long as he didn't push them beyond their natural envelope. Put them all together, and there was very little that could hide from him. Sure enough, it took him less than an hour to find what he'd originally come here to hunt.
Resting in a channel beneath two enormous mangrove islands, the creature resembled a crocodile: the largest crocodile he'd ever seen. Its jaws alone were at least twenty feet long and studded with protruding teeth the size of Harry's forearm. It was covered in greenish-black scales, and its slit-pupiled eyes shone sulfurous yellow. Though its lower body was concealed by the dark waters, Harry knew it had six stubby legs and a long, paddle-like tail powerful enough to snap the huge tree roots around it as easily as if they were matchsticks.
The giant not-crocodile was, fittingly, a cold spot to Harry's senses, taking energy and thoughts in rather than emitting them. It was also the latest on his list of quarry. Since his arrival in this dimensional reality, he'd hunted in dense forests, open grasslands, and arid deserts. Once this kill was complete, he'd move on to the waves of an inland sea. In each biome, he'd claimed the lives of a variety of creatures, sharpening his powers and abilities by hunting the same kinds of monsters a Master of the Mystic Arts was expected to deal with.
To make the exercise as challenging as possible, Harry was forbidden from using direct telekinetic or telepathic attacks against his prey, which happened to be creatures with immense strength, resilience, and resistance to curses. It was almost as if he were hunting dragons from his home reality. But this wasn't sport; this was a survival ritual. A true hunter did what he did out of necessity, taking no satisfaction from it other than the assurance that he was helping his community. A hunter treated his prey with solemn respect, showing it the only mercy his duty allowed by striking fast and true. The cleaner the kill, the better.
Harry wished he could harvest the creatures he was killing for potion ingredients, but it was impossible. The same alien energies that made it so uncomfortable for him to exist in this reality permeated the bodies of the native wildlife, rendering them toxic to humans and other lifeforms from Earth. Instead, the parts would be used to create and fuel enchanted relics, allowing sorcerers to channel extradimensional powers without making unsavory bargains with demons and other beings.
He'd been surprised to learn such things were necessary for Kamar-Taj's type of magic, and even more surprised to learn that the sorcerers couldn't passively maintain the enchantments on their strongholds. Wards against eavesdropping, infiltration, and other forms of attack had to be periodically recast, unlike the self-sustaining protective spells used and taught at Hogwarts.
Harry studied the super-croc, trying to decide how best to take it down. His transfiguration wasn't yet back to its pre-Phoenix levels, so conjured weapons were off the table. In this environment, the only objects he had to work with were trees and water. He supposed he could transfigure wood from the former into a spear, but he didn't want to damage the forest if he could avoid it. Besides, the hunts were about more than replenishing Kamar-Taj's supply of specialized weapons and relics. This was also a chance to practice unconventional uses of magic. The more creative his methods, the better.
He considered wrapping the croc's head in water to drown it, then dismissed the idea. The croc could certainly hold its breath much longer than he could, and drowning hardly qualified as a merciful way to die. Most curses he knew were unlikely to achieve a quick kill on such a large, magic-resistant target, not unless he got a lucky shot straight into its eye and down its optic nerve. Fire? A big, bombastic blast of burning energy would annihilate many of the precious body parts and fluids he was supposed to collect. He supposed he could focus the flames into a more concentrated energy stream to burn straight through its brain, but that would be too easy. He needed to innovate instead of spamming the obvious tricks.
After a moment, Harry settled on good old-fashioned loophole abuse. He wasn't supposed to directly grip, push, or pull his prey with telekinesis, but there were no rules about manipulating the target's immediate surroundings.
Step one. Taking a deep breath, Harry dredged up his memories of a type of magic he almost never used, magic he barely understood even before bonding with the Phoenix, magic that he had simultaneously admired more than the Patronus Charm and feared more than the Unforgivable Curses.
Channeling magic through his voice box, Harry began to sing. His voice was soft and low, but it echoed with the power he laced into it. The lullaby he wove was not English, nor Latin, nor Sanskrit, nor any of the other standard spellcrafting languages. Instead, he sang a particular, obscure dialect of old Norse that had never been deciphered by muggles. It was a blended tongue born from the interactions between the ancient people of Scandinavia and the alien beings they'd deified, and that gave it power.
The nameless dialect had existed in his old world and possessed the same properties there, which had implications for the nature of the multiverse that Harry had no desire to explore. All that mattered was that the language, old and mysterious, was inherently tied to ancient magic. It invoked forces no other sorceries could summon and wove them into enchantments that could affect reality on a deeper, more fundamental level than any ordinary charm or transfiguration.
This was the language the founders of Hogwarts had used to construct and fortify the castle, the language Dumbledore had used to cast the Bond of Blood Charm, the language that Voldemort and others like him had used to split their souls and bind the pieces to Horcruxes.
Harry had no intention of doing anything so drastic here. He just needed a way to circumvent the ancient, enchantment-repelling power that nature had granted the creature before him. He sang of rest; so simple a thing, yet so difficult to find, and more difficult still to cling to.
Harry sang of relaxation, of sleep, of respite, of numbness. The ancient words felt awkward, but as he kept singing, they began to come with increasing ease. His voice slowly, steadily gained volume and strength, the flow of sorcerous words growing smoother. He projected the song toward the crocodile-like creature, watching intently as he focused his energies upon it with every bit of concentration he could muster.
He could not say how long he sang, or how many repetitions of the verses he went through. At first, the creature didn't react. Then, the lid of its golden eyes began to droop. It resisted the song the way an offended infant would resist the rocking lullaby of a frazzled parent, but Harry was a stubborn bastard when he wanted something, and right now, he wanted the damned not-crocodile whose proper name he hadn't bothered to memorize to sleep.
Finally, the eyes closed completely and didn't open again. Harry kept singing for another verse to be absolutely sure, then let his voice trail off. When he stopped, he felt himself sag on his tree branch, his muscles as limp and useless as jelly. His throat was raw and sore, and he felt like he couldn't get enough air. He'd never been known for his singing, and the oppressively alien air of this place hadn't helped.
If Harry were being honest with himself, he hadn't expected his gambit to work. But it had, and that was the important thing. He waited for another minute, both to let himself recover from the effort of channeling so much ancient magic and to wait for any signs that his prey would wake. It didn't, even when he hit it on the back with a snowball he fashioned from the water below. It simply floated in the dark water, drifting slightly in the current.
Now or never. Extending his hands, Harry reached out with his thoughts, wrapping not around the croc creature itself, but the air and water that surrounded it. He gripped it as firmly as he could, but his feelers constantly slipped and let molecules through, like dry sand spilling from his fist. His telekinesis wasn't precise enough for this task. Not yet. He'd have to supplement his efforts with a charm.
No, not a charm, he thought. The way I'm using it, this is a curse, pure and simple.
Fast as a snake striking, Harry spread his arms wide and cried, "Aufervo!"
It happened in a fraction of a millisecond. Every single molecule of air and water within a hundred feet of the croc creature fled from it suddenly and violently. The waters caved back into place with crashing force, sending huge waves out into the giant mangroves. Displaced air buffeted Harry so badly he nearly fell from his perch. For a single, infinitely brief moment, the creature hung in a void as empty as deep space.
His perceptions sped up to match the alacrity of his magic, Harry saw in slow motion the croc-creature's body inflating as blood boiled in its veins and its lungs ruptured from the loss of pressure. A few old, dead scales, loosened in preparation for shedding, snapped off its hide like coins scattered from a dropped money bag.
Then the spell ended. Air and water rushed in to fill the void, even more violently then they'd fled to open it. The atmosphere sealed itself with a deep, echoing pop, and a fountain sprayed up around the croc creature's body, catching it as gravity dragged it down.
Harry marveled silently at what he'd done. The Clearing Charm was designed to telekinetically banish physical objects from the target area to create an empty space. It was a household spell with few uses in dueling. He had found a new use for the incarnation. He'd removed everything the charm's magic could touch, leaving only an organic lifeform in the center of a bubble of hard vacuum. He'd innovated a form of explosive magic more insidious than any seen or heard of before.
Appropriate for a cosmic trauma surgeon, he thought, slightly hysterically. He had promised himself that he would do whatever it took to master the Phoenix and the powers it granted him. Hunting magical creatures in alien realities was merely part of the process. He wasn't about to stop because he was afraid of what lay at the of his chosen path.
Knowing that local wildlife and demons would be attracted to his kill, Harry leaped down from his perch and landed lightly on the water beside the carcass. A few hand gestures later, and they were both in the Mirror Dimension.
Even here, the alien reality balked at him. If anything, the less tangible nature of the Mirror Dimension made the hostile whispers louder and clearer. Together, they harmonized into a low moan. It reminded Harry of the hiss of food dropped into a vat of hot oil.
Ignoring the discomfort, he rewove the Mirror Dimension around him and cast a couple of charms. When he was finished, the croc-creature's carcass lay atop a slab of room temperature, unmeltable ice that floated atop the expanded waterway between the giant mangroves. Satisfied, he pulled a long, enchanted knife from a sheath strapped to his belt and took a deep breath to prepare himself for the grisly next step: butchering his prize.
Having spent his adolescence chopping and measuring a variety of animal parts for potion ingredients, he was hardly squeamish, but as he'd discovered since his hunts began, there was quite a difference between handling organs already excised from the body and extracting them fresh. He cast a Bubble-Head Charm to shield himself from the smell, then got to work.
May 2004
Andromeda Tonks sipped her tea as she watched the horizon from the deck of her cottage. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds, casting the house and the lands around it in shadow. A breeze rose out of nowhere and filled the air with an unseasonable chill that reminded her of dementors.
Even in these dreary conditions, the estate was beautiful. A three-bedroom cottage that mixed the old, Victorian style of architecture favored by wizardkind with modern materials and design sensibilities. Andromeda and Harry had built it together on a stretch of partially wooded moor near the shore of a small, round lake. The back porch faced the lake, and it had quickly become Andromeda's favorite place to sit with her afternoon tea.
Ten meters away, near the water's edge, Harry and Teddy were playing a slow game of catch , floating a ball of gold light back and forth between them. Teddy, whose hair was its customary shade of electric blue today, had been fascinated with the radiant sphere from the moment Harry placed it in his little six-year-old hands. It took the little boy several fumbling attempts to master the trick of holding the light, which Harry had patiently coached him through. Her grandson's godfather really was an excellent teacher.
Teddy's obvious joy was reflected by Harry's soft smile. The sight was at such odds with Harry's usual attitude these days it gave Andromeda whiplash. As his new Phoenix powers had grown, the man had been forced to exercise ever greater control over himself and his emotions. The change had been subtle, but steady.
He meditated every day like his life depended on it and constantly pushed himself to hone his magic and develop new ways of using his abilities. In three years, he'd not only recovered most of his former powers, but gained new ones that would have impressed Dumbledore himself. While he still wore glasses, they were no longer a necessity, as he had learned how to sharpen his vision at will. The unhealing scars he'd accumulated fighting the dark arts had softened and begun to fade. Even without magic, his skin seemed to glow with health.
But for all that, Andromeda doubted Harry was happy.
Stoicism had never been his style in the past—not outside life or death scenarios, anyway—but he'd grown into the practice over time until it became his natural habit. He rarely laughed. He no longer cried or raged. He no longer sought one-night stands or dates, so far as she could determine. He didn't even have any drinking buddies; he was growing more withdrawn by the day. There was a gravitas to his movements that hadn't been there before, a grim confidence she'd seen in Aurors who'd seen more than their share of tragedy.
It was the look of a person who'd been thwarted too many times and would not handle it well if they failed again.
After a while, Harry ended his and Teddy's game. With a flick of his hand, he transfigured the little ball of light they were playing with into a border collie, which Teddy eagerly started playing with. Joining Andromeda on the porch, Harry conjured a teacup of his own and poured from the pot she'd prepared without actually touching it.
Andromeda shook her head. "Do you ever do anything with your hands anymore?"
Harry shrugged. "Only when I'm hiding what I am from muggles. I use my hands for other things now, as you may recall." Even Harry's speech had changed. He almost always spoke in a monotone now, rarely allowing any emotion into his words.
"Honestly," she huffed. "You're worse than Dora on her seventeenth birthday. She tried to do everything by magic the second she woke up. Blew up my favorite teapot and put it back together just to prove she could and ended up putting the spout on backwards, nearly blew up the whole house."
Harry snorted softly. Once upon a time, he'd have laughed openly at such a story. Andromeda couldn't tell if it was grief, his new meditative practice to control his new powers, or a bad memory from a mission with the Masters of the Mystic Arts that had killed his ability to emote. She suspected the second, or possibly a combination of all three.
"I promise I won't blow up the house," Harry said, sipping his tea.
"That's not the point. You're setting a poor example for Teddy."
"Come on, Andi, let me have my fun. I can't get away with these shenanigans at Kamar-Taj or the Sanctums, you know."
Andromeda sighed. "Fine. Be that way." She set her empty teacup down on the table between them. "What kind of monster did the Ancient One send you after this time?"
She was morbidly fascinated with the creatures and entities the Masters of the Mystic Arts fought. Much as she would have preferred Harry not involve himself with their activities, she couldn't help but ask about them whenever he was willing to talk. So far, he'd taken down a variety of minor demons, a corrupted water dragon that could fly despite its lack of wings, a giant of living stone, a dinosaur-like creature that could emit intense heat and flames, horse-shaped monster that generated lethal thunderstorms around it, and a tentacled interdimensional beast called an abilisk. And those were just the ones he'd told her about.
Harry's lips thinned before he answered. "The Jersey Devil."
Andromeda frowned. "That sounds… vaguely familiar. Where have I heard that name before?"
"It's an American legend. The one from our world was a dark wizard's experiment gone wrong that went around eating babies."
"Ah. And this one?"
"Almost exactly the same thing. A dark creature that appears in the Pine Barrens, drinks from a cursed lake called the Blue Hole, and terrorizes the locals. Nasty thing, eats kids. Every time it's killed, a new one shows up to replace it. Each one has slightly different weaknesses from the previous ones, so it's a right trick figuring out how to kill it."
Andromeda's frown deepened. "And there's no method of preventing this… resurrection?"
Harry sipped his tea and blew out his breath, igniting it like dragon breath and swirling the resulting gout of fire with a finger. "Practitioners from all over the world have been trying to do that for centuries. The Ancient One was hoping my bond with the Phoenix would give me some insight."
"Did it?"
"No." Harry took a big gulp of hot tea. A normal person, even a powerful wizard, would have blistered their tongue and throat, but he didn't seem bothered at all.
Andromeda doubted he even felt it. "How long before its replacement shows up?"
Harry shrugged. "Depends. Years, maybe even decades if we're lucky. Weeks or months if we're not."
"So, with your luck," Andromeda said dryly, "tomorrow?"
A twitch of the lips. The slightest quirk of an eyebrow. "Even if it does, someone else gets to deal with it. The Ancient One herself wouldn't ask me to leave Teddy alone unless the world was ending."
"Shall I prepare another emergency survival trunk, then?"
Now Harry did chuckle. A minor victory, achieved by striking at his fondness for gallows humor. "I doubt our luck runs that bad," he said. "So if you're looking for excuses not to go on vacation, you'll have to try harder."
"I'm not thick enough to decline a chance for leisure," Andromeda said dryly. "Merlin knows I don't get enough of it these days." And neither do you, she added silently.
They knew each other well enough that Harry didn't need Legilimency to know what she was thinking, but he wisely refrained from speaking to it.
A couple of hours later, the two of them prepared dinner together. Teddy had changed his hair and eyes to match Harry's and adopted a puppy-like expression to ask for an extra helping of dessert, but Andromeda put her foot down. Harry would have plenty of time to spoil the boy after she was gone. Teddy was due to wake up at the crack of dawn for school on the morrow, so he said a slightly hesitant goodbye before allowing himself to be ushered to bed.
An hour after that, Andromeda stood in the foyer, clutching the handle of a magically expanded carry-on bag in one hand, a small purse hanging from her opposite shoulder. Harry leaned against the wall opposite her. He played with a blob of water by twisting it into various shapes of increasing complexity with minute twitches of his fingers: a bird taking flight, a three-dimensional star with a dozen points, a horned serpent winding around itself, a three-headed man with four arms that each clutched a liquid sword, a spiderweb.
Andromeda shook her head. "Do you ever stop practicing?"
Harry shrugged as he shaped his water blob into the snarling-faced, snake-haired head of a gorgon.
"Not really. And I can't afford to either. I owe it to everyone we lost to make sure that I never let this world down."
"And you don't think you're letting yourself down?" Andromeda asked softly. "You may have an obligation to the world, but you also have an obligation to yourself. You are allowed to—what's the phrase—take a pause for the cause."
"Am I?" Harry asked. The gorgon head became a human figure, naked save for the ropes binding its wrists and ankles together. The liquid mannequin stretched unnaturally so that its hands and feet touched behind its back, forming a near-perfect loop of contorted limbs, almost like a bracelet. The figure's face looked vaguely familiar, and it seemed to be crying.
"Yes, you are," Andromeda said a bit sharply. "And I know you know that."
Harry gave a ghost of his old, crooked smile. The horrible water sculpture melted into a stream of liquid that snaked upward into his mouth. He swallowed it and said, "I know, Andi. I do. But…"
Andromeda took a step toward him, but he held up a hand to stop her. He never did that before the Phoenix.
"Until I master this power, I'm a danger to everyone around me. Even Teddy."
"So, you're making yourself less of a danger by training to become more deadly?"
A laugh, a guffaw really, escaped from Harry's mouth. "Well, when you put it like that…" He continued to giggle for a long moment until the wall paintings and rugs decorating the room began to rattle and twitch. Once he had control of himself, he said, "The goal of the training is to attain mastery of the self. And this power is a part of me. Even if I somehow severed my bond with the Phoenix Force right now, it wouldn't undo the changes I've undergone. It changed my magic, changed me. I'm just trying to make the most of it."
Andromeda hesitated. He had a point, especially considering the side effects of his outburst. "As long as you remember your humanity…"
Harry's expression hardened. "I'll never forget."
She nodded slowly. "Very well." Turning away, she opened the front door and strode outside, dragging her bag behind her. The wards on the cottage made it impossible to open a portal inside, and while the sling ring gifted to her by the Ancient One was keyed into the scheme of protective enchantments, that only meant that she could open portals to and from the grounds.
She examined herself one last time, taking her outfit and belongings in with a long downward glance. It felt strange to go out in a muggle skirt and blouse that made her look even more like the grandmother she was, but the cut of the clothes was admittedly more comfortable than her old wizarding robes. Turning, she saw Harry watching her from the front door, backlit by the foyer chandelier. She could barely make out his shadowed face.
"You will take a vacation of your own one day, Harry Potter," Andromeda said. "Even if I have to drag you into it by the ear. Understand?"
He nodded. "Yes, Andi."
"Good." She turned away and raised her free hand, where her sling ring rested. She was used to apparition, but the convenience of the ring was too great to pass up. A swirl of her fingers, and a circular gateway of orange-gold sparks appeared before her, like a ring of fire. On the other side, daylight revealed the twilit Bavarian town of Schwangau, overlooked by the castle she knew was called Neutschwanstein.
"Goodbye, Andi," Harry called from behind her. "Enjoy your trip."
She turned back just long enough to reply in kind before forcing herself to step through into crisp mountain air. They'll be alright, she reminded herself as the gateway fizzled shut behind her. Taking her eyes off her grandson for a while wouldn't end with him being murdered by her own sister. That war, at least, was over and done with.
:
I hope everyone reading had a great holiday season. This chapter took much longer to finish than it had any right to, in part because this was my first attempt at writing an anthology chapter. Please let me know what you think of it, because my untrustworthy inner critic won't shut up. On a personal note, I've got a regular job now and am currently working on the manuscript for my first serious piece of original fiction. I've also had the pleasure of welcoming three new baby cousins into my family.
I'd like to take this opportunity to clear up some confusion I may have caused. First, I am intentionally blurring the line between mutants and mutates in this story, and in any other MCU fics that I write. This is a personal stylistic choice—I'm well aware of the difference in official Marvel media—and it won't significantly affect the storylines. Second, I am discarding some of the weaker plotlines from the original Eye of the Phoenixand changing up the sequence of events. The last few chapters have all been setup and training arc; the real plot starts now.