Updated: 3/5/2023
The Hated Headmaster
With the Place of Sorrow renovated into a livable if primitive space, Harry moved out of the rustic tent. The very first thing Harry realized was that he actually had nothing to do. There was only so much tinkering and tweaking of the compound, house, and tower to be done before he could make no aesthetic improvements anymore. There was no telly to watch over the Dursleys' shoulders, no Daily Prophet to page through for depressing propaganda or smear pieces, no Wizarding Wireless to tune into Potterwatch. Alone at the top of an icy mountain, Harry had little hope of visitors. The only entertainment on the table was to beg lessons from Phineas or read them for himself.
Thus, Harry took it upon himself to modernize his living space. Unfortunately, according to Phineas, his level of enchanting skill (which verged upon zero) was not up to snuff to, say, create a building-wide climate control system. Apparently, enchanting things with warming charms, while technically able to reproduce a crudely similar result to climate control charms, was not the same at all to real enchanting.
"Will you teach it to me?"
"Have you proved yourself?" Phineas shot back from the mantle over the new fireplace Harry had grudgingly hung him upon. "What is the most impressive piece of magic you've mastered, Little Potter?"
"The Patronus Charm."
Phineas sniffed. "The Patronus is not actually difficult in terms of magical skill. It merely requires strength of will and emotional immaturity. Show me something of actual difficulty, won't you?"
Harry harrumphed. "Tell me a challenging spell and its incantation, then. Except for the Patronus, I learned what I was taught."
"There is your problem, then. Did it ever occur to you that your professors couldn't possibly teach you every useful spell in existence in seven years? That maybe they were teaching you broadly applicable skills, and the onus was on you to research spells useful to you?"
"It has now!" Harry said hotly. "And now I'm asking you. Weren't you a professor?"
"I was a headmaster," Phineas said snidely. "That means I didn't have to teach brats like you the wand-lighting charm. What's something you're good at?"
"Quidditch," said Harry automatically. The Black Headmaster guffawed.
"Of course. You know," he added as an aside, "I seized every opportunity to cancel Hogwarts quidditch in my tenure. It was played eleven years of my forty-year tenure as Headmaster. But imagine: you know all your fancy quidditch maneuvers and play on Britain's national team. Would you enjoy teaching six-year-olds how to get onto their broomsticks?"
"No, but teaching isn't my job."
"It isn't mine, either," Phineas's grey eyes glittered malevolently. "I'm dead. And even when it was, that was the job of Professor Ronen. Go do something impressive," he waved dismissively. "I might be willing to share some wisdom then."
Harry stalked off. Bitterly, he thought he had cast a spell Phineas would be impressed by: the Killing Curse. He just wasn't sure he wanted to admit to himself that he had cast it. Harry would venture through the book tent and find something suitably impressive, and then get on with Phineas's lessons.
The first problem Harry encountered was the horrific disorganization in the tent. Finding a single book required the use of the summoning charm, and the one time he'd tried it had been plenty to know that he should never, ever use it again like he had. Miranda Goshawk's Standard Book of Spells, Grade 7 had burst from a huge block of stacked pillars of books, sending tomes flying through the air and crashing into his forehead, leaving a nasty bruise that had subsided only under a particularly strong casting of Episkey.
Harry made a mental note to organize the books later, and cracked open the tome. Absent any better ideas, he began to work his way from page one: Acericum and Acricum, culinary spells which made things more bitter and sourer, respectively. The passage was very clear that the spells were never to be used in potion-making.
Valiantly, Harry made it all the way to Autacskey, a low-level panacea like Episkey, but for trivial illnesses like the common cold, before he could continue no longer. It was even more boring than actual classes to consume charms and spells he could not fathom the use of one after another. He needed to learn something useful. What did he need right now?
His eyes fell upon his right hand. Very faint stripes ran up from his wrist, minute scars from Elladora's cursed astrolabe. Where better to start than something he didn't mind breaking?
Finding the astrolabe in the endless warehouse that particular tent had become proved to be a chore. Without shelves, it was just rows of stuff in vague aisles. Even if the astrolabe could be summoned with Accio, Harry did not want the cursed bauble to come flying at him. At least, he reassured himself, it's better than the Room of Lost Things.
The cursed artifact in question was wedged between a pile of telescopes stacked in a pyramid and a stack of parchment that Harry found to be countless old marked Astronomy assignments. Very carefully and with conjured tongs, Harry hauled the thing up to the coffee table below the hearth. Phineas watched him deposit it without comment. A moment later, a few books joined the pile. A stack of parchment and a pen came after. The pages of the first tome flopped open. Harry kicked back and began taking notes.
"Inspecirus," Harry murmured, eyes closed. An additional sense bloomed in his mind, like he was holding a transfiguration spell and tweaking its parameters before release. He got the vague impression of the golden disc and its little dials. A malevolent energy clouded the device, blood-red and streaked with black. He prodded closer. A vague sense of peeling. He listened carefully. It felt…wrapped. It did not permeate the device. He referred to his book, then glanced back at his notes.
Disingenuous Disenchantments was very light on definitive answers, which was fair since magic tended to defy measurement. Harry wished he had a living wizard to help him through – if Bill hadn't apprenticed to a curse breaker before becoming one himself, he would be very impressed that the eldest Weasley managed to survive training. Blood-red and black-streaked usually meant flaying, except the nomenclature was actually 'victitious' and 'striated' (malicious). Of course, if the black striations weren't actually black and instead dark (yes, there was a difference) then unraveling the dark striations with colors imbued the cursed object and caster alike with vivid, insanity-inducing nightmares. Likewise, unraveling black striations with light caused the cursed object to radiate its negative effects to everything within line of sight.
The book was full of subtle contradictions that were virtually indistinguishable until the moment you did something, at which point it would become violently apparent if you were wrong. And it wasn't something that could be measured like potions, where Harry could know exactly how many ingredients to put in before the mixture exploded. Inspecirus gave vague impressions that bordered on divination. He just had to get good at it before he made too big a mistake. By the amused look on Phineas's face, the portrait knew this too, and was waiting for Harry to drop dead.
Reluctantly, Harry put the astrolabe aside and went to hunt for something less dangerous to start learning curse-breaking on. Venturing down into the junk tent, Harry began casting Inspecirus on everything and making notes of only the things which were benevolent or borderline useless.
In the 'okay to destroy in the pursuit of learning' pile went first a rubber python that vomited applesauce when stretched, a wicker basket that dropped its contents if it detected they were delicate, and a suspiciously phallic rubber object which toggled vibrations when its base was touched.
Some of the artifacts were actually rather useful, and got set aside for when he hopefully learned to make enchanted things instead of breaking them. He found a few endless quivers that managed to conjure enchanted arrows and a cleverly expanded knife sheath that flattened into a barrette hair clip. When the clip was open, a tiny catch would let a razor sharp kunai slide out, the clip folding into the handle. The concealed weapon gave Harry inspiration for a sword that could fit in a ring.
Harry really did think he could figure it out by himself. He had heard that magic used to be formless and free from the highest authority he could imagine. Even more, he had put that knowledge into practice by messing about with platonic ideals in transfiguration. Harry didn't think he could ever beat out Hermione in academic fields and learning from literature, but when it came down to it, he was damn good at casting magic.
Disingenuous Disenchantments felt pretty advanced for his level of experience (zero), but Dummy's Guide to Disenchanting felt closer to his speed. The first chapter outlined what a typical witch or wizard could expect to learn and how quickly. Apparently, learning disenchanting was a prohibitively expensive activity since the process of learning was by breaking things. It recommended avoiding specific spells or at least using generic, broad application ones to get used to doing magic outside the rigid strictures of common spells.
The book agreed with Harry's mother that spells were concepts linked to phrases. It followed that the more widely-used a spell was, the easier it was to use. It also tended to be more and less flexible at once. Within, say, a levitation charm's field of influence of levitation, it could do virtually anything since the Levioso spell family was so widely spread, it was almost certain that someone had used it in the way he might before. But Levioso was so firmly defined as a levitation charm, it was all but impossible to use the incantation for something not levitating. Thus, finite incantatem and its cousins were the best starting point for disenchantment. Every enchanted item worth a sickle would be specifically spelled against finite, but ending a magical effect was such a broad domain, with a little bit of skill, he could use it on poor-quality enchanted items, anyways.
First to go was the basket of dropping things. Rather than immediately decimate it, Harry picked and poked at the way the enchantments were bound to it. Most of the magic felt sticky. By charming his own conjured ball, Harry found that the engorgement charm clung to its target like a film that could be washed away with finite. The basket's enchantments were a step above, feeling like glue that clung to it. Harry could tug until it came away, but the simple ending charm washed over it. Immediately, he became very nervous that the expansion charm he had used on the tent of junk could be cancelled so easily, and resolved to find a more robust spell immediately.
By working through more useless items, Harry discovered what worked best for disenchanting a variety of spells. Tugging away woven spells and chipping at brittle shells, he worked through all the little enchantments on the basket until it was nothing more than a wicker basket. It became his project for the whole week to learn more about enchanting. The whole time, he grew more and more familiar with the sensations and nomenclature of enchantment, more familiar with using finite like a scalpel, and more understanding of how it was achieved in the first place. By the end of it, he had returned to Elladora's astrolabe.
A further examination revealed traits he now had terms to, and a basic understanding of what they did. Harry could admit to himself he was tempted to dive right in, but something held him back. He had heard a saying before, floating around in the general muggle consciousness that said a person was most likely to overestimate their skills when they had just been introduced to the relevant field. He knew enough to know the rudimentary basics of disenchantment, but Harry could hardly call himself a curse-breaker. Resignedly, he searched for and fetched a lightly-cursed object, an ugly, floating lamp whose bottom was carved to look like swimming fish tails. It burned his fingertips if he touched it wrong, and from the outset, his goal was to render it magically-inert without ever activating the curse.
It went poorly. It felt like every time Harry poked or prodded at the lamp, the pads of his fingers got singed. Every time he took a break from the thing, his fingers were red and raw. Every time he triggered the curse, he backed off and tried again. Dummy's Guide to Disenchanting advised that it was typically only the first spell that caused problems for a disenchanter, since the goal was to try and remove whatever anti-tamper enchantment there was first. At the end of the week, Harry finally managed to peel that all-important spell away. From there, a finite finished the job.
Harry built off that success. Knowing what success felt like and a vague idea of how to achieve it, he began to tear through the most useless of the artifacts he could put his hands on. He ended up preserving the applesauce snake – it was a source of food and Harry wasn't so confident that he'd never need it – but perhaps a dozen odds and ends cluttered the coffee table by the hearth.
Absence of any real time constraints and limited by his attention span, Harry took frequent breaks to do other things. He descended the mountain towards Carvahall on transfigured skis (the range was definitely not the place for a beginner to learn), then apparated to the top to go again. He tried with middling success to coax living plants into his garden out of the old potioneers' kits he'd found. He began work on an expanded basement to move the clutter from the living room using the same spell as the tent. Apparently, no common expansion charm could be cancelled by a finite – even wizards weren't that crazy.
But he kept coming back to magic practice. The simple truth was, magic was about the only interesting thing he could do all alone on the mountaintop. He transfigured and untransfigured until every little detail to his home possessed his own personal touch. He wondered if that was how Hogwarts had come to be so unbelievably crammed with history; Rowena, Godric, Helga and Salazar had nothing better to do but add frescoes, mosaics, stained glass windows, suits of armor, and portraits. He practiced his repertoire of offensive and defensive spells until he could cast them completely silently and with naught but a twitch of his wand, and he managed the magical plants in his garden until he had coaxed back to life from some '70s potioneer kit.
He started projects, enough that he could never be bored of all of them at once. He expanded a library out from the cabin and tried to organize it as it pertained to the Dewey Decimal System – difficult, since magic did not have official categories in the system. He began cataloguing and shelving artifacts, baubles, furniture, and other miscellaneous junk in another expanded room, a warehouse that branched off from the ever-growing workshop in the basement. He started landscaping the ridgeline and its south-east slope to make skiing easier, started reading other textbooks again, started reading muggle textbooks and encyclopedias presumably left over from Lily's possessions.
Phineas watched him silently. Elladora's cursed astrolabe still sat on the hearth. Harry got the feeling the old headmaster had cottoned on to the test he had set himself and was waiting. When about a month had passed and the grass and trees of Carvahall had turned a lush, summer green, Harry returned to the astrolabe.
The illusion of knowledge he had gained during his first week learning of disenchantment had been replaced by just enough understanding that with two reference books and hours of notes and planning, Harry managed to rip away the curse before the painted headmaster's very gaze. Glancing up very slightly smugly, Harry picked the astrolabe up with his bare hand.
"Congratulations," Phineas said boredly. "You have managed basic competence."
"Surely it's impressive enough," Harry stood.
The headmaster shifted in his chair, yawning. "I suppose. Fine. What is it you wanted to know?"
"How do I enchant a refrigerator?"
"Stasis cabinet," Phineas corrected. He straightened a bit. "Stasis cabinets stop time within the dimensions you define. You should avoid transfigured components as a matter of course, but accommodations must be made for your current state of…disenfranchisement. If you have a cabinet on hand, bring it here. Else, I understand your transfigurations skills are passable."
Harry shrugged and conjured what was essentially a refrigerator. It was about three meters tall and fronted by a reflective double door, with an extra drawer that covered the bottom third. He supposed the refrigerator part wouldn't be cold, but he could simply stick a freezing charm inside the bottom part. Phineas apparently couldn't find any fault in his conjuration, and proceeded to teach him (as rudely and obstinately as possible) the necessary enchantments to finish his project.
Despite Phineas's level best to make everyone he spoke to hate him, Harry grudgingly accepted that he was a phenomenal teacher. If one could ignore the snide comments and backhanded compliments woven between each set of instructions, they would undoubtedly learn what he had to teach. The stasis portion on top, Harry further divided into 'cheese drawers' he excluded from the spell. When he had cast the requisite enchantments to Phineas's standards, Harry returned to the idea of using glacius to keep the designated areas cool. The intention was to tweak the execution of the freezing charm as he had, finite when learning disenchanting.
"What are you doing?"
"Enchanting the ice box and cheese drawers."
Phineas frowned. "What are those?"
"Areas of a muggle fridge that cool things down."
"Why would you need some barbaric muggle cube to crudely preserve your food when I just wasted my valuable time teaching you the proper way to do it?"
"Some foods are best served cold, aren't they? I can't do that without somewhere cold to cool them."
"While you learn from me, you will use proper wizarding magic, and cease to imitate it with the crude trappings of the disabled masses," said Phineas. "If you want a dish cold, tell your house-elf."
"Er, I don't have one," Harry admitted.
"Then procure one," he snapped.
"What are the odds they exist on this plane of existence?" wondered Harry aloud.
Phineas paused. "Fine. How were you going to accomplish your," he hesitated, as if forming the words caused him great pain, "-ice box."
"I was going to use glacius like finite, y'know? Tweak it until it did what I wanted."
"You're not so hopeless as to believe it's impossible without the right spell," Phineas allowed. "But you'll not use an inferior, ill-matched, and temporary charm to produce a sub-par result. Something you ought to keep in mind: you can do a great many things with magic, and rarely is the proper way the only way, yet the proper way is often the best way, and I accept nothing but the best. Find this book: Orag's First Primer, Volume 4. It best explains the volumetric temperature charm. Naturally, he was a Black."
Greetings, Brom.
I have nothing better to do, and I'm bloody bored. As per your advice to come by again, I am inquiring after a convenient time. I have almost nothing to do.
-Harry
P.S: Do you know where I can buy a few seeds of each kind? I'm running out of food.
"Brom's house is the nice-looking one-story one down there," Harry pointed, eyeing Hedwig's burning white plumage. "Can you take it to him?"
Hedwig allowed him to fix the letter to her smallish leg, bobbing her head. She flapped into the air. Rather than soaring off the precipice of the tower and down to the valley, the white phoenix abruptly erupted into white flames.
"Oops."
Hedwig returned an hour later in a blast of very noticeable fire clutching a small corner of torn parchment.
Fine. You're lucky your firebird showed up inside. If anyone else had seen, it'd be all anyone talked about in the village for years. Any time the sun is up is fine. You can always get your hands on some seeds if you only need a handful.
-Brom
Harry smiled and left the scrap of parchment on the kitchen counter. (Today it was black granite – he really liked the modern aesthetic). He perused the intangible database of all things for comfortable fabrics before settling on a white puffy parachute jacket with a reflective thermal inner and a layer of soft polyester. The zipper was a bit finicky to get right, but eventually he got it to zip up properly. If it got stuck, Harry supposed he could always vanish it.
Skiing down the valley to Carvahall was always thrilling, though near the bottom the trees were too dense to go flying between, and the snow had melted too much from the onset of spring to be particularly deep. Harry unstuck his boots from the skis and ended the hardening charm on them. Rigidity, as he had crashed many times to discover, was crucial to ski boots, yet made for very uncomfortable walking boots. The skis were slung over his back. They were conjured, but getting the vinyl bottoms and steel edges just right had been tricky enough to get right that Harry found carrying them around occasionally to be easier than reconjuring them after every descent.
He got more than a few odd looks from the villagers, headed to Brom's house.
When Brom let him in, Harry handed over the furled up map he had copied with geminio back at the Place of Sorrow. "I made copies, if you want it back."
Brom snatched the scroll away and made a sour face. "Yes, well, be glad the elvish cities are unmarked, or I'd have to give you a long and terrible lecture about secrecy, and then probably kill you just in case. What was that bird you sent your mail with?"
"Hedwig. Believe it or not, she used to be an ordinary Snowy owl. The correct term is phoenix, though the only other one I've ever seen was red and gold. I came here to get seeds of as large a variety I can get my hands on."
"Hmm. You brought gold?"
Harry rolled his eyes and nodded.
"I would exchange them for crowns, if you are willing. Less questions asked. Do you find three crowns per coin fair?" Brom fetched a sack and held up a small, chipped and crudely stamped crown on a little gold coin. Realistically, a galleon could probably make four, but Harry was so loaded, refusing to pay a currency transfer fee felt cheap."
"Yeah, I guess. How much would I need for a packet of every seed you've ever heard of?"
Brom snorted. "There are some plants so rare a single seedling would cost a King's ransom, but for Carvahall? No more than three crowns."
Harry was taken aback. "That doesn't sound like much."
"They must swim in gold in the UK if you think so," Brom grumbled. "If that pouch is full, you're richer than everyone in Carvahall except me."
Obligingly, Harry handed over ten galleons and received thirty crowns, evidently a princely sum. "If I transfigure galleons into these crowns, that's fine, right? There's no magical anti-counterfeit measures or hidden details to worry about?"
"Gold's gold," Brom shrugged. "Presumably you haven't learned the common tongue in the last month or so?"
"Nah. I would appreciate your company."
It wasn't exactly Diagon Alley in Carvahall, but Brom seemed to know exactly who to speak to for what Harry wanted. First they hit up a tavern where Brom found a bearded guy in his forties.
"Delwin, farðu upp. Ég fann hálfvita sem vill kaupa fræ fyrir gull á koparnum." Brom harassed the man out of his chair. Delwin's eyes widened, glancing at Harry.
"Hann?"
Harry gave a little wave.
"Fínt. ég er að koma," he grumbled. "Morn! Ég þarf að fara að vinna til að lifa!" He dropped a few copper coins on the weathered table and left his drink half empty. "Hvað viltu? Maís, bygg, hveiti, kartöflur?" He addressed Harry. He eyed the purple skis slung over his shoulder with curiosity, then dismissed them.
"He's asking what you want," Brom translated. "Svolítið af öllu. Hann talar ekki almennt."
Delwin laughed a bit, then chatted with Brom for a minute.
Harry sighed and put three crowns in the guy's rough hand. Delwin stopped laughing and looked at his palm with wide eyes. Suddenly, conversation exploded between him and Brom. Delwin gesticulated a bit, asked something questioning, then snorted at whatever Brom said.
"What are you guys talking about?"
"How you're getting absolutely gouged," Brom said cheerfully. "Chin up. You'll definitely get your seeds. Let's go to another farm. Garrow grows different crops."
He led Harry down a long path out of the village. Ten miles north, apparently. After an hour of walking and after some needling on Harry's part, Brom admitted that they were only a quarter of the way there. The man walked like he was late to class on the other side of the castle and the only thing keeping him from running was the eyes of a professor on him. The whole way was inclined just enough to burn his thighs without being overtly slanted, and the village remained in view until halfway, when they finally crested an unseen lip and the terrain subtly flattened. An hour after that, the edges of a dark patch of soil were visible, and an hour after that, they finally made it to a fair-sized farmstead and barn surrounded by loamy fields of tiny green sprouts.
A couple of teenagers about his age were out in the fields, an older, barechested one weeding and a younger one tugging a horse and plow along back and forth across the field. Both of them perked up at the sight of him and Brom, though the older one looked a bit more wary.
"Halló?"
"Brom? Hver er hann?" The other demanded. Just then, a man of a similar age to Brom emerged from the unpainted barn. He was almost certainly younger, but the lines on his face and his slightly bent posture indicated he had been weathered more than Brom seemed. Compared to the older kid, his demeanor verged on hostile.
"Hvað ertu að gera hérna með ókunnugum manni?"
With a bit of patient explanation and another offer of three crowns (vehemently turned down, and only one accepted), Harry received six cloth packets of staple crop seeds.
The younger one asked him a question he did not understand. He eyed the skis and jacket curiously. Brom caught it and said something back. The only words he caught were 'Place of Sorrow' and 'The Spine.' The guy grinned and nodded, gave Harry a wave, then went back to leading the plodding horse around.
Garrow grew markedly more hostile upon finishing the transaction, said something to Brom, and all but planted his fists on his hips, waiting for Harry and the old storyteller to leave.
Brom grumped something and beckoned for them to leave.
Once the farm was out of sight, Harry groaned. "Are we really going to walk another three and a half hours to get back?"
"We didn't bring horses, did we? What, are you expecting a dragon egg to fall out of the sky?" Brom mocked.
"I can apparate us to your house in an instant." Harry did not particularly want to put in more physical effort than he already had that day, which was already vastly more than he usually did in a whole week.
Brom was immediately on guard, but there was a hint of curiosity in him, too. "Swear to me you will take me to my house in Carvahall and nowhere else."
"I swear I'll take you to your house in Carvahall and nowhere else," Harry parroted. "Why the hell would I want to kidnap some crotchety old guy from the middle of nowheresville?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" Brom snarked. He hesitated. Then, "Fine. If I see anywhere but the inside of my living room, you won't live to take another step."
Harry rolled his eyes and looped his arm around Brom's abruptly, then twisted into nothingness.
"Hellfire, that's uncomfortable!" Brom exclaimed, sucking in deep breaths. "Why would anyone choose to inflict that upon themselves?"
"Why would anyone want to spend a whole day walking just to make it ten miles and back? It's not exactly my favorite, but it damn well beats the Knight Bus, portkeys, and the floo." Harry said. He patted his skis. "I may not apparate down the mountains, but I certainly don't climb them, either."
When he had calmed, an appraising gleam appeared in his eyes. "Well, that's certainly useful. What are the restrictions on distance?"
"Er, anywhere I've seen or another wizard has set up an apparition point at. I've not noticed much difference between apparating across the room or apparating across the country."
"Does it cost very much energy to cast?"
The way Brom phrased the question was odd, like he expected Harry to come out and quote some number of gigajoules or something. The idea of needing power to cast magic had come up before in wizarding society, but only really as a prerequisite. You must be this powerful to cast Fiendfyre or something.
"Magic doesn't consume power, does it?" Harry wondered aloud. "No one's ever killed themselves doing too much magic."
Brom was violently taken aback, like he had been the one to say something completely and utterly foreign. "Magicians die all the time to overuse of magic. You've never heard of someone blowing themselves up trying to cast something too big?"
Well, there was the one incident that came to mind, but Harry pushed the thought away. "You lose the mental focus to cast spells far before energy, if that's a factor at all."
"Your magic is just…free?" Brom clarified. He seemed unable to accept the notion.
"There's some really evil stuff that needs sacrifices, I think, but yeah, pretty much."
"And you've had no trouble casting it here in Alagaesia?" he checked.
Harry laughed. "I've probably cast more magic this month on the mountaintop than I had all year back home. Why? Do your spells consume energy?"
Brom hesitated. "Yes. Exactly as much as the produced effect would require to do by hand. And I could not count the amount of magicians I have known to have killed themselves trying to cast something too big for them."
"That sucks, mate. I guess you still have to work for a living. Well, most of you," Harry cackled. "How ever did you manage to make storytelling into a career?"
Brom sniffed. "My stories are legendary. I've traveled the length and breadth of Alagaesia in search of stirring tales. You should be so fortunate as to hear them. Fifty crowns was a paltry sum."
Harry grinned. "Maybe I should do that. I'm already getting bored. Why have you stopped adventuring? Getting too old?"
"Something like that," he grumbled. "If you're serious about adventuring, stay away from the Empire. Every magician out there has to learn some of this language to do anything, so you can communicate roughly with most races, but the elves in Du Weldenvarden actually speak it fluently as their national language. In human settlements, speaking it will get you marked as a magician and subsequently dragged before Galbatorix to be made a slave of the Empire."
"Not here?"
"Carvahall is a bit beyond the black stump," Brom said wryly. "The only folks from the Empire are the tax collectors that come around every year and the occasional soldier recruiting for the army."
"And if I wanted to fight the Empire?" Harry wondered.
"Then you'd have to stumble across the Varden, I suppose. Good luck with that."
When he returned, the fridge (his brand new fridge!) had fallen face first and was propped up by the countertop. The doors hung open, spilling three enormous butchered wolf corpses and three stuffed squirrels on the wooden floor. Hedwig was perched on the topmost edge of the refrigerator, squawking urgently at something blocked from his view by the counter. Harry crossed the main area and circled around the back of the island.
Blinky looked up guiltily at him. Her jaw was fully unhinged and she appeared to be struggling to fit a full wolf leg down her throat. A normal wolf leg would have been a stretch for the currently rather petite serpent, the behemoth he'd killed a couple days ago dwarfed the regular variety.
Harry grinned in shameless schadenfreude as the little snake hissed awkwardly around the colossal paw, slithering unsuccessfully forwards in an attempt to shove her throat further down the limb.
§Having ssome trouble?§ he teased. Some unintelligible hissy choking noises made it past the rather large blockage. Harry's grin grew even wider. The basilisk seemed to get over her embarrassment and now glared at the annoying speaker. When the infuriating idiot began laughing at her, she blinked her outer eyelids menacingly. Her servant must have gotten the message because his adams apple bobbed as he swallowed heavily and cautiously approached her.
Snickering, the wizard carefully cut the paw off from the leg. Gratefully, she worked her jaw over the appendage, bobbing her head to push it down her throat. §Sshut up,§ Blinky hissed with some venom.
§I didn't ssay anything,§ Harry complained. They stared at each other for a second before the basilisk turned away shamefully and slunk off. Hedwig hooted loudly and launched herself from the fridge. The two of them went out the door to the patio, the phoenix clipping his head with a wing as she wobbled after the snake.
How is it that they trash the kitchen, knock over the fridge, and nearly choke, yet it's somehow my fault? Harry thought exasperatedly. He eyed the blackish-green streaks on the meat appraisingly. Basilisk venom was useful to have on hand.
"Why would I know about anything as banal as-" Phineas wrinkled his nose "-exploring?"
"Fame and fortune?" Harry guessed. The Blacks were into those, weren't they? He had the vague idea of exploring the Spine first, if only because it was right there and he was really enjoying skiing.
"Exploring is for outcasts and expatriates," the headmaster sniffed. "The House of Black was never so uncouth. We all but ruled British aristocracy. Why would we leave?"
"I dunno, I kinda got the impression noble houses did whatever they wanted."
Phineas sighed. "Your intuition is actually not far off. The Potters did do that. At least in my time, the consensus was that the Potters were rich and important enough to be influential, but rarely bothered with politics. They mostly did whatever they felt like, and occasionally one of them was politically-minded and shook things up during their life before dying and letting your family's influence lay dormant again. The House of Black was far more influential because we deliberately kept a firm grip on wizarding Britain."
"So if I wanted to learn adventuring magic?"
"Call up one of your ancestors," Phineas said dismissively.
Harry shrugged and twisted his ring inwards when he realized he did not actually know any names save his parents'. "What's that book called that has all those family trees?"
"Nature's Nobility," Phineas smiled. "A fabulous resource-"
"Accio, Nature's Nobility!" Harry announced. From the half-organized library, a torrent of enormous books over two inches thick came hurtling towards him.
"-of which we have many copies," the headmaster finished.
Harry sighed and sorted through for the most recent edition, which turned out to be 147th, 2004. It was a black leather bound book with brass corners and an embossed golden tree on the cover. He found 'Potter' in the index and flipped to the end of the section, where his own name stared off the page at him.
Harry James Potter (July 31, 2002 - present)
Parents: Lily Potter Nee Evans (muggleborn) , James Charlus Potter (pureblood)
Widely known as The Boy-Who-Lived, Harry James Potter is the only known survivor of the Killing Curse, surviving both his parents and his would-be murderer, You-know-who. Credited for the Dark Lord's defeat, Harry Potter disappeared from the wizarding world immediately proceeding the events of October 31, 2003.
Above his name was James Charlus Potter.
James Charlus Potter (April 17, 1981 - October 31, 2003)
Parents: Dorea Potter Nee Black (pureblood) , Charlus Henry Potter (pureblood)
Spouse: Lily Potter Nee Evans (muggleborn) Married November 11, 2001.
Children: Harry James Potter (half-blood)
James Potter was an upcoming transfiguration prodigy and outspoken muggle advocate. Invited to apprentice under Master Minerva McGonagall for a transfiguration Mastery, James Potter was one of the last two victims murdered by You-know-who before he could begin his apprenticeship, and was survived by his famed son, Harry Potter.
Lily was unmentioned except by her relation to him, but Harry thought for once that it was not due to overt racism. The blurb above was about Charlus Potter, and his wife Dorea Potter Nee Black, yet his grandmother did not rate a section of her own but rather a little subscript after her name reading 'p74.' And on page 74, sure enough, Dorea Black had her own section, including her husband who had his own subscript 'p434.' Flipping through random families, it was apparent that there were people mentioned who were labeled as pureblood and lacked a page number indicative of further mention. Apparently the 'Sacred Twenty-Eight' was quite enough to be getting on with, since the genealogy book verged on 800 pages.
Harry found actual pictures of family trees at the beginning of each family's chapter. Potter came after Nott and Parkinson and before Prewett and Rosier. In contrast with most other families, the Potter family tree was more of a vine. His family tree comprised of eighty-nine generations of Potters. At the top, during the Roman empire, it looked like the others, but about fifty generations later, Linfred of Stintchcombe's son Hardwin Potter married Iolanthe Peverell and from then on, generations rarely exceeded one single child. Each biological Potter and his or her spouse who had one biological child and so on. Occasionally, one of his ancestors had two or three children, but their subsequent children's birthdates were always at least nine months after the previous ones' deaths. Adoptions happened infrequently, denoted by a dotted line, and disappeared off to the side.
He mentioned it to Phineas. "Do you know why?"
Phineas Nigellus shrugged. "Most likely a bloodline curse, or an odd tradition."
Harry found it suspicious that the 'odd tradition' started immediately after Iolanthe Peverell married into the Potters, especially with what he knew about that particular family. Apparently, there had never been any doubt as to who would inherit the Cloak; there was never more than one candidate alive at once.
Bemoaning his inability to further pursue the issue in another dimension, Harry nevertheless managed to find a promising bio on Henry Potter, his great-grandfather. He had earned the title of 'mapmaker' because he was famous for exploring and mapping wild dragon sanctuaries in the Swiss Alps. Really, he couldn't have hoped for someone with more relevant experience. Twisting the Resurrection Stone, he murmured, "Henry Irwin Potter."