Elves of Ellesmera III

The days in Ellesmera began to slip into a rhythm. The three of them would travel to the training yard in the mornings, learning and honing their swordplay with each respective elf, then head out to the Crags of Tel'naer to learn from Oromis. Harry continued to struggle with opening his mind in the glade, and subsequently became very familiar with the pair of birds and their clutch of eggs (now laid!)

Harry's and Arya's magical culinary skills grew every day. (Harry had a thought of Dobby battling with him to produce the best socks using only magic) And each day at the end of lessons, Harry would take an hour or so to teach Oromis and his students some of his own magic. Despite the usefulness of Transfiguration, Harry left that particular branch mostly up to self-study. After all, that was how he honed his skills from good to incredible. Mostly he focused on combative spells and charms that produced effects either impossible or unfeasible to achieve with the Ancient Language.

He had run through the unbreakability charm, the space expansion charm, the featherlight charm, the stasis charm, and dozens more that his three students generally managed to cast within minutes of their introduction. By providing his students with tablets of their own to browse the library, Harry enabled Oromis, Arya, and Eragon to learn at their own pace. He preferred to use face-to-face lessons teaching basics, giving them all a narrow introduction to a broad range of magics. Familiarizing them with

During lessons, Eragon learned the basics of natural philosophy while Harry learned history, politics, and negotiation from Oromis, who often enlisted Arya's help to teach so that he could focus more of his time on Eragon's education. Similarly, Harry assisted Oromis in teaching Eragon the sciences, often enlightening the old rider at the same time.

When Dagshelgr started, the magic of the elves drove every inhabitant of Du Weldenvarden to find a mate and create new life. Eragon was well protected from the magic, but enough of it slipped through the wards that he still felt the desire. Harry, on the other hand, had no intention of shutting the wonderful magic out, and spent an inordinate amount of time alone with Arya. Participating in such a grand piece of magic was a heady feeling that left Harry and Arya feeling more connected to the forest than either of them had ever been. Virtually every elf in the forest had lent their voice and magic to the midsummer festival, and its effects were visible. Though Oromis suspended lessons for the duration of Dagshelgr, Harry still went out to the glade to visit his birds, who had laid another clutch of eggs that was even bigger than the first. The first clutch had hatched and eagerly awaited each time their parents returned with food for them.

He had never thought of forests as particularly loud places. The Forbidden Forest outside Hogwarts had a quiet and foreboding air, where the only sounds besides his own footsteps was the gentle rustle of leaves and the occasional screaming monster. From what experience he had with Du Weldenvarden, it was similarly quiet. Birds still chirped in the mornings, and crickets announced their presence during the evening, but throughout the day it was uncommon to hear anything but the occasional footsteps of a deer or such.

Dagshelgr changed all of that. It filled the forest with constant mating calls, cricket chirps, and footfalls. Even the trees were in on it, creaking, swaying, and rustling as if they too, were reaching out to each other to bring forth new life. Bees buzzed ceaselessly, breeding and pollinating in an endless frenzy. The screeches of birds of prey seemed to call triumphantly to the denizens of the forest, building countless new nests to raise their young.

Underscoring everything, the rising and falling melody of song floated on the air, wafting through the trees and into the ears of every living being. It emanated from the mouths of a thousand elves, weaving their magic into the beautiful song that not even they escaped the effects of. They all seemed to revel in the lure of their magic, playing among the birds, running alongside the horses, frolicking with the deer.

The elves were not overly bashful people in general, but during Dagshelgr they were even less restrained. Harry noticed their actions become more playful, their clothing more revealing–if they bothered to wear any at all. It became commonplace for an elf to beckon another towards their dwellings to mate. Their bodies reflected their moods, having sung themselves into more physically attractive forms for the duration of the midsummer festival.

He was very glad that Arya was not the jealous type, since his wandering eye would surely have drawn censure. Indeed, her eyes wandered along with him. He was curious if her preferences were similar to her own, and asked.

"I appreciate beauty in all of its forms," she said. "Women have a charm of their own."

"Elves do not have a taboo on homosexuality?" Harry asked curiously.

She laughed. "No, we do not. Why should we, when it is the work of a song to switch between genders ourselves? Human hangups like that are more damaging than you know. Galbatorix thankfully is not deliberately oppressive of such views, but he makes no effort to reign in his underlings when they suppress their subjects. Pay close attention, and you will learn to pick out others' preferences by their reactions alone. It is not as uncommon as you would think. I have passed through plenty of human villages and seen women's eyes follow me."

He sighed. "Would that my own world were so tolerant."

Arya's face fell. "You know, from the way you go on about your world, I cannot help but build up a paradise in my mind. This is one of the first bad things I've heard about it since meeting you."

Harry nodded. "Yeah, it's a pretty dumb issue to see in such prevalence. That's not to say there aren't others, like third-world countries that still have slavery, or violent dictators of poor countries where the average standard of living is even lower than here. It isn't surprising that Galbatorix would be apathetic towards the issue; humans in Alagaesia are polytheistic and without the formal orthodoxy of the church, there is no powerful authority to condemn homosexuality."

"It is unlikely that the sentiment would spread here," she agreed. "Dwarves would be the worst offenders with their rigid social structures and strong sense of duty, but in a hypothetical era after Galbatorix, the elves will rejoin society and perpetrate our looser sexuality. We barely adhere to monogamy, and only after bearing children."

Harry hummed. "Why is that?"

"Having a child is so rare amongst elves that sex is merely a leisure activity. It is virtually impossible to have a child without deliberately trying for one for a long time and also employing magic to increase the chances of conception, so sex has little consequence."

"What happens when accidental pregnancies do happen?" he asked curiously.

Arya smiled. "They are considered blessings. So many elves wish for children that they fiercely debate with each other for the chance to adopt. And pregnancy is much easier on mothers than humans, both because of our greater strength and our skill with magic." She beckoned him towards Tialdari Hall. "Come. Let us see if we will be so blessed."

Harry couldn't help but agree.

Despite lessons with Oromis being suspended during the festival week, Harry found himself drawn back to the clearing to meditate each day. Though he did not feel much closer to success withstanding the deluge of information, he managed to deepen his connection with the minds of the animals familiar to him. Harry found the consciousness of the unhatched chicks to be fascinating. They had a slow torpidity among them, and felt more content than when Harry was basking in the afterglow with Arya. The egg whites fed them all the nutrients they needed to grow large enough to hatch, and the warmth of their mother sitting on them made them feel safe and loved. Harry also found himself captivated by the effects of Dagshelgr on the animals themselves. They did not perceive the magic as a song, per se, but more of an atmosphere. A sort of frenzied revelry that encouraged them to lay another clutch despite needing to brood and eventually feed the first one.

The anticipatory atmosphere in the forest had been replaced by a joyous time of growth. Beyond the animals, the plants also felt the effects of the magic, in a conscious way that Harry couldn't quite put into words. The yearning for sunlight and water had never been stronger, and he felt a sense of power and strength from even mere grass that he would never have associated with plants. The soil below seemed to 'taste' better, and be easier to access.

True to Arya's promise at the feast, she took the time to drag Harry away from their rooms every other day to tour Ellesmera. They watched master craftsmen and women ply their arts, toured the wonders of the royal gardens, the tiny waterfalls formed by brooks and creeks, or the museums of elves' greatest works. They visited Ellesmera's library, the largest in Du Weldenvarden, and Harry took the opportunity to copy down all the books to his computer.

In the museums were some of the most incredible pieces of craftsmanship Harry had ever seen. Scale replicas of Ilirea and Doru Areba, an entire room whose floor was covered in a topographical map of Vroengard, silk tapestries with nearly photographic-quality images of panoramas, dragons, macro and micro art. Harry was especially entranced by one which depicted a single dew covered leaf, blown up to six by twelve feet. The artist had somehow managed to capture foreground focus without the use of a camera, something that blew Harry away.

Similarly impressive were the magic exhibitions. Harry saw models of the galaxy swirling slowly in a glass orb the size of his outstretched hand, tiny triremes made from painstakingly carved wood that floated gently through the air, bizarrely enchanted flowers that grew wooden trunks, and flower stems that grew deciduous leaves. Atop a pedestal sat a ring that would filter any poison from all food and drink that passed the wearer's mouth, an anklet that would turn the user invisible with but a word, a diadem that would swap the sex of the wearer, and a necklace that caused the wearer's hair and eyes to constantly cycle through all the colors of the rainbow.

Everywhere Harry looked, some new and incredible use for magic was on display and inspired him with dozens of his own ideas, concepts for artifacts or spells he wanted to make. It nearly brought him to tears of frustration, being taunted by all the infinite possibilities magic granted him, yet being limited to perhaps an hour a day of tinkering. Between Arya essentially showing him off to the elf nobles, and Rhunon helping him make arms for the Varden, Harry had virtually no free time.

The artifact hall spurned him to invest some time into time magic. He had reached the point where spatial magic came like second nature to him, and time magic was intrinsically linked to space. Harry theorized that the relationship between them might enable him to bring some of his experience and skill with spatial magic over to temporal magic. Angela's time-turner proved to Harry that Alagaesia's magic system could technically support temporal magic, but he was inclined to use native magic to avoid paying any ruinous prices that such Word magic would demand.

Despite the time constraints placed on him by Oromis's classes, followed directly by Rhunon and Arya's respective demands on his time, Harry found himself able to clear perhaps an hour a day, spread haphazardly across the week, to cram in time for his experiments with time magic. He had trawled for nearly a full day through his family vault, in the vain hope that maybe the paranoid and unlawful Black family might have squirreled away a Time-Turner, or perhaps that the great craftsmen of the Potter family had made some of their own, but to no avail. No ultra-restricted time machine artifact made itself known throughout his search.

Harry placed an incredibly high priority on exploring the dangerous and volatile branch of magic, but there just wasn't much there. Two enormous and ancient libraries full of unseen tomes, and hardly any went into even superficial detail about Temporomancy. The ones that did generally had inserts or notes scrawled inside the covers, warning any reader of the book's highly restricted and illegal nature. Generally, any mention of time magic was prefaced with a long and gruesome passage detailing all the horrifying and cataclysmic ways in which tampering with time could go wrong, followed by a forbidding line or two, and then some bare hints as to the puzzle that was Temporomancy.

Time to explore his passions, cram more time into study, to pursue his many projects would be an incredible boon, and it was time that drove his studies into the treacherous field of magic.

Fortunately, a couple of Harry's other projects had begun to bear fruit. His magical computer now had a usable interface and a method of linking sheets of glass to the core that seemed unaffected by what distance Harry was able to put between them while constricted to Ellesmera. It lacked many of the things that made modern computers so powerful; namely the internet and the billions of other users who contributed their collective intelligence to the system. But its ability to organize and index the library alone was worth the effort he had invested in creating it. Other than that, it was a glorified calculator. But Harry found that acceptable. For one man to have come up with a working computer that actually resembled the modern archetype was fine by him, considering he was doing it in a medieval world that had yet to discover electricity or steam power.

The potions Harry had brewing had all finished, with varying levels of success. Spells designed to measure the drinkability of potions spat out unpleasant but unsurprising results; the potions where he was able to find all the same ingredients came out perfect. The more Harry was forced to substitute and guess at, the less effective and more poisonous they became. Doing all that work on substituting ingredients gave Harry an appreciation for Potion Masters that he had not possessed before.

Creating or modifying potions was like juggling a chainsaw, a grenade, and a lit blowtorch at the same time. Harry had to try to balance the chemical, mystical, and spiritual components of all his ingredients to come out with a desirable product. Balancing pH levels with the effects of skrewt shell powder was hard enough without considering the symbolic effect that an insectoid, fire-aligned creature would have on an alkaline liquid. It was enough to drive him spare.

Conversely, his alchemy skills were advancing at a fair clip. Alchemy and potions were often mistaken for being brother disciplines, when in reality they were near opposites. Potions were all about mixing and matching, a careful and elaborate balancing act that masters would tinker with to try for some useful product. Alchemy was all about purity and simplicity. Distilling things down to their most basic form, then building them back up again into something new and better. Reducing a pig down into cells, blood, plasma, and calcium, before building them back up to a human arm with his own DNA.

At Rhunon's request, Harry had been attempting to make an alloy successor to mithril. Going into it, he had the target of working orichalcum into an alloy that gave it some enchantability while retaining the magic-piercing qualities of its base metal. Despite mithril being the unquestioned best metal for enchantability, Harry held off on employing it out of fear that he would run out during the learning stage.

In some respects, working with metals was similar to the biological alchemy he'd become familiar with, but in terms of processes, it was as night and day. There was no nurturing, growth phase like Harry had come to be familiar with when working with animal parts. Materials were instant and unyielding. With magic, he could cheat and complete processes like slow boils, freezes, and distillations in minutes instead of hours, enabling him to cover much more ground experimenting than he could otherwise do. The results were definitely inferior, but workable. Yet another reason to invest in time magic.

His first experiments were done remotely from outside the blast chamber, radiology instruments sticky-charmed to the wall and diagnostic spells bristling inside. Harry had no intention of killing himself via radiation poisoning for accidentally releasing a kilogram of iron's electrons into the air. Alchemy was very closely tied to mundane chemistry, which gave him a massive head start in the form of the periodic table and assorted chemistry textbooks courtesy of Lily Potter. Harry did not even need a Philosopher's stone to create gold from lead, merely a room to weather the neutron storm that came from releasing billions of subatomic particles when transmuting the heavier isotopic mix of naturally-occuring lead into incredibly radioactive gold. Fortunately, gold's halflife was under three days and could be waited out easily.

During the week of Dagshelgr where he actually had some semblance of free time, Harry was able to construct mystical alloys out of his most abundant resources, namely steel and diamond. The result was a strong, durable metal that somehow retained the ability to rust, but was otherwise ideal for an unenchanted sword. It could be sharpened to a finer point even than Zippy the diamond-edged rapier, yet retained the flexible strength of alloyed steel that allowed it to endure the rigors of pitched battle. It also had an opacity ever-so-slightly less than one. A bright enough beam shone at it would leak through. Experiments proved that adding glass to the mixture made the blade essentially transparent, though with a grey tinge.

Experiments alloying the steel with molybdenum quelled the rust issue, but the newly-coined 'diamantium' had poor enchantability when compared to mithril, even if it was slightly better than stock steel. It was also harder to work with, prone to shattering during the forging process unless heated to an extreme degree, and only gained its incredibly durable finish with heat treatment and quenching.

Harry planned to continue refining the alloy, but resigned himself to the fact that it wasn't good enough for mass-production. Zippy 2.0 was part of an exclusive limited run of weapons that were likely to be phased out once he managed to make a useful alloy out of orichalcum. Arya, Eragon, Orik, and he wielded diamantine arms for the time being, but it was only a matter of time before they were replaced.

After Dagshelgr had come and gone, the routine changed a bit. Harry had built up all the basic skills for a fencer, and Vala had pronounced him passable. He began to spar with others, so that he could learn how the light and quick weapon matched up against axes, warhammers, and traditional swords.

He started out with Eragon, who he had noticed was not feeling well. Eragon had bags under his eyes, and his temper was shorter than normal. When Harry asked about it, Eragon dismissed his concerns, so he let the matter drop. But he resolved to keep an eye out, anyway. Some of that self-confidence Vanir kept beating out of Eragon returned when he was able to soundly thrash Harry. The wizard almost always managed to land several hits, but Vala never called them as killing blows, and he had a hard time stopping Eragon's heavier strikes.

Still, he soldiered on and developed the techniques Vala taught him, giving him the ability to eventually hold his own with Eragon, no easy feat. Eragon was not yet quite at the level of an elf, but he was certainly preternaturally quick and his strikes were heavier than even the burliest of men. And beyond that, he was an eminent swordsman. He won one in five duels with Vanir, and those were usually not the result of unforced error.

When Harry and Eragon broke even, Vala graduated him from rapier-on-sword to rapier-on-axe. He privately suspected that it was only because no elves used battle axes, and thus Harry could only spar with Orik. The trick there was to wait for Orik to commit, then punish him before he could recover. Unfortunately, what Orik lacked in elven reflexes, he made up for with strength and cunning. When they sparred, the dwarf fought guardedly and patiently, probing but never committing until Harry played his hand. Orik would try to hook the rapier and wrench it from his hand or move his grip up the haft of his axe for more fine control. In the end, Vala got bored of watching them fight since it always ended up a pre-emptive stalemate. Harry was vulnerable because of how difficult it was to deflect a battle axe with his rapier, Orik because he needed to finish the fight in one blow or the lightning-fast retaliation from the rapier would almost certainly defeat him, too, so they wound up circling slowly and never attacking.

Over the next month, Harry was introduced to spears, warhammers, pikes, halberds, quarterstaffs, and any other number of polearms. Following that, he learned how to cut arrows out of the air mid-flight, throw his sword with perfect accuracy, and reliably hit the chinks in even the most advanced, articulated armor. Harry had complained about that to Vala. After all, his rapier cut through steel armor like it wasn't even there, and he had used simple steel to make it. Unless Galbatorix's soldiers wore spellforged brightsteel armor, nothing would stop his blade once it swung. In the coming battles, Harry theorized that fighting would be like reaping wheat, except the wheat had swords to reap him back.

"You must be wary of your opponent's blade," Vala warned. "If Zippy cuts clean through, the top half of their weapon will come flying at you, and may cost you your life even as it costs your enemy's."

That hadn't been a fun demonstration. Harry had transfigured an unenchanted steel sword to test. Depending on how Vala swung when he cut the sword, it didn't always fly into his body, but it happened enough to be dangerous. Overhead cuts would drag the edge of the severed blade down his sternum, hooking swings would clatter off the side of his armor, but uppercuts were the most dangerous; the point of the broken segment would strike right under his chin. Were Harry not using enchanted armor during the demonstration, and a guarded sword, he might have died from it.

Against spellforged weapons like the elves or Galbatorix, who was known to have a rider's blade, it wouldn't matter. But rank-and-file soldiers could be just as dangerous to an experienced swordsman. They didn't have to be skilled to be dangerous, just lucky.

It had been two months since they had arrived when Orik arrived at the Crags.

"Hail!" He called out, striding purposefully down to the table where Oromis taught his lessons.

The old rider rose to greet him. "What brings you to my home, master dwarf?"

"Hrothgar's orders, master rider. I've been instructed to observe and report on the results of Eragon's training for the dwarves."

Oromis frowned. "The secrets of the riders are for riders, alone."

"Aye, I do not begrudge you your secrets. But these are uncertain times, and Eragon's training is too important to Alagaesia to be hidden behind obfuscation and secrecy. The dwarves are throwing our entire race behind Eragon and the Varden's campaign to overthrow Galbatorix; we have a right to verify that he is being trained."

The old rider sighed. "And this is a matter of honor for you?"

"Honor and duty," Orik nodded firmly.

"Very well, then. Fortunately, we are not doing anything overly dangerous, and the lesson has only just begun. Would you draw up a chair, Harry?"

Orik sat down and eyed Oromis's students with curiosity. Oromis was handing out polished rectangular slates, one side covered in a dull grey coating that looked not unlike dark graphite.

"Today we shall be making fairths. Though Arya is undoubtedly familiar with the process, it is good practice to revisit, anyways." He held up a slate and gestured to the coating. "Fairths are images imposed on some flat surface with magic, an accurate depiction of the mental image the caster holds when they speak the spell, which I shall teach you in a moment. These fairths have been prepared with a coating that enables the spell to recreate any color with the pigment on it."

Harry toyed with his blank slate, rubbing his finger against the perfectly cut edges. "The spell is thus; "let the image in my mind's eye be imprinted on this surface." Once you are familiar with the spell, it can be reduced to "Imprint image." Remember, the fairth will only be as clear as the image in your mind. If your focus wanders, it will be unrecognizable. Similarly, your focus must be broad enough to capture an entire scene in detail, else the edges will be blurry and unfocused. Be careful to include everything which you wish to see in your mind when you release the magic." Oromis gestured. "Now go and find something worth immortalizing. Summon me when you wish to try."

Harry found the lesson to be interesting, if less useful to him than it would be to Eragon, since photography and cameras did not exist in Alagaesia yet. "Oromis, can you place Naegling on the table?" He requested politely. The rider inclined his head and drew the yellow blade from its scabbard, placing it lengthwise across the table. The black glyph naming it contrasted sharply with the iridescent yellow of the mithril blade, which contrasted in turn with the worn leather grip wrapped about a steel hilt that had been polished by Oromis's fingers over centuries until it gleamed.

Carefully, he propped the hilt up a bit on a pile of scrolls, ensuring he did not crush or damage them. It took a moment to arrange them so the blade did not slip off, and that one side of the grossguard was lower than the other so that the face of the blade would be visible rather than the profile. Harry scattered a couple of quills next to it and put an inkpot to the left of the pommel, propping another quill out of it.

"What are you doing?" Oromis asked curiously.

"Back home, we had these devices called 'cameras' that would capture a visible image instantly, and could be printed by another device called a 'printer' which would match the image with a mix of three dyes that could reproduce practically any color. And it wasn't magic, so everyone could do it. Those pictures were called photos, and an entire branch of art evolved out of it; photography. I think that for beginners, cameras are much more versatile. They require no skill to take a perfect picture, and there are settings like filters, exposure rate, depth of focus, and the like that can manipulate how a picture looks in contrast to how the real world appeared. But I imagine a skilled fairth-maker could simply conjure up an imaginary image and put it on a fairth without any medium."

"That's true," Oromis allowed. "Though it takes great skill to lie with a fairth. It is possible, but requires significant mental skills. That, or an active imagination."

Harry sighed. "This would be an illustrator's ultimate dream; the ability to instantly take their mental image and put it on paper without going through the rigors of actually drawing it."

The old rider's lips quirked. "Perhaps. But I meant to ask, why are you putting my sword atop a pile of scrolls?"

Harry shrugged. "I'm trying to capture the essence of a rider. You say they aren't just fighters, but explorers, thinkers, artists. The rider sword is the second most iconic thing about the riders, right after the dragons. The scrolls are a good juxtaposition against it; fighting versus learning. Though I think I could do better with exotic and strange baubles from all over Alagaesia to represent exploring, or maybe an illuminated scroll for artistry."

Oromis seemed at a momentary loss for words. "I had not thought to use fairths like that. Now I am curious to see what you make of yours."

Harry nodded, grasping his fairth and scooting back his chair. He knelt on the soft grass, carefully positioning his head like the lens of a camera, so that he might capture the image from exactly the right angle. Reaching for his magic, Harry carefully observed everything about the bits he wanted to capture. The background was unimportant. He traced his keen elvish eyesight over the engraved knotwork on the pommel, fixing in his mind the way the yellowed diamond caught the sunlight and how Naegling's blade seemed to shimmer with iridescence. The stark black of its name imprinted just above the crossguard, and the razor sharp edge of the blade.

He saw the faded and worn edges of the scrolls, the tall white feather poking out from the glass inkwell and the neat and tidy black script that lined the paper. The pair of quills that seemed to have spilled onto the foreground, and the slight bend in the parchment where Naegling's hilt rested atop it. "Let the image in my mind's eye be imprinted on this surface."

The surface of the fairth swirled for a second before settling. Harry studied it for a moment, slightly disappointed. Oromis held out a hand. "Kausta." The slate flew into his hand. "For a first attempt, this is excellent," Oromis praised. "More so because the blurred background was intentional." He turned it so they both could see. "But there is room for improvement. Look at the open scroll in the foreground. You captured the text perfectly, but did not keep the actual letters and words clear in your head. Thus, they are depicted as meaningless symbols here. Remember that you must hold everything in your mind that you wish to be captured. Else your subconscious will fill it in with noise or blur. Capturing written text with this technique is a mastery-level technique, though. You did well."

He slid over another slate. "Now I want you to try a faith without a blurred background. Every part of the image should be clear and sharp. Perhaps a landscape image?"

Oromis stood, and moved to observe his other students. He thought that Harry had done astonishingly well. The exercise gave him a good insight into how his students were progressing with the meditative technique they were learning in the glade. Harry's fairth was a promising sign. Though he did not manage to capture everything in front of him, he was able to hold all the details of his target in his mind. The only thing left to him was a broadening of his focus. Naegling and the scrolls alike were in sharp detail, but the background remained blurred. Once he managed to capture that, too, Oromis knew he would be nearly done with meditation.

He strode across the grassy field towards the fringe of the woods, quietly marveling at the painless ease of his movements since Harry's operation. A feast was hardly enough reward for such a life-changing service. And that he returned Glaedr's leg and his magic? Oromis was at a loss for expressing his gratitude.

The old rider honed in on his second pupil, the Queen's daughter Arya. He remembered her childhood better than he remembered any other. Oromis had been crippled early in the Fall, and was confined to Ellesmera during those dark times. How many riders had he seen pass through the leafy city, bidding him farewell and disappearing into the gaping black maw of Galbatorix's madness?

When he was not stuck in the healing halls with the partner of his life, Oromis watched over the King's daughter as a personal favor. The Arya then was so different from the Arya laying on her back in the shaggy grass. She was bright and vivacious, full of energy and mischief. When King Evandar left for war, she had such faith in him that he would return. Oromis well remembered how his own parents felt invincible to him. They were the mighty lord and lady of house Thrandurin, were they not? No mere human rider could slay them. His confidence had been badly shaken by his crippling at the hands of Kialandi and Formora, but Oromis had always viewed his elders as infallible, even without the might of dragons behind them.

Then they died on the fields of battle. He remembered well when Lord Dathedr touched his mind, presence filled with sorrow and regret. "The King has fallen," He had said. "I'm sorry, Oromis, but your parents were with him."

Elves were a close-knit family. They had never needed to harden their hearts against loss like the humans and dwarves, who marched daily, one step closer to their inevitable graves. The range of mental communication meant that Oromis talked daily with his mother even when he was doing his duties on Vroengard. Even a century later, he could so clearly remember how wide their smiles were, how proud they'd been when he brought home Glaedr, a little golden hatchling that changed his life forever.

House Thrandurin had always been a small, close-knit family. It was just Oromis and his parents. But they were everything to him, his mother and father and later, little Glaedr as well. "We were blessed to have you, little one," his father would say. "Six centuries of companionship before you came along and made us a family."

"Not for lack of trying," his mother would say flirtatiously. Oromis would clap his hands over his ears and pretend to have heard nothing. He found it bittersweet that now Glaedr was calling him little one instead of his parents. In turn, Oromis had called Arya that.

When Evandar died, It had felt like the fight drained right out of Arya. With her mother's aspirations for the knotted throne hanging above her head, the darling girl he had babysat became detached and aloof, hiding her personality behind courtly manners and royal demeanor. He tried his hardest to draw that exuberant child out, giving her beginner's rider lessons, flying with her atop Glaedr, and playing little games with her, but Arya had seemed determined to retreat from the world, and hide herself from everyone.

Oromis knelt on the grass next to her. Arya held her fairth close to her chest, staring unmoving at the sky above. "Would you permit me to see your fairth?"

She extended it to him silently, eyes fixed upwards. He turned it over, heart clenching at the image. It was King Evandar, features he would recognize anywhere. But it was not the Evandar he had known. He was kneeling down, a hand outstretched towards the surface of the image. A little, roughly hewn bird perched on his shoulder, tiny asymmetrical teeth marks on its wing. The slate showed a face smiling with infinite kindness, a soft, private smile he showed only to his family. His silver hair was tousled and a bit snarled, like he had just taken off his circlet.

"I miss him, too." Oromis admitted.

He sighed unsteadily, reclining in the grass. The weight of being the last rider hung about his shoulders like an iron mantle. For a moment, he cursed whatever circumstances of fate brought him to this moment. I have time for this, at least.

The cloudless azure sky stretched above him, a flat blue emptiness that yawned from all four corners of the earth. "It is times like these where I envy the dwarves and humans for their faith. Ours does seem a colder world for being alone, doesn't it?" Arya remained silent, unmoving.

"I knew your father reasonably well," he admitted. "Else I'm sure he would never have entrusted you to me when he was away at war. I remember a time before he left, he had dressed you in your mother's cloak. You were practically swimming in crimson fabric, teething on that little wooden bird. He had put his crown on your head, but it was too big and hung on your ear down to your chin."

The ghost of a smile tugged at Arya's lips.

"Your mother was a different woman, then. Quicker to laugh, she could be just as silly as Evandar, but she was always nervous that your grandmother might see. Your mate seems to be drawing that side out of her through sheer irritation." Her cheeks pinked slightly.

"Here, let's trade," Oromis propped himself up on an elbow, plucking a blank slate off his stack and offering it to her. "I'll hold onto it for you. Show me a picture of now." Arya wordlessly exchanged fairths with him. "You remember how to do it?"

She rolled her eyes, smiling slightly. "Yes, Oromis. I remember your lessons." Holding the slate, her eyes cast about for something worth immortalizing in stone. He watched her, curious what she'd choose to capture of the moment. Arya seemed to come to a decision, rolling slightly onto her side so she faced him laying on the grass. He raised a curious eyebrow.

Arya began to look at him intensely, as if drinking in his features with her eyes. "Image, imprint." She handed the slate over, making grabby gestures with her hand. Oromis laughed and swapped again, returning Evandar's fairth to her.

His own face stared up at him. Oromis saw that she had mastered the exercise, adding and embellishing on top of the original image. The wooden bird covered in teeth marks perched in his long silver hair, its feet tangled up in it. Islanzadi's crimson cloak draped over him, though he could still see even the intricate details of his own outfit underneath and in the gaps and openings of the cloak. The crown was conspicuously absent.

There were other little things, bits of the image that Oromis knew came from the heart. In the fairth, he was laughing good naturedly, a genuine sparkle in his eye and a slightly raised incredulous eyebrow. He was also more at ease than he had ever looked or felt since Kialandi and Formora, and then the death of his parents. Had Harry's treatment really changed him so much? He was honored to be the person in the fairth. That man meant something to Arya. "Do you mind if I keep this?" he asked.

Arya shook her head.

"Excellent." Oromis quickly warded it against shattering and sent it floating into his home. "Shall we go see what my other students have wrought?" He offered Arya a hand to help her up. She clasped it and got to her feet, and nodded.

Eragon had chosen a tree stump that had been blasted apart by lightning in the storm the night before. Oromis scrutinized the shards of wood and the flecks of debris, needles, and leaves that had gotten into it. Crystallized bubbles of sap oozed out of the wounded wood, reflecting the sunlight like some organic diamond. He studied the slate Eragon held. "May I?" He reached and took the fairth from his hands.

It was an excellent first attempt for a rider in training. It lacked the comprehensive detail Harry's had, but then, Oromis had not expected it to. The focal point of the fairth was in perfect, vivid detail, but beyond it the colors and shapes softened and blurred together, like a watercolor painting with too much water. "Very good," Oromis praised. "You are able to take in and comprehend a vast amount of detail in a narrow focus. Now all you must learn is to broaden it. It took your father and Morzan years to achieve this level of clarity in this exercise. It's why you don't see paintings replaced by fairths; the talent to make one properly is rare and difficult to learn."

Eragon seemed heartened by the praise, which Oromis was gladdened by. Harry was no cruel Morzan to taunt his fellow student with his superiority, but his greater skills could just as easily lead to resentment in the young rider, and Oromis did not want to see the son following the steps of the father. "Do you wish to keep this fairth?" he asked. When Eragon shook his head, he walked his student through the spell to reset the pigment to dull grey.

"Technically, you do not need to do this to overwrite the image, but I find it's best to make a clear distinction between available canvas and abstract art, lest you accidentally obliterate something important to someone." Eragon laughed a little.

"No master, I would not want to do that." The young rider cast the spell easily. Oromis was unable to find fault in his technique, either. The spell worked as intended, and returned the colorful (if rather formless) image back to flat grey.

"Excellent. Now, try again. This time, use an image you are very familiar with, enough that you could fill a picture with details. Fix it in your mind." Oromis watched Eragon intently. Without entering his mind, he was much restrained in his ability to see what his student was doing, but one could glean a lot from mere facial expressions if they had the patience to learn. Eragon's eyes seemed to unfocus as if pondering what to capture. His eyes flicked to Arya, but he seemed to think better of it. Oromis was curious what Eragon's unfiltered thoughts were of Arya, but the act of immortalizing them on stone could do more harm than good. What thoughts men held in their mind were no business of his. Riders only intruded upon them at the greatest need.

The ghost of a smile graced Eragon's lips. He paused for a moment, brows furrowing in thought. Recalling all the details of the image, Oromis guessed. He watched carefully. This was the last step, maintaining a clear, cohesive image in your mind. He was mildly surprised when Eragon closed his eyes, his face going flat and emotionless.

The surface of the fairth swirled into a twist of vibrant blues, whites, and dark greens before resolving itself into a breathtaking image. It showed Saphira with her wings outstretched, flying regally above a mountain range that Oromis was sure was the Spine. There were sparse clouds in the sky, white clumps that added texture to the sky rather than overcast it. Saphira was younger in the picture, Oromis could see the telltale gangliness of adolescent dragons, her spine spikes were much shorter and her head much larger in proportion to her body. He was impressed by the skill with which Eragon had wrought the fairth. Not only was the background of the mountain range in sharp detail, Saphira herself looked so real it was as if the fairth was a window into the sky.

"You altered the perspective," Oromis noted. The framing of the picture was such that it clearly did not come straight from Eragon's eye, but rather a point above and in front of her, off to the side.

Eragon nodded. "The image of the Spine comes from my disastrous first flight, combined with the knowledge of its trails and topography that I've learned from hunting there for years."

"Masterfully done," he praised honestly. "I had not expected this from you or Harry, not least until you had mastered the meditation exercise in the glade. I can find little fault in your technique. Let us return to the table and share what we all have learned."

"How did it go?" Orik asked Eragon. "Harry was just showing me his own work. Incredible. If everyone could do it, our enamel-carvers would be out of a job."

"Well, I think?" Eragon said hesitantly. "My first attempt wasn't great, but Oromis said my second was 'masterful.' I hope getting it right once will make further fairths easier."

"Nice," Harry grinned. "I think you win this one, Eragon. I've got some experience with a similar art, but it seems that my preconceptions are hindering me. That, and the training I did in a sport I used to play. When I do not consciously focus on something, motion or shininess splits my attention and makes it harder to hold a cohesive image in my brain."

Oromis and Arya took their seats. "I had you do this exercise because it gives me a very visual insight into how your minds work. Eragon, Harry, both of you struggle to accept the influx of thoughts present when you open your mind to the world around you, do you not?" They nodded. Orik sat forward curiously.

Oromis gestured for the three of them to slide forward their fairths. He pointed at Harry's. "See here, the various areas of focus? But the rest of the image is very blurred. The bigger picture eludes your gaze. You have the curious ability to split your focus and still comprehend an incredible level of detail, but that will only get you so far." He pushed back the image of the fruit bowl and folded his fingers.

"This exercise is among the hardest and most rewarding skills the riders had. There is a saying which I feel fits the idea: You must see the forest between the trees. Except, with this exercise you must also see the trees between the forest. It is this dual-mindedness that is so hard to master. Even once you manage to sit in the glade with a tranquil and reflective mind, passively hearing the thoughts of every living being around you, you will have only managed half the battle. Far harder is your second task; to understand it all. Once you manage it, in the area your mental senses cover, you will have virtual omniscience."

Oromis tapped the table with a fingernail. "For example, the seity of the trees and the warmth they feel from the sun can help us deduce the weather patterns both in the past and those yet to come. By listening to the grass and dirt, we may learn if any travelers have passed through, or perhaps an army. The deer tell me of the predators in the forest, even beyond the range of my sight. The keen sight of the falcons overhead are mine to command, as are the sensitive noses of the wolves and the powerful hearing of the rabbits. You will instantly know if even the notion of attacking you crosses the mind of another human, and how it shall occur is laid bare beneath your gaze."

He saw that while Eragon had a faintly awestruck expression, Harry's face was unreadable. Oromis gentled his voice. "Remember, it is how you use these skills that makes your character. Brom taught you that invading someone's mind in this manner was a heinous transgression against anyone, and reinforced the sanctity of the mind and the privacy everyone should be entitled to. These things are still true. What you learn from this skill will be more than you ever wanted to hear from your fellow humans, yet still you must respect their privacy. Unless they plan to do something you cannot allow, do not act on the knowledge you glean. Understand it, yes. Learn from it, yes. But allow it to color your perception of them? No."

He reached for Eragon's fairth and slid it towards himself. "Had you made this image straight from the source, I would assume you had mastered the technique. As it is, you have superimposed Saphira over a familiar landscape." Eragon opened his mouth, but Oromis shook his head with a faint smile. "That does not make it any less impressive. It means that you already have the mental acuity to hold a clear image in your mind. Now, all you must do is learn to see your present surroundings more clearly. If you have not already mastered the meditation in the glade, I imagine it will come to you sooner than later. Learn to take in your surroundings without discrimination. When making a fairth, the meanest blade of grass is just as important as the shade of the sky."

Oromis picked up Arya's second fairth with a grin. "You have obviously mastered the technique, Arya. Coupled with your superior experience, I presume you have managed to hear everything during your meditation?" She nodded.

"Good, then there is little left for me to teach you in that field. You will continue to practice and grow your understanding and comprehension of the deluge of minds."

Orik cleared his throat. "Am I to understand, master rider, that you teach your students to read the minds of everyone and everything around them?"

He sighed tiredly. "It is not something I would have you make known," Oromis warned. "But yes, this is something my students must master. Tell me, master dwarf, if you were Galbatorix and you wanted someone dead, how would you do it?"

Orik frowned. "I'd send my bloody army after them, or hop on my dragon and torch them."

"A waste," Oromis proclaimed. "All it takes is for Galbatorix to take one of his many magicians, force them to swear a binding oath to obey him unhesitatingly, and send them on a suicide-attack against their target. Any magic user will tell you: in a fight against a magician, no one casts a spell until there is a clear winner. Magic cannot be blocked and must be directly countered, but the amount of vectors and the speed of the attack makes it all but impossible to live through an attack.

"Magicians attack each other's minds. Once one breaks in, they are able to either prevent the attack from happening directly, or else see the thoughts and thus know the nature of the attack their opponent intends to make. If I said 'strike Eragon with a bolt of lightning' right now, Eragon would surely die. But before that attack lands, there is a moment in time where he is free to retaliate against me. A suicidal magician-assassin will not bother trying ot break into their target's mind, they will simply cast a lethal spell and accept death."

"So the only way to guard against them is…" Orik breathed.

"To know what they're thinking before they ever attack," Oromis confirmed. "Quite so. Did today's lesson satisfy your duty, Orik?"

The dwarf nodded. "Aye, it did. Thank you, Oromis, for allowing me to fulfill it."

Harry peered into dull, unmoving emerald eyes of the exact same shade as his own. He poked its cheek, feeling the warmth of a living body beneath his fingertip. "Looking at your own soulless body is really weird," he remarked to no one in particular.

On the table in front of him was his first successful homunculi. He was fortunate that the instructions he followed led him to a soulless, mindless body instead of a proper clone. Harry didn't know what he would do with a bunch of baby-selves in adult bodies. With his luck, they'd all have his tremendous magical strength. They would probably have accidental magic incidents that leveled the forest.

He decided to name the body Larry. It was him, but lame. Larry's heart beat and his lungs breathed without any outside input, but that was about the limit. If he wanted Larry to eat, he had to put food in his mouth and externally manipulate his jaw, then massage his throat to get him to swallow. Harry only made that mistake once. Larry wasn't potty trained.

Now, an IV fed fluids and nutrients directly into his bloodstream, and a catheter took care of any accidents. When he wasn't messing with it, Harry left Larry in a suspended animation tube. It had a release hatch on the inside, just in case. If he were being honest, Harry wasn't sure what would happen if his current body died. Would his status as Master of Death confer a Horcrux-ghost-like state to his soul? Or would he have to ask God to send him back again. They were questions that he wanted an answer to.

"You finished it?" Arya came down the steps to his workshop.

"Yeah," Harry nodded distractedly. "But I think it won't be so hard to do this if I'm bodiless. The Bone-Flesh-Blood ritual creates the whole thing in like a few seconds." He shook his head, then tugged Arya deeper into the lab. Harry led her through the Operating Room and out a door in the back that she was unfamiliar with.

It had the same sterile white walls and ceiling of the Operating Room, the floor the same drab laminated grey. But it was dimly illuminated by blue lightstrips that bounced their light off the walls, providing softer lighting than the naked halogen tubes that lit the main room. A gleaming chrome countertop wrapped around three sides of the room, the center dominated by an adult-sized cradle made from glass and metal.

"Check this out," Harry grinned, rolling out a deep drawer that stretched from the countertop to the floor. Inside was a deep glass cylinder filled with the strange amniotic fluid. But it was the contents of the cylinder that really shocked Arya. Inside the tube was a tiny, infantile blue dragon.

"How?" she breathed in awe.

"Once I figured out human homunculi, dragons weren't much harder," Harry admitted. It was true. They had much higher magical density and required a lot more power, but the same skills applied. "Don't get too eager, this isn't a new baby dragon. It's soulless and mindless like Larry. But it does mean that if Saphira dies in battle, she can just take over this body provided her soul stays on this plane of existence."

"Everything functions the same? She could still have children?" Arya asked.

"Yeah. Hell, she could have children now if she wanted." The elf made a face.

"It would be improper to mate with her teacher."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Without Glaedr. Or Shruikan, or the other two eggs. Back on my world, the mundane scientists figured out this branch of science called 'cloning.' Basically, every cell in your body contains DNA, this super-long string of chemically-encoded data that holds all the information needed to build your entire body. Your foot calluses contain the information to make eyeball cells, and vice versa. Cloning involves taking a special type of cell called a stem-cell that hasn't been specialized yet and tricking it into thinking it's a zygote, the cell that is made during conception by a combination of sperm and ova.

"They implant the stem-cell in a female animal that can grow it, usually cows for mammals, and after the proper gestation period, viola, the cow gives birth to any other mammal that will fit its birth canal. Or not, in the case of a C-section."

"Saphira will be able to have children by herself?" Arya asked incredulously.

Harry tilted his hand back and forth. "Kinda. Remember, any clones she has of herself will be exact duplicates. They will have the same blue scales, the same body shape, the same general disposition, etc. Obviously, how they are raised will cause them to differ, but they will also all be female. Genetic diversity comes from the shuffling of genes that occurs when two parents contribute random parts of their own DNA to the child."

"Because Saphira has female DNA, she can only give female DNA to her children?" Arya clarified.

"Right. I think it might maybe be possible to create a female clone from a male with a bit of genetic editing, but it would also probably come with horrifying birth defects. This actually segues into into an issue I have been considering for a while," Harry admitted. "Five samples is really not enough to create a viable species."

"What do you- oh," Arya breathed. "No." She looked horrified. "You mean…?"

"Even if at least one of the other two eggs was female, and each dragon bred extensively with all the others of the opposite sex, and I used magic and cloning technology to make artificial crosses between each pair of males and females, that still comes out to a dangerously small gene pool. And this is the best case scenario, Arya," he reminded her.

"I doubt Saphira really wants to have sex with Shruikan, nor Glaedr Saphira. Surely you are familiar with the dangers of inbreeding?" She nodded mutely. "Well let me explain exactly why it's such a terrible idea. DNA works in pairs, one from the mother and one from the father. Of course, these pairs don't always match, so traits are divided into 'dominant' and 'recessive.' Imagine the mother has red hair and the father, black hair. Red hair is recessive so when that particular allele reads 'rB,' the child has black hair. If two redheads had children, since they both had recessive red hair, their genes could only read 'rr.'

"Most birth defects are caused by genetics. Back home, the entire human genome was mapped and pretty much every genetic defect was known. Prospective parents could go in and have tests to see which recessive genetic defects they each had. The doctor would compare and estimate what the chances were that their child would get both of the same recessive gene, then give them the odds that the child would have some life-altering disability.

"Now, imagine that a mother from Dras-Leona has one hundred recessive genes that, if paired with another recessive copy, would make the child unviable. Each of her five children have perhaps half of those lethal genes. Her husband has his own hundred lethal genes, but he is from Teirm and they only share one of the same. It's vanishingly improbable that they would both contribute that same gene, so they have no problems.

"Now, imagine that of those five children, two of them try to have children. They might not have exactly the same hundred lethal genes, but they probably do have like fifty. The chance that their children inherit that lethal gene is fifty times higher than their parents. And that's not all. Besides the lethal genes, there are thousands of recessive genetic disorders that all rear their ugly heads, and if by some miracle the child manages to dodge every single certain-death allele, they will at the very least be plagued with multiple genetic disorders, some combination of which could be just as lethal as certain death. Say, cystic fibrosis and lung cancer."

"Incest is bad," Arya repeated dully.

"Incest is bad," Harry agreed.

"So how many dragons would you need for a viable species?"

Harry rubbed his chin. "Modern science would have you believe the 50/500 rule, that you need fifty specimens to avoid extinction by inbreeding, and five hundred for a stable population that can evolve with the environment. Otherwise, you risk the small population spontaneously drifting away from viability due to things like food scarcity, differing diets, change in climate, etc."

Arya frowned. "Dragons can survive in any climate. Saphira was plenty fine in the Spine and the dragons' ancestral home is Du Fell Nangoroth, the Blasted Falls in the center of the Hadarac desert. Is there no chance that three would be enough?"

Harry sighed. He didn't want to raise Arya's hopes just to dash them when Saphira's grandchildren start showing the effects of inbreeding. "Five is simply not enough. I don't want to give you false hope, but there are a lot of things I could do to cheat. There are rituals, spells, and potions to combat the effects of inbreeding, methods of forcing conception to produce a male or female, and treatments for genetic defects. If Glaedr and Shruikan are not going to contribute to the gene pool, at least I could clone them so they have their own 'children' that are diverse from the other three."

"Anything else?" she pressed.

"Yeah, but options get increasingly distasteful from here on out," he warned. "If there is any flesh or keratin or bones left from killed dragons, I may be able to reconstruct a complete specimen and clone dead dragons. Eggshells might also have enough DNA to work."

"Didn't you say your clones were mindless, soulless husks?"

Harry shook his head. "No, homunculi are soulless. Creating a clone with magic is really quite easy. 99% of the difficulty in making a homunculi involves making absolutely completely certain that it does not develop a soul or consciousness. Otherwise, when someone goes to inhabit it, instead of it simply becoming their body, it becomes possession which is degrading to both the host and the spirit." He gestured to the infant dragon-homunculi.

"So what do you say? Should we propose this to Oromis and the dragons?"

Arya laughed delightedly. "Why would you be nervous, they'll be overjoyed!'

He rolled his eyes. "That would have gone over so well. Hey Saphira, surprise, you're a mother!" Arya pushed his shoulder.

"You know what I mean. You should tell- No wait. If you can develop something useful before the Agaeti Blodhren, you should present it as your gift. The elves would write songs and poems about you until the end of time if you manage it," Arya was breathless with excitement, her green eyes sparkling.

"But check with Oromis first?" he clarified.

"Check with Oromis first," Arya nodded.

"How certain are you that this will work?" Oromis asked.

"Pretty much one hundred." Harry opened the drawer he was keeping Saphira's homunculus in. "This proves that it can be done. If it was for some reason impossible to artificially create a whole dragon, the homunculus would have failed. Cloning is a slightly different process, but the results will be the same."

"I noticed your homunculus does not have an egg," Oromis observed. "That will mean that none of your dragons can be bonded to a rider. In order for that to happen, a certain spell must be said over an infant dragon's egg."

Harry frowned. "I used a method that creates the homunculus directly as a fetus. The embryonic method risks developing a soul. If I were to clone a dragon, it'd probably have to be gestated by some other animal. Which class of animal is a dragon? It's not a mammal since they lay eggs, I would presume reptile?"

"Dragons are generally put into classes of their own," Oromis frowned. "But reptiles are certainly the closest. How is this relevant?"

Harry nodded. "Well, I can grow a zygote in a petri dish for a while, but eventually you need a proper way to gestate the embryonic dragon. When cloning mammals, we use cows. Dragons are obviously not mammals, and thus the umbilical cord would be useless. Without the nutrients inside the egg, the dragon would simply starve trying to draw nutrients from amniotic fluid. Thus, the question of if they are reptiles. I need to find the closest animal to a dragon and implant the zygote inside it, so it forms a shell and lets the embryo grow."

The old rider shook his head. "I fear that this will not work. Dragon eggs are laid completely ready to hatch. The dragon inside can wait virtually forever for environmental conditions to be right before hatching. In wild dragons, that is usually dictated by availability of food and such. For the rider dragons, they wait until someone suitable touches the egg that they want to bond with. If you put your zygote inside a lizard, she would try to lay it immediately and thus the egg will not develop into a proper baby dragon."

Harry sighed. "Then I can simply use homunculus-Saphira's womb to gestate the eggs. This is not something I'm just going to give up on. I just wanted your opinion on the ethics involved. Where I'm from, human cloning is banned because some people consider it-" he wrinkled his nose distastefully, making air quotes, "-unethical." He snorted. "To be fair, having a womb unconnected to any body implies that I killed a dragon or ripped the womb out to get it, which is probably why this kind of magic is illegal according to British Law."

Oromis hummed. "I would not see infant dragons killed while you experiment to figure this magic out, but I am willing to sacrifice a few chickens and lizards for it as they are not sapient. I have conferred with Glaedr and he agrees; so long as you exercise caution and use your best judgement on if something is morally wrong, both of us are eager to see what you will manage. Galbatorix still must die, but this gives me hope that the dragons will have their own part of our revenge."

And thus a new project was added to Harry's plate. Because of the mass of weapons and armor Rhunon and he had already made, their appointments further decreased from alternating days to weekly meetings, and usually to experiment with new mystical alloys instead of mass-producing for the Varden. It gave him more time to pursue time magics. Harry found himself spending much more time than he liked in the blast chamber experimenting on an old pocket watch he'd found in his vault.

By tinkering with the parameters of the stasis charm, Harry could reliably freeze, slow, and accelerate local time. Simple charms like that were cheap to cast, and had easily modifiable parameters like duration, area, and intensity. As a bonus, they affected him, too, if he cast it so he was inside the area of effect when starting the spell. That was the eureka moment Harry had been waiting for. After his discovery, Harry went to petition Arya for an area in Ellesmera that he could use to construct a 'big ugly building,' in his own words.

"Why do you need a…?"

"Plot of land measuring at least one hundred by one hundred by one hundred feet. I figured out how to accelerate time in a specific area, but I don't want to test it inside a space-expansion charm for fear that they will mess with each other. Once I iron out the kinks in the magic, I expect I'll be able to apply it to a room within the tent, but I need to make sure it doesn't rip a hole in the universe in the mean time."

"You couldn't do this with a ten foot room?" Arya asked bewildered. They were sitting on a stone bench in the middle of an open-air park that she had been touring alongside him. At their feet, a creek no wider than a single stride burbled past, gushing over polished dark stones.

Harry rolled his eyes. "I can do this with a ten inch room, but that's not realistic for my purposes. The whole point of this exercise is to set up a workshop of sorts inside, so I have much more time to invest in the many many projects that have been foisted upon me. Without expansion charms, all I could really do in a ten foot room would be to read." He gestured with a hand that held a sandwich, breaking off a corner to feed the mama duck and her ducklings, waddling along behind her.

"Besides, with a large enough aperture on the outside, theoretically Glaedr and Saphira could use the room, too."

"Very well. I shall petition mother about this." Arya bit into her own food, chewing silently.

"Good," Harry sighed. "I'd have done this in the middle of nowhere beyond the Endless Plains, but the wards around Ellesmera mean that I would have to physically fly to the edge of the wardline, walk past it, then apparate there and back."

Swallowing, she nodded. "I agree. This could be an incredible advantage over Galbatorix. If it works, Oromis will no longer be restricted to perhaps a single year of training that must contain the condensed lessons of a decades-long education."

Harry hummed. "I'm not so sure he'll go for it. Unless I manage to make the interior vast enough to contain the Crags of Tel'naer and use magic to fake a whole ecosystem, he might not use it for anything but educational lessons. Saphira's flying lessons and the mini-fieldtrips Glaedr takes her on will be impossible from within my proposed Room of Flowing Time."

Arya sent him a bemused look. "Room of Flowing Time?"

"What? It sounds poetic and fancy, much better than 'time chamber,' or 'room of ultimate cheating.'" Harry crossed his arms defensively. She rolled her eyes.

"Room of Flowing Time, then. Mother will surely agree to that."

"I do not agree to this," Islanzadi stated. "An 'eyesore,' as you coin it, may be visible from overhead. Can you not do this belowground? Ellesmera is built into the forest for more than just personal aesthetic preferences. The very city is so well camouflaged that Galbatorix could fly right overhead and never notice us. Submit plans to me for the exterior design, and I may agree if it can either be covered by the canopy or else if little enough of it protrudes from the ground or a tree that it could be missed."

Harry twirled his holly wand between his fingers. "I can make the top flush with the ground, if you want, but one of the reasons I wanted to make it so large is so that Glaedr could fit inside. Would that be amenable to you?"

The queen nodded, tapping her fingers on the knotted throne beneath her. "Indeed. Once it is complete, I shall send a team of spellweavers to grow foliage overtop of it without obstructing whatever dragon-door you put in it. Laetri!" She called.

A responsible-looking elf with silver hair and dark eyebrows came forwards. "Your majesty?" He asked.

"Please locate a plot of land one-hundred by one-hundred feet, where there are no tunnels or subterranean features below." She gestured to Laetri, addressing Harry. "My seneschal will assist you. You are dismissed."

Harry, paragon of maturity that he was, briefly thanked Islanzadi before sticking his tongue out at her, disappearing down a side hallway that led deeper into the capitol. It might have been his eyes playing tricks on him, but he could have sworn he saw the corner of Islanzadi's lips twitch.

Laetri led Harry down a grand corridor supported by tall stone pillars carved in the likeness of trees, whose petrified branches peeked between green enamelled leaves. Blue-white werelights floated at regular intervals along the ceiling, bathing the pale white trunks in ethereal light. The elf navigated the beautiful architecture with a detachment that spoke of decades of familiarity. They turned right under an archway formed from some ultramarine stone and into a warmly-lit studio office. A long window on the far wall opened to a courtyard with a grassy floor and wrought-iron furniture.

Inside was airier than Harry would have suspected from the almost claustrophobic style of forestry construction. There were shelfs perpendicular to the right-hand wall that jutted out perhaps eight feet, like the teeth in a comb, but that was where they ended. The rest of the office was open floor, interspersed with those slanted architecture tables and a countertop covered in folders and stacks of parchment. The left side of the room was dominated by an enormous crescent-shaped desk absolutely covered in papers. Cartography and calligraphy tools littered the surface, interspersed by three thick tomes and an advanced-looking abacus with strange extra rows and beads that Harry could only guess the purpose of.

Laetri sat at his chair and shuffled the piles of parchment about officiously. "Off the top of my head, I can think of four places that will work for you. I gather you intend to make this dragon-accessible?" He clarified. Harry nodded. "Then I believe either of these two will work." The elf leafed through a loosely-bound sheaf of paper, marking off one page with an inserted finger before letting the thing fall open to a map. It was divided into neat regions of varying pastels, tidy black scrawl labeling each one with an owner and a name.

Pointing to a white space with thin black topographical demarcations and twisting starbursts that Harry presumed were trees and their roots, the elf continued. "This one is close to the city center, near where Eragon's home is and just beyond the opposite side of the area from the Crags of Tel'naer. Benefits of this are easy accessibility and proximity to all other districts for if you needs must call in another elf for whatever reason." He put his third finger into the sheaf, then flipped the pages between his fingers over to show the other section. A single pink area was cordoned off in the top right, labeled 'disposal,' and labeled without an owner.

"This is one of the wider areas of space which is well beyond the city limits, perhaps five minutes' flight on dragonback from the Crags, due north. Less accessible, but still feasible given your ability to fly and teleport. Upsides include space for expansion, less foot traffic, and even easier for dragons to access. Additionally, Islanzadi would probably prefer you do your volatile experiments beyond the city limits. If there are any surprise detonations, it's unlikely you'll damage anything important."

"The latter, please," Harry asked politely. Laetri grinned.

"I get better manners than the queen? I'm flattered." He prodded at the open papers. "The only thing near here is disposal, which is just where we dump things we want to get rid of to let nature reclaim. Exercise caution when venturing in there, it's just as likely to contain cursed baubles as forgotten treasure. Couriers come by weekly to drop off more stuff, I'll have a schedule sent to you so you can factor that into your magics. The camouflage mandate means you'll have to deal with a team that will likely come around in two weeks- that's the standard grace period for construction in Ellesmera."

Laetri pulled out a thin stick of charcoal that could almost be called a pencil, followed by a two-pronged tool with an adjustable angle, which he used to check and set the scale of the map. He marked off one corner with the pencil, then placed one point of the map-protractor on the dot and turned it several times. When he finished, he marked the endpoint and used a protractor to square off, then repeated the process perpendicularly. Harry watched in interest as the elf employed a straightedge to fill in the lines between points, before using a deft word to clear away the excess charcoal and leave no more than thin, neat lines. He inked over those with a proper fountain pen and again employed a sentence to hue the square a light pastel yellow.

"Ideas for a name?" he asked wryly.

"Er, right." Harry said sheepishly. "Room of Flowing Time."

Laetri wrote it neatly in the center, with flawless calligraphy and in perfectly straight lines. "Full name?"

"Is Harry not enough?" He asked bewildered. "Harry James Potter. I think there's a couple more names in there somewhere, but I've forgotten them already and they probably aren't important outside of super-crazy rituals." The elf scratched out his name obediently.

"Best to be thorough, for disambiguation's sake," Laetri said blithely. He rummaged in a drawer before withdrawing a scrap of paper that he scribbled on quickly. "This ought to make finding the exact spot pretty easy, and if you're off by a few feet, I shall simply use magic to alter the maps. Do try your best, though. I've given you a margin of ten feet in each direction, but I'd prefer not to need to refile all this."

Harry agreed easily and left the office with a set of coordinates on it. Despite being wholly unfamiliar with the coordinate system the elves used, or indeed any real skill in navigation, just by touching the paper he was able to feel a sort of supernatural certainty in exactly where he was intended to go.

"How did you find Laetri?" Arya smiled, flying alongside him to his new site.

"Interesting, why?" Harry commented. "Do you know him well?"

"I know most of mother's courtiers. Laetri can be stuffy and officious with the best of them, but he's good-tempered and has an interesting sense of humor." Harry began to descend, the slip of paper flapping in his grip as he held it against the handle of his broom.

"I'll take your word for it." Harry whistled. "My man didn't skimp, this place is great!"

Off to the northeast, a thick knot of trees grew, but the area he had landed in was essentially empty except for calf-high green grass that Harry was able to use his rudimentary mental radar to determine was essentially absent of life. A single den of snakes on the opposite edge of the clearing, away from the thicket. "If I tear all this out, d'you reckon they'll just put grass back over the top and call it a day?" Harry wondered.

"It's likely," Arya confirmed. "The plot for disposal is a good ways into the thicket, but it's best to just stay away entirely. Between the Fall and Du Fyrn Skulblaka, I am sure there is much to be wary of in disposal's depths."

"Treasure?" Harry perked up.

"No, cursed artifacts and malignant weapons, buried under countless wagonfuls of rusted, charred, or broken stuff."

"So…treasure." Arya threw up her hands.

"If you want to die so bad, so be it. At least wait until your latest grand contribution to the war effort bears fruit, before you commit suicide-by-cursed-artifact."

He grinned. "I'll take you up on that." Trawling through the discards of a society very much pre-consumerism would certainly be interesting. It was probably filled with some crazy stuff, if the age of the race had any bearing on the quality of their junk. Eight thousand years was a long time, even for immortals, and some cool shit was bound to turn up. Harry thumbed the slip of paper again, refreshing the coordinates in his mind. He dug around in his backpack and came out with four tall aluminum stakes.

Marking out the corners, he followed the directions to the exact centimeter, pounding them in with a few satisfying mallet thwacks. Arya seemed content to watch the proceedings from above, hovering lazily on her broom. Harry went about prepping the site, scouring the tall grass with fire that disgorged copious amounts of white smoke as it consumed the wet plants. Once the soil was covered in lots of char and not much grass, Harry extinguished the fire with a flick of his wand. The next step was excavation.

"Watch out!" he called upwards. Arya, suitably forewarned, glided towards him and out from near the blackened ground. Harry had switched to the Elder wand for the particular task, appreciative of the boost in power it provided. Though the parameters of his spell only deliberately captured the exact dimensions of the plot, the topsoil and the groundwater all spilled spectacularly into the hole left by the colossal cube of earth and stone that hovered overhead. Lacking anywhere specific to put it, Harry simply dumped the stuff a hundred or so paces from the hole. He repeated the process of levitation and discard until the sides of the roughly trapezoidal pit became stable.

The water leaking from the surrounding soil would just keep coming until Harry plugged the walls up with something, or until the bottom of the pit filled with water. He wanted to avoid that, since the bedrock, while appreciably deep down, still left probably a dozen feet of slowly-filling stagnant water. The soil in Du Weldenvarden was almost ludicrously deep, even for an ancient forest. Despite the size of the clearing, roots the size of Harry's arm showed their ringed cross-sections along the slanted, collapsed dirt walls.

"Probably should have planned for plugging the groundwater," Harry called up to Arya.

"You think?" He hummed for a moment before conjuring simple concrete walls and foundation. They stretched straight up in a perfect cube, forming a box that stood straight up from the bedrock. The vast pile of dirt and rubble was dumped around the edges of the foundations to bring the ground back to level, leaving Harry with a field of grass that turned to mixed earth, rubble, and root about twenty feet from the border of a perfectly level grey concrete border that delineated a heady drop from its lip.

Harry cast about for a hefty rock and dropped it over the lip, counting in his head. It struck the stone bottom with a sharp crack, just under three seconds from his hand. Arya floated over to him. "One hundred feet deep seems to feel much further than one hundred feet tall," she remarked.

"Agreed," Harry commented. "I'm just glad I didn't insist upon making it bigger."

"You do like big things," Arya agreed. "What next?"

"I decide what material I want to make this thing out of. It can probably be anything, but sandstone will likely be the most effective."

"Why?"

"Sand is linked to time," Harry mused. "It is integral for hourglasses, and hails from deserts, which tend to be the most 'timeless' biomes. Hard to count the seasons but for subtle temperature changes, and it has a real sense of endlessness, at least if you're on the ground. Obviously, I can't really use sand for structural bits, so sandstone is the next best thing. Sand is also the core of the only artifact I know of that lets you travel through time. It is at the center of Time-Turners."

"There is not much sandstone to be had in Du Weldenvarden," Arya observed.

"No, there's not." Harry switched wands and flicked his holly one towards the foundation, conjuring up a flat white light that lit the pit like industrial floodlights. "We might have to make a field trip to the Hadarac. How long would you estimate a trip would take?"

Arya touched down and dismounted gracefully. "Assuming we apparate from here to the wardline, walk under it, then teleport straight to the Hadrac, it would take only hours. The wards are not infinitely thin, they touch the ground in a wide area that would be traversed on foot or horseback. Dragons cannot even fly through it, for they rely on magic on some level to fly."

"But entirely non-magical methods would work?" Harry clarified. His eyes twinkled with mischief.

"They should," Arya allowed cautiously. "But it interrupts all transport and scrying magic. Your brooms would fall from the skies, your apparition would not reach beyond the wards."

"We can use enchantments?" Harry grinned. "This ought to be easier than I thought."

The look in her eyes suggested that Arya knew she had just made a dreadful mistake, but didn't know exactly what it was just yet.

Later that evening, Harry disappeared into his tent. Intermittent explosions and strange mechanical roars drifted out the tent. He emerged later with wet hair fresh out of the shower and slept for a couple of hours before they both had to get up. "Let's talk to Oromis before we go," Harry suggested. "If we're leaving Ellesmera anyways, we can do a few side-quests while we're out. Anything your mother would want us to do outside of Du Weldenvarden?"

Arya blinked. "Actually, yes. We ought to ask both of them."

How Arya managed to get her mother to follow her to the Crags, Harry didn't know. But he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. The queen seemed interested in their quest, and Harry judged that she wasn't likely to be an obstacle. Islanzadi proved him right. "I would like a great many things, yes," she agreed. "Sending out agents to get things done is difficult, moreso for agents who must reveal that they are elves. Arya and her companions were the only ones beyond the bounds of the forest for a long while, and I fear her death spurred me to make irrational decisions, not least of which was to withdraw many of the less essential elves from the Empire and beyond."

"Be cautious," Oromis warned. "Assume Galbatorix knows all of your abilities and has time to devise counters to them. He resides in Uru'baen right now, and is unlikely to move to intercept you unless you do something incredibly disruptive."

"Right. Sensible things only," Harry said to himself aloud. He did have the ability to exercise caution, but it never seemed to kick in since he learned that he was immortal. Something about that revelation had permanently broken his sense of self-preservation.

"Please. Our agenda is mostly concerned with the Varden, such that Lord Dathedr has been scrying Nasuada's progress through the Beors. They passed beyond the range only two nights ago, and it is estimated that she will arrive at Aberon, the Surdan capital, in no longer than a month. I shall summon Lord Dathedr to scry them so that you may know where they are.

"Will you have need of Harry and Arya today?" Islanzadi asked of Oromis.

"Nay," he shook his head. "And some one-on-one lessons with Eragon shall do a world of good, I think."

"Excellent," the queen commented. She beckoned Harry and her daughter. "If there is no more on the subject you wish to add, master rider?"

"Only to be safe, and may the wind be at your back, Harry and Arya." Oromis bowed respectfully and retreated from the cliffside. Islanzadi politely declined use of a broomstick and prevailed upon Harry to apparate them back to the royal court.

"What an unpleasant form of transportation," she remarked idly. "Does your world have others, and are they similarly dreadful?"

Harry thought about the nauseating twists and violent acceleration and deceleration of the Knight bus, the nauseating spinning of the Floo network, and the nauseating spiraling of Portkey travel. "Pretty much, yeah. But broomsticks are alright, really. At least if you're not scared of heights."

Islanzadi's eyes dipped to the custom broom slung over his shoulder. "I shall take your word for it." Harry had deposited himself and Arya just outside the doors to the room where Islanzadi had held court. The queen took over and led them through the beautiful corridors and through a grand set of doors into a grand office with a vaulted ceiling and an assortment of mystical baubles that were placed in neat rows and cubbyholes about the place.

It was clear that Lord Dathedr valued not just organization, but the appearance of tidiness as well. Where Laetri had files strewn across his desk and otherwise kept his files in neat drawers and shelves, Dathedr's desk held only four visible items of paper, and none of them were properly visible. Harry saw only a blurred white surface on each sheet, which led him to believe Dathedr dealt with sensitive information. Four chairs were arrayed in a circle around a low table in front of his desk.

The Lord himself was an older looking, refined sort of gentleman with long silver hair and a serious face. He was not sitting at the desk but standing in front of a strange table with the surface of a mirror whose surface was perfectly clear. Harry noted that it wasn't the only reflective surface in Dathedr's office. There were a pair of basins set into the desk on either side, though he was nearly certain the liquids they held were different. And the far side of the room had a bowl-shaped indent filled with water, lit by a hanging blue flameless lantern.

"Your Highness," he greeted the queen with impeccable manners. "Might I ask what the purpose of your companions is today?"

Islanzadi took a seat and gestured to them. "Harry intends to make a trip beyond Ellesmera, and wishes to run errands for us while he is out. If I might have use of your stationary, I shall draft missives to our allies that he might deliver. However, it is my understanding that your method of instant transport requires you be present at the place you wish to return to." She addressed the latter to Harry, who had taken a seat with Arya in the other two comfy chairs.

Dathedr rose easily from his seat. "Of course. Feel free to make use of my desk." He sat easily in the fourth seat, with a sort of adaptive easygoing nature that Harry decided he liked about the elf. While Islanzadi drafted formal letters for Alagaesia's world leaders, Lord Dathedr explained what he knew of the whereabouts of each faction.

"I am unsure if Oromis has covered this with you, but it used to be commonplace among the age of riders for them to fly on dragonback across the breadth and width of the continent, so that they may scry anyone, anywhere. For you may only see that which you have seen before. Though I was never blessed with a dragon to share my heart, my mate was. Freya and her dragon, Polaris, took me with them on their flights. Thus, my sight is the most encompassing of the elves alive. Beyond advising Islanzadi on matters of military and intelligence, it is my duty to scry the lands for information on both our allies and our enemies." Dathedr rose and fetched a polished circular mirror which he placed on the center of the table.

"Draumr Kopa," he murmured. The mirror seemed to ripple like water, resolving itself into a clear image of the Beors. Through the looking glass, Harry could see that the mountains that flanked the image were smaller than the monstrous behemoths that made up the center of the range. Interspersed throughout the image were clear bands of white, shaped and contoured around the mountains like visible beams of light that denoted exactly which lines of sight were cut off to Lord Dathedr.

A dizzying distance below, an army camped in the mountains. The standards of the Varden fluttered on flagpoles above the clump of men. They were not organized in the way that Harry might have expected, but curled and contoured around the difficult terrain in the Beors. Ravines and clefts boxed the men into a winding train that trailed over ridgelines and through thickets of trees or piles of timber where the army cut cleanly through their obstacles. They marched slowly, yet inexorably through the range.

At a gesture from the elf, the image zoomed out to show a more comprehensive view of the Beors. Harry noticed that they were close to the very fringes of the range. "We are fortunate, indeed, that the dwarves have wrought such an expansive network of tunnels," Dathedr commented. "Else it would have taken them a year to exit the range, alone."

"Hrothgar ordered the most vulnerable and far-reaching of their tunnels collapsed at the end of the fall," Arya commented. "For fear of an invasion. Still I think it was short-sighted of him. Would that he hadn't, Nasuada would be knocking at the gates of Aberon already."

The mirror panned to the right where miles upon miles of forest and thicket and field stretched from the foothills to the heart of Surda. Dathedr manipulated the image so that the capital of Surda filled the mirror. A rough-looking castle rose within view, the flags of Surda flapping in the wind on their poles. It looked carved from marble, gleaming white in the brilliant sun. All the shutters were flung wide open, and billowing fabrics of bright colors billowed in entrances and windows. "Castle Borromeo, the seat of King Orrin's power," he said. "Though he has undoubtedly received Nasuada's missives, we have not yet had the opportunity to send an ambassador to discuss the Varden's campaign with Orrin. Arya, would you favor us with your impression of the man?"

Arya's eyes were unfocused, gazing at the castle. She shook herself. "Of course. King Orrin is proud, but cautious. He values the lives of his people highly, and is likely to be somewhat reticent about committing to the invasion. He believes, and rightly so, that if he casts his weight behind Nasuada, and we fail, that Galbatorix will finally be spurred to re-annex Surda. He is a clever natural philosopher and a learned man, but untried in war and battle. He is also very defensive of his sovereignty and will likely clash with Nasuada over command of their combined army." She glanced at Harry. "Though he is not so officious as to demand proper titles and forms of address at all times, he will be offended unless you acknowledge him properly as king."

Harry grumbled, but subsided quickly. "I can probably just apparate straight there with the image in the mirror. If not, we can go to Tronjheim first and hand out Hrothgar's letter, then fly to Nasuada and Orrin. How long do you think until the Varden reaches Aberon?"

Dathedr stroked his chin. "My estimations place her in the capital during the coming spring. Though she will have won free of the Beors come winter, Surda's proximity to the coast means high precipitation. She will be snowed in during the winter, which will stop her around here." The elf tapped the city of Petrovya, nestled between a fork in its titular river where lake Tudosten fed into the Petrovya, which served as the Surdan border.

"How long shall I expect you to be, daughter? Brisingr." the queen lit a scarlet candle and dripped it onto each of her three completed missives, pressing her signet ring to each in turn.

"I suppose that depends. If we are to fetch materials for Harry, then deliver these and return without delay," Arya met Harry's eyes searchingly.

"We could do that in two days, maybe one if we don't have to fly and can apparate to each place. Can you think of any other errands we might get up to? I kind of want to tour Vroengard while we have the chance." Harry mused. He twisted the ring with the Ressurection stone on it around his left ring finger idly.

Islanzadi hummed. "The isle of Vroengard holds many perils now, not least of which is its poisoned air and earth. Without adequate protection, you shall fall sick within a week. If you wish to visit Doru Areba, I implore you to bring the dragon riders with you, for Oromis knows the spells to protect himself, and is familiar with the beasts both old and new, who haunt the ancestral home of the riders."

Harry clapped his hands together. "Field trip for afters, got it. I think we'll need at least two days, since I want to deliver the metalwork Rhunon and I did for the Varden while we're there, and check in with Du Vrangr Gata and make sure they haven't done anything stupid. There's also the issue of the baby Eragon accidentally cursed, Checking in on his cousin, and gathering whatever other materials I might need in the future," he ticked off his fingers. "How do you feel about a week, just to be safe?"

"That is agreeable," Arya's mother nodded. "When do you wish to leave?"

"Er, now?" Harry patted his backpack. "I've got everything I need, and the day is still early. I thought we'd apparate out to that spot where that Gliderien chap showed up, fly straight up above the canopy, then glide through the wards and apparate to Tronjheim."

"You are prepared for a sojourn across Alagaesia as we speak?" Dathedr said curiously.

"I need to fetch my tent from the royal apartment, but everything else is in my backpack. We don't really even need the tent, but living in luxury is better than camping in bushes." Harry was actually somewhat conflicted on that. If he took the tent, he would not bother actually camping outside, and he was a bit nostalgic and enjoyed the experience of sleeping under the stars. Buuuut, if he didn't, he'd have to take his shits in the woods. And no showers. Decisions, decisions, Harry thought to himself.

Islanzadi smiled, offering the three scrolls to Arya. "Then may good fortune rule over you. I shall see you in a week."

Ten minutes later, Harry stood next to Arya holding a great orange triangular contraption of metal pipes and canvas. "What is that?" she asked, shooting a distrustful look at the hang glider.

"This, dear Arya, is a hang glider. It acts not unlike a dragon with spread wings. The canvas catches the air and glides through the air. By leaning and tugging on these bits, we can bank and turn through the sky. The one unfortunate part of hang gliders is that they can only glide down, and require most people to start high up, like at the edge of a cliff, or the back of an airplane." Harry's eyes gleamed with mischief. "Wizards have no such plebian restrictions. Come here, I'll show you how to get on."

Arya managed to grasp the setup of all the buckles and footrests faster than even Harry had, which he was pointedly not jealous of, despite being the one to create the thing, thank you very much. When they were all set up, Harry had them both lean the canopy back like a rocket for take off. "Ready? ASCENDIO!"

The hang glider took off like a rocket, shooting up from the ground so fast it must have left afterimages in the eyes of Gilderien the Wise, who had been watching them the whole time. Harry was too busy whooping with glee to notice Arya's panicked shout, nor was his head tilted up to see the dense thicket of leaves and branches zooming ever closer to their faces. "Part!" Arya shouted, forcing the branches apart and forming a gap not a moment too soon, for the instant after her spell, dewy leaves whipped at her face, forcing themselves into her mouth and down the open collar of her tunic.

Harry did not seem bothered by the faceful of leaves, he merely cackled, keeping his wand fixed upwards as they arced higher and higher above Ellesmera, leaving the vast expanse of green behind and soaring into the brilliant blue sky. Arya tried to berate him for his idiocy, but the rushing, roaring wind snatched her words away and flung them below her. She spat out leaves and shook what twigs she could from her long black hair, sputtering and cursing.

Below, the leaves and trees had lost their definition, melding into a mottled tapestry of shades of green. Even to her elvish eyesight, Arya knew they were high in the air. "We're high enough," she shouted to Harry. He glanced at her, then glanced again, eyes filled with mirth at her disheveled hair and face. "Level off!" Harry grinned and leaned forwards, forcing the bar beneath their arms down, the orange canvas perpendicular with the earth. The wind instantly died, going from tearing gusts to light breeze.

"You idiot!" Arya exclaimed. But there was little heat in her words. "You would have smeared us across the underside of the tree branches." She fought to keep a smile off her face.

"Well, now we know that my first idea would have been even worse," Harry commented idly.

"What!?" Arya was offended that there even existed a more terrible idea than Harry's. "Dare I even ask?"

"I was planning for a rocket," Harry cackled. "I'm definitely trying it at some point. Imagine this, but propelled up by a massive gout of flame hotter than dragonfire, and louder than the biggest thunderstorm.

She shivered theatrically, pretending that she wouldn't enjoy such a thrilling experience. Arya shoulder-checked Harry, suppressing a smile. "Don't even say that." She lapsed into silence for a moment. "Still, I think I can forgive you for the view."

Arrayed below them, Du Weldenvarden stretched to the corners of the earth in an endless sea of verdant green. The wind rippled at them, flapping the vertical tail fin like a flag. A gentle gust flew past them, rippling Arya's clothes and chilling her pleasantly, a dull, quiet roar in her ears. The sun was low enough in the east that the orange canvas did not cover all of it, brilliant rays of its warmth chasing away the cool breeze and lighting up the orange canvas.

The wards of Ellesmera became obvious, a heady, protective force that seemed to weigh about her like a weighted blanket and warm her bones with the promise of safety. Arya sighed and relaxed a bit into the glider. Though the harness took most of her body weight off her arms, she was still essentially holding a plank for the duration of their flight. Harry didn't seem to even notice. He was a thrill-seeker, and hang-gliding was exactly the sort of thing he loved. The wizard wore a massive smile that hadn't dimmed since their violent takeoff.

"I have got to learn how to be an animagus," he commented. "And if my form's not a flying thing, I'm going to make it one. Or figure out unassisted flight."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it's a sort of ritual/transfiguration thing that lets you transform into an animal at will. According to the books and such, you don't get to choose which animal, it chooses one based on your personality, or soul, or some such rot. I want to isolate the factor that determines your animal so I can ensure I get something suitably awesome, like a dragon or whatever." Harry grinned.

"Who do you know that's an animagus?" Arya wondered. "Perhaps the answer lies with them?"

Harry adjusted slightly, following the southward arrow on the floating green compass rose that hovered in front of them. "I knew five, which is a lot for Britain, where animagery is all but illegal and the Ministry has buried the process in loads of red tape that prohibit all but the most persistent applicants. My Transfiguration professor, McGonagall, who was a common housecat, an obnoxious reporter named Rita Skeeter who could turn into a beetle, and my father, godfather, and the guy who sold them out to Voldemort. A stag, a dog, and a rat, respectively."

"Fitting," Arya said with a glint of steel in her eyes. "How did their animals match up with them?"

"I never really met my father, so I can only give you a second-hand account, but everyone said he was proud, bordering on arrogant, and regal. From what I know of him when I met him in the afterlife, or when I called him here, he was loving, kind, funny, protective." Arya glanced at the ring on his left hand, set with a small black stone.

He sighed heavily. "I'm sure there are books on this that probably explain it better than my random thoughts. I really hope the ritual is done poorly or can otherwise be improved upon, since all those animals are boring, mundane and common in Britain. Hmm, I wonder if that's a factor?" Just then, the heavy feeling in the air vanished as they passed beyond the wards.

"Right, scooch over to me so I can put an arm around you. I'd rather not apparate out without you." Harry shimmied awkwardly to the right on the handlebar, smushing his side against Arya. He leaned to the left and braced himself entirely on his left arm, bracing himself on Arya's back. She grunted with the effort of holding him and herself up on her arms.

"Hurry up," she grumbled under her breath.

"Right. Three, two, one-!" Harry twisted midair, gripping the hang-glider with a steel fist, hugging Arya to his body with his right arm. The sensation of squeezing enveloped them both, plunging them through the darkened tunnel of apparition as they hurtled through the void, headed towards Tronjheim.

With a powerful CRACK of displaced air, Harry emerged in the dimmed light of the grand room beneath the Isidar Mithrim, its sparkling red petals winking down at him. He had transported them vertically on the assumption that they would be standing, meaning they emerged a couple feet from the ground, still hanging onto the handlebar of the glider. They immediately fell forwards, clattering on the gleaming granite and smacking into the ground. Arya cursed and swore like a sailor, tangled up in the straps and harness.

"A-alohamora!" Harry exclaimed, waving his hand wildly around. Every strap and buckle popped open and flew away from them as if blasted. Harry fell forwards, taking a moment to simply lay face-down on the cool granite. "Well," he mumbled into the ground. "You know what they say: any landing you can walk away from is a good one."

Arya gripped the edge of the glider and hurled it off them with one hand. It clattered noisily off to the side. "Perhaps, but I am adding another criterion: it's not a good landing if you're forced to fall on your face." By then, dwarves had arrived to investigate the commotion, standing around in a circle and chatting among each other in their own tongue, excited and interested in the strangers that had appeared out of nowhere.

"Arya! Ascudaruna!" A dwarf called out. "To what do we owe the honor of your visit?"

Harry got to his feet and brushed himself off, shaking and dislodging bits of tree from himself as he pulled out pins and hasps to fold up the glider, stuffing it in his backpack in a hilariously incongruous way. Twelve feet of bright orange canvas and aluminum poles he kept shoving deeper into a bag that was two feet deep at the most.

"We're here with a missive from queen Islanzadi," Arya bowed.

The dwarf's eyes flicked up and down, taking in the scene. "Aye, you are. Come on, we best get you to Hrothgar."

Eragon heard rather than saw Harry and Arya depart. He had been in the training yard with Vanir, wondering why the two of them were late. When they never showed, he sent his bewilderment to Saphira.

They are both old enough to be responsible for their actions. And neither of them seem the type to simply skip lessons. We shall ask Oromis and Glaedr when your hour is up, she said. For now, focus on yourself. I want to see you beat Vanir. When you give it your all, you are a match for the elf.

Eragon acknowledged her and wrenched his mind into the present. Vanir stood with his blade out warily, which told him that at least the elf was beginning to take him seriously as a threat. He probed, feinting towards Vanir's right shoulder, then whipping it up towards his head. Vanir had raised his sword to block, and needed only to tilt it higher to deflect. He darted under Eragon's guard, slashing at his unprotected midsection. Eragon was forced to leap back, but Vanir pursued, lunging forwards to reach. His silvery blade nearly tickled his belly, but by then, his blade was back in rear guard and he batted Vanir away.

Thrust to left hip, parry the retaliation. Nearly faster than he could track, Vanir reversed his grip and stabbed low. Eragon sidestepped to the left, swinging with his shoulders and arms, a mighty stroke that forced Vanir's own blade against his armor. Vanir acknowledged the point, backing up and panting. Sweat dripped from his bangs into his eyes, stinging and blurring his sight. "Clear my eyesight," he said hastily. Clarity bloomed in his vision.

And then the elf was upon him once more. Vanir swung underhanded. Eragon ducked below and shot out his foot, heel catching the elf in the belly and knocking him back. He whirled around to capitalize, but the elf had already recovered. Eragon parried an overhead feint that would have landed on his shoulder, spinning and folding his forearm back so the blade laid heavily across Vanir's own forearm. The elf hissed and cursed.

"I hear that the human student Harry is learning at twice your pace," Vanir taunted. "How sad that you're second best even to a human."

Eragon tried to let the taunt roll of his back, like water off a duck. It still bothered him, but he would address it later. They rejoined battle in a flurry of blows, but Vanir took the bout by leaping over Eragon and attacking from behind, before he managed to twist fully around. "How long did it take him to best you with an unfamiliar weapon? A month?" the elf mocked.

He did not respond. Instead, Eragon called up the feeling he strove for in the glade; a reflective state of mind that thought of nothing. His face settled into placidity as he readied himself for the next bout. When they began anew, Eragon allowed his body to take over for him while he studied his target. There were some stumbles which resulted in four touches in quick succession, but none of them were 'fatal,' and so the spar continued. The forms Brom had so painstakingly taught him were a part of him, part of his very body, and they worked through him while he tried to put together the puzzle that was Vanir.

Pride is integral to him, he tries to win by the largest margin possible to humiliate me, Eragon analyzed. Parry, thrust. Slash to shins, feint to thighs, sweep up. Vanir's eyes darted from Eragon's own to his sword. He began to flow through a series of forms which Eragon tried to parse the goal of. Each strike seemed designed to tire out his sword hand, and to bait it out to full extension. He means to disarm me! Eragon realized. If he managed to hit the base of Eragon's sword with his own blade hard enough, it would force him to drop it. If Eragon's grip was already weak from fatigue, all the better.

Eragon held his prediction at the forefront of his mind, throwing together a plan to capitalize on the moment. He could bait the move at any time, merely by making it clear his sword arm was flagging and holding it at outer guard. But what would he do when the move came? Humiliation, he reminded himself. And pride. He'll bring his sword point to my chest after disarming me. All I can do is hope that when the time comes, he will attack recklessly.

He laid his trap. Eragon sparred patiently for another thirty seconds before carefully loosening his sword arm, incrementally. When he held it out to guard, he made sure the circles the tip drew in the air grew larger and larger. Finally, Vanir seemed to seize the bait. Eragon parried another slash and held out his sword at near arm's length…

A fleeting look of triumph flashed across the elf's face as he went in for the disarming move. The tip of his sword hit the hilt with a clang, forcing Eragon to drop the blade. But in that instant, he was whirling low, ducking under the thrust and grabbing the sword with his offhand. He completed his spin with a powerful backhand that swept Vanir's legs off the ground and dropped him heavily on his back. Quick as a flash, Eragon straightened up and pointed his sword at Vanir's bare throat, looming over the elf on his back.

"Dead," Eragon grinned, panting. His arms were burning and his face flushed, but the victory he felt was indescribable.

"Well done!" a familiar voice exclaimed. Eragon whirled about to see it was Oromis, leaning against Glaedr's foreleg and clapping politely. He had not noticed them arriving, nor the cessation of the other spars, so focused was he on Vanir alone. Vala and Aldr gave nods of acknowledgement. "Well done indeed," Oromis praised. "You have taken a lesson I have taught you and applied it to swordfighting perfectly. Come, Saphira and Eragon. We have much to discuss."

Eragon offered Vanir a hand and tugged him to his feet. The elf had a slightly bitter expression, and did not offer him a farewell before trudging off the field. The young rider shrugged and clambered into Saphira's saddle. When he arrived, he was brimming with questions he wanted to ask. But the most pressing of them-

"Where are Arya and Harry?" He asked as they both dismounted their dragons.

Oromis drew his wand from his tunic and frowned in concentration. He traced a pattern in the air and spoke an incantation, creating a pair of simple wooden chairs from nothing. Eragon sat in one and noted that the legs were not of uniform length, but on grass as they were, it was moot.

"They have gone in search of material for Harry's projects, and offered to carry Islanzadi's missives while they traveled. The queen has sent word that they expect to return in a week. That means that for us, we have more time for one-on-one lessons where I no longer have to balance my time and curriculum upon the needs of two other people. Furthermore, since neither Arya nor Harry are actual dragon riders, their absence is of great import to us since we may discuss secrets no outsider can know; both on dragonlore and what it means to be bonded to one." Oromis summoned a bowl of fruit with his wand and placed it between them.

"These lessons have been passed down by word-of-mouth since Eragon I first chose to raise a dragon egg instead of killing it in the war between our specieses. You will not find them even in the most secret archives of Doru Areba's library, nor whatever vaults Galbatorix keeps filled with his plunder"

Eragon sat forwards eagerly in his seat, a rapt expression of attention on his face.

When he left the Crags that day, his head was spinning. Never before had he crammed so much information in his head at once, not even when he read scrolls through to the late hours of the night. Oromis had this way of teaching at exactly the speed necessary to stretch his ability to comprehend, without making him feel like he was drowning in facts and figures. Glaedr and Saphira were active participants in the lessons, too, instead of Eragon simply listening in on their second pair of instructions. They spoke of how dragons felt when they accessed their own mighty magic, what often inspired them, and how the collective racial memory of all the dragons guided and influenced them; helping them grow to be cunning and brilliant at only a year of age, or how they managed to grasp complex languages in an astonishingly short period of time.

When those lessons concluded, Oromis would lay out a chessboard and they would have at each other with the strategy game that Harry had brought. When the wizened elf trounced Eragon, they would switch to Runes, the elvish game of strategy that shared many likenesses with chess. It was more complicated, but Eragon didn't mind the challenge, and enjoyed the the opportunity to practice strategic thinking and predictive analysis.

All too soon it felt like he was headed back to Ellesmera. He deposited his sword on a hook by his bedroom door and exchanged a few scrolls in their cubbyholes to return to Oromis. It was still daytime, and Eragon did not feel like cramming his head full of letters so soon. He tossed together a hasty repast of spicy cheese and soft bread, then wandered out of the house, snack bread in hand.

For half an hour, he took in the sights of the city, passing beneath strings of lanterns and over little stone bridges that spanned burbling brooks, padding across thick carpets of short grass and tracing his eyes over the otherworldly architecture the elves favored. Twice he stopped to feed a duck and a rabbit with a bit of bread crumbled off the baguette he carried. He greeted an elf politely when hailed, the Ancient Language flowing off his tongue easily after months of constant practice.

It was after a half-mile of wandering that the faint sounds of laughter and chatting and the crunching of gravel paths ceased, the only sound his own footfalls and the rustling breeze of the forest. Eragon became conscious of how loud his own feet were, and placed them carefully so as to remain quiet. A low stone wall stretched from either side, stretching out of sight. It was made of loose stones piled atop each other, lacking any sort of mortar or masonry. The low wall came only up to his shins, and terminated on either side of an archway formed of twisted and braided wrought iron.

The air seemed quiet, almost sacred. A sense of sorrow and rest hung about, like the dwarven crypts where Ajihad was interred. Beyond the arch, rows upon rows of trees rose from the ground, arching out like arms encircling the ground in a loving embrace. Fruit hung from each branch, ripe bananas and apples and cherries and plums. Nestled in between the roots, or in a hollow in the trunk, flat stones or plaques bore inscriptions Eragon was too far away to read. Laid next to the roots or hung over branches were lanterns, fruit, bundles of flowers, and other sorts of little gifts.

Eragon stepped off the winding gravel path and approached the tree on his left, an apple tree whose lowest boughs hung eight feet above him. Gleaming red apples hung low on the tree, easily within reach. He approached the trunk with a sense of trepidation, ducking under a glowing yellow paper lantern and kneeling in front of the flat stone propped against the roots. Gently brushing away the lichen, Eragon read the inscription.

Vilya of House Miolandra

1657-2592 ARP

Daughter of Anise and Olivar

Wife of Nenya

Beloved mother of Olivar, Isla, and Eiru

May the stars watch over you

Atra du evarínya ono varda

Realization struck him like a bolt of lightning. The sudden realization that the trees were grave markers made Eragon feel like an intruder, as if he were witnessing some intensely private moment. The enormous grove transformed in his perception from a quiet and peaceful garden to a place of tragedy and sorrow. He resolved to return to the path and not stray from it again.

Every step he took upon the gravelly path echoed like the collapse of a building. Eragon nearly winced at the noise, loathe as he was to disturb the elves' rest. His heart clenched in his chest at the rows upon rows of trees, a seizing feeling in his breast that pushed him further into the grove. He had passed nearly twelve rows of trees when they began appearing; little red ribbons that dangled in the breeze, flapping gently from where they had been tied on the lowest boughs. It seemed that nine in ten trees had red ribbons. The observation made Eragon's stomach seem to fall right out of him.

Interspersed throughout the grove were trees with another ribbon of some other color. Eragon spotted blues, yellows, purples, greens, every hue he could think of. Each one firmed his resolution to see Galbatorix dead, by his hand if he could possibly manage it. The idea of a tree with red and blue ribbons made his eyes sting.

Thrice he spotted an elf at a tree, kneeling with a bough of flowers, or singing some heartrending melody or else sitting quietly in front of the tree's placard. A woman with deep red hair knelt under a cherry tree with an empty basket, clutching a wreath of impossibly purple lilies, singing a devastated verse punctuated by gentle sobs. A swaying bough above her had a single red ribbon affixed to it, fluttering gently.

The winding path strayed to the left, leading Eragon ever deeper. He wandered off the gravel, heading deeper into the grove. The placards kept grabbing his attention, so he indulged his curiosity and chose random ones to read. Beneath a plum tree with red and purple ribbons:

Yímmuani of House Rilvenar

2417-2592 ARP

Daughter of Idr and Erolr

Bonded to Cipha Sharpclaw

May peace live in your heart

Un atra mor'ranr lifa unin hjarta onr

Eragon very carefully did not think about Garrow and Brom. He hoped Roran did not hate him too much, for he did not think he could live with the last of his family disavowing him. His wandering feet took him ever deeper, inexplicably drawn to one tree in particular. A sword in its scabbard was propped against the bark, next to an open pack. Faint murmuring emanated from the leaves. Curiosity pushed him forwards.

A familiar, black-haired elf had lain down in the branches, holding a board and stylus, writing something with his best calligraphy, his face betraying infinite care in each stroke. Vanir was talking quietly to no one in particular, speaking to the tree itself.

"-Miss you, mother. Great-grandfather's lessons proceed apace, but they feel hollow without your smiles or pride. My hatred for the Mad King is as an inferno, as is my feeling of impotence," the elf admitted.

"I was not fortunate enough to be chosen by the dragon egg Brom rescued, so it is impossible for me to have my vengeance personally. And the human who was does not inspire confidence. Still, I was selected to hone his swordwork." An unmistakable note of pride.

"I treasure the painting you made of me as a baby, and it reminds me of you and father. I hope that I can be as good a father as you were a mother-"

Eragon turned and departed silently, feeling dirty for his intrusion. He found the path and padded out of the grove, nearly an hour spent walking down the seemingly endless rows of living gravemarkers. When he finally passed under the wrought iron arch, the sounds of the forest seemed to come crashing back into him, a frenzy of chirping and squirrel claws on bark and elves milling about their daily lives.

He glanced over his shoulder once more, feeling as if his heart had ballooned in his chest at the import of what he'd just witnessed. Eragon went straight to Vrael's house, keeping silent and pensive, ignoring the hailings of the more friendly elves entirely. The moment he entered the antechamber, Eragon padded quietly up the stairs to his room and tugged off his boots and socks, shedding his tunic and falling to bed in his underthings. He only acknowledged Saphira with a wordless thought, tugging the sheets over his thin cotton underthings.

When he fell to sleep, it was with a mind filled of sorrow and sympathy, and a dreamless night where the impression of loss whirled and rattled about his skull, releasing a tear from his dreaming eye that was lost in the fluffy pillows.

AN: A bit more fluff, a bit more development of elves as a race in general. We're (finally) getting out of Ellesmera next chapter. bit of trivia: before Galbatorix's death, I'm saying that elves count year zero as the casting of the rider pact, hence ARP: After Rider Pact. I've been sitting on the scene with Vanir by his parents' trees for a while now, as a way to bump up Eragon's motivation even further and a bit of an excuse for Vanir's behavior. Paolini implied he's an arse because he's young and immature, but I felt that wasn't enough reason for the relentless and incredibly rude insults he is constantly spewing.

FEEDBACK: GIMME! I loved your suggestions for gifts Harry might give for the Agaeti Blodhren. Things like that, and interaction are what inspire me to write more! Also, we on the front page of IC/HP Crossovers! While I did start this with the hope that I'd eventually get there, I assumed it would be after like five years and a million words, ages after the thing was complete.