Harry Evans's Fabulous Multidimensional Adventure

by androidrainbow

After dying in the forest, Harry is offered the chance to help other children of prophecy. Adventure ensues. Vol. 1: Inheritance Cycle

45. Potential

Potential

Harry had almost expected a hostile basilisk to leap out from the Rock of Kuthian the moment he spoke his name. Anticlimactically, it was just a dark tunnel. Harry had his sword Zippy out for the rare possibility of magically-impervious monsters despite Arya's assurance she knew of no such beasts.

The tunnel was big enough for dragons but next to Doru Areba, that wasn't so impressive. It was a bit larger than the huge pipeway down to the Chamber of Secrets, but it smelled exactly as underground tunnels did: earthy and eventually tinted by the quiet scent of stone dust.

It was long enough that by sheer dint of time spent walking, anticipation rose, then fell, then, when a dim, reddish glow became visible at the end of the tunnel, rose again. Slanted downwards and in covering the distance it did, the tunnel reminded Harry of a poetic description of hell.

They approached an archway bare of any decoration, beyond which the mental presences Harry felt all but confirmed his guess. He stepped through and was struck down out of nowhere.

A shout and a roar confirmed that Arya and Firnen were being attacked, too. It felt as if Voldemort himself were staring into Harry's eyes, whispering Legilimens with his wand trained at him. Like a Grunnings drill boring into his skull, the mental attack was powerful and relentless. His defenses caved, feeling like his skull had given way, too. All in the space before he could think up a spell to defend himself, his body had been petrified.

The attackers tore his perspective apart. Like he was watching four disparate televisions at once, they tore through his memories on ultra-fast-forward, faster than if someone had taken that same drill and used it to rewind a VHS tape in front of him. Alagaesia raced by in seconds before whoever was attacking him drilled deep into his life on Earth. Memories raced by, classes and summers and confrontations with Voldemort along with the mundanity of eating lunch, brushing his teeth, and watering the flowers on Privet Drive.

Though it happened with astonishing speed, twenty years or so was long enough that the surprise had worn off while they were still tearing through his mind. Every attempt he made to regain some autonomy ran up against unyielding resistance.

Harry gasped and collapsed. "Protego," he got out. A shimmering shield enveloped Arya and Firnen around him, but they were recovering, too.

"Apologies. We must be certain you are no servants of Galbatorix's, willing or not."

"What's the matter? Surely you saw what happened at Agaeti Blodhren. Galbatorix's days are numbered."

"Arrogance is unbecoming, _." the voice said. Harry shivered at the potent reminder of his helplessness. It was hot and dry in the cavern, but hearing his Name from the mouth of another was a unique kind of chilling. "Were it only our lives to gamble, we may have been willing. But we are more than mere frightened Eldunari. Look upon the walls of the cavern, Lifebringer, Shadeslayer, Firnen."

Crawling off his knees, Harry examined the Eldunari critically. There were a lot of them, maybe twice as many as he had recovered from Galbatorix's citadel. He peered over a massive open shaft deep into the glowing red throat of the core of the earth.

Firnen suddenly roared triumphantly, followed by a gasp of utter shock. "What?" Harry asked, bewildered.

"Look at the shapes," Arya insisted.

And it dawned on Harry; the gems were not all the mostly-spherical shape of Eldunari. Instead, at least half were oblong.

"Are those-?"

"Eggs," she whispered, awestruck.

"Whether they remain the only hope for our race no longer is immaterial," the voice added. "Our children are our responsibility. Thus, when you leave this place, the spell which once affected you, Arya, will affect all three of you again, and you will forget it until Galbatorix's death. The island of Vroengard rests atop a magma chute of a similar size which provides us the warmth we need to survive indefinitely."

Harry wondered what they wanted, then. If they were content to simply hide until Galbatorix's death, they would not have summoned him during Agaeti Blodhren. Did they want bodies? He could easily bring them to the well, yet it sounded like they wanted to stay and guard the eggs. He had never heard statistics from Oromis about how long dragon eggs stayed viable, but there was a finite amount of nutrients in an egg and even comatose, factoring in the impossibly low food intake dragons required compared to their size, they would run out eventually.

The eggs were impressive. They would have been a game changer just last week. They still represented precious infants who deserved every bit of protection they could be given.

But defeating Galbatorix was within the Varden's grasp.

If they were going to have the campaign now, and every sign Harry had seen pointed that way, they had a decent shot. It made more sense to invest nearly everything into this sprint than to preserve resources in anticipation of failure. Sending a handful of dragons to the east coast was prudent, leaving two hundred out to guard eggs that urgently needed to hatch was a waste.

"May we know who we're talking to?" Arya asked.

"I am Umaroth," the voice of Umaroth directed their gaze to a large purple Eldunari, bigger than the biggest rescued from the citadel, but still dwarfed by several others within the cavern, so big Harry had not known Eldunari could reach nearly the size of a refrigerator. Lurking behind him in the shadows, a thing caught his eye, a contraption which looked like a robot made of silver.

"I am Cuaroc," another voice rumbled in his mind. "I inhabit the body crafted for me by Silvestri the Enchantress." He opened a panel on his chest to reveal an Eldunari hooked up to a nest of diodes.

"I have been elected to voice our desires," Umaroth explained. "Too many voices mean nothing is heard."

"And I tend to what physical needs remain for us," Cuaroc added.

"The eggs we guard approach expiry," Umaroth murmured. "You have worked to give Alagaesia and the Varden a better chance of dethroning the Tyrant than we had ever hoped. Alagaesia's deliverance draws near. We wish to join you."

---

Harry cast a glance at the receding Vroengard behind him. He knew something had been hidden from him in a manner similar to the fidelius. The Eldunari with him felt it, too. The facts he had led to an obvious conclusion his mind was not allowing him to make.

Flying beside Firnen on a carpet, Harry was aware he was wasting precious time by not apparating to Ellesmera and the Well of Rebirth, but an idea that had been percolating in his mind recently realized itself as a plan that needed doing before they finally left for the Varden. Upon privately sharing the idea with Arya, she agreed.

"I would not ask it of the eggs who know nothing of the world, but I think the Eldunari will agree. Many of them will feel duty-bound to reject reembodiment on the assumption that they will be able to contribute more with the energy they can lend than with young physical bodies."

A tailwind pushed Firnen all the way to the mainland. He was slower than the carpet's top speed, so the resultant boost shaved many hours off the flight time. Over the Spine, he had to land briefly to drink, but Arya fed him a constant stream of energy to keep him at the height of his performance without needing to eat or sleep.

Reaching Ellesmera took another two days, during which Harry and Arya made plans for the last–this time really for real–thing they would do before rejoining the Varden.

Despite having been gone for barely a week, the elven capital was transformed during their trip. Harry would have expected the influx of elves visiting for Agaeti Blodhren to leave once it finished, but the forest remained not quite crammed, but as busy as it had been for the last month or so.

Harry saw exactly why. Barely a week had passed and the crowd of dragons were already larger than the size of horses. The elves still stopped what they were doing whenever one flew overhead. They painted life-sized portraits of the dragons on massive canvases pulled taut over stone tables, stepping carefully barefoot over areas of wet paint on portraits that had yet to be filled with color, or else dangling from scaffolding with paintbrushes and palettes in hand. They laughed and sprinted below dragons in a futile attempt to keep pace, flinging themselves into the grass when they were overtaken.

They gawked when Firnen flew overhead, his green scales glimmering on the sunny side of his body, casting a wide shadow over the meadow and generating ripples in the grass. Songs wafted up from the trees, music that came from the mouths of elves so overjoyed that they spontaneously broke into song. The smell of lawn clippings and pollen stirred up in Firnen's wake and washed over Harry.

"Did we miss Dagshelgr?" He called forward to Arya.

"Yes," she nodded, turning back to him, her hair rippling in the wind and smushing over her face. She laughed and pawed it away. "Look at how much they've grown!"

A purple dragon craned up at them with its wings outstretched over a span of twenty feet. A tongue of purple flames escaped its teeth, a rippling banner of welcome. Firnen saw and adjusted himself a bit, preening under the attention and gliding down to Tialdari Hall.

"Welcome back. Did you accomplish what you'd hoped?" Islanzadi emerged onto the landing pad with Elva in tow. They wore matching elvish outfits in purple the color of Elva's eyes. Elva twisted her fingers over her sternum and gave them the traditional greeting. Harry shot Islanzadi the stink eye. He did not need her to turn into some stuffy, traditional elf. Islanzadi let the glare roll over her with bemused indifference.

"Umaroth?" Harry asked both aloud and with his mind.

"Astra ono thelduin, Queen Islanzadi. It is a pleasure to meet you again."

Her eyes widened. "I ought to be less surprised after the second time. Where have you been hiding, if you will indulge my curiosity?"

"We are unsure. Somewhere on Vroengard, evidently. We number 163 Eldunari, many of whom have eagerly anticipated visiting Ellesmera again."

"Are you aware that a procedure now exists to restore your bodies?" Islanzadi nodded to Harry.

"We are. Long have we watched Alagaesia in anticipation of an opportunity to lend our strength to the final downfall of Galbatorix. That such an opportunity would take such a form is an unexpected boon. Whether we choose to avail ourselves of the Well of Rebirth is still a matter of internal discussion, Queen Islanzadi and Harry Lifebringer. The younger of us especially long for the sensation of air beneath our wings and sun on our scales, yet circumstances demand our priority be prowess over prosperity."

Understanding lit her eyes. "Your dedication to duty does you credit, Umaroth and those yet unnamed to me. Know that none will begrudge you the choice to embrace the freedom of a physical body over whatever extra energy you choose to lend to the cause. Unfortunately, Dagshelgr has just passed and the developmental boost it provides has been spent. However, the Varden and the Empire are only now mustering to march. You will have some time to grow."

The result of Harry bringing yet more Eldunari to Ellesmera was another riotous party. In the end the thirty youngest dragons chose rebirth. They would likely eclipse the power their smaller Eldunari held before any confrontation with Galbatorix by simply growing, and they deserved a chance to experience more than the limited life they'd had before their bodies were killed.

"Is it still worth doing that project?" Harry wondered. Arya, who had spent the evening with him gathering up the Sniper Corps, furrowed her brow. Before them, the archway leading to the House of Miolandra glimmered in the evening light. Eleven other elves milled about behind them in the shadow of Firnen's silent form.

"It would be advantageous to leave it available, but even making it under time dilation would first require us to set up the initial structure. We're already running late on the timeline we gave Nasuada."

"I'm ready." Niduen had tied her hair up in a ponytail and slung the backpack over her shoulder. Her pulled-back hair revealed rounded ears, and her facial structure was a softer, human shape.

"You've said your goodbyes and everything?" Harry checked. "It looks like we're leaving right now." Niduen nodded.

Harry slung the tent over his shoulder and dropped it on the ground. "Firnen can't fly all Fjfteen of us, so all of us except Arya will ride in the tent." Inside, Harry had done some spatial rearrangement and the entryway was no longer the interior of the cabin but rather a nexus of hallways. After the initial bit of ooh and aah-ing, they headed down to the range. With a week of time to kill before reaching Surda, they got down to work training.

One of the first things Harry noticed and appreciated was that the elves were barely awestruck with him, and what little awe they had faded quickly when they picked up on his discomfort. He had worried briefly that the Well of Rebirth would give people the same expectation of nigh godhood he'd experienced as the Boy-who-lived.

He made it clear that he was learning alongside them and that he wanted and valued their input. Harry sometimes forgot how different wizards in Alagaesia were compared to Earth. Magic solved most of the elves' problems, but it was not enough to guarantee safety and good health like Britain did. Rather than the opportunity for laziness fostering an indolent and incurious society that lived in aimless luxury afforded to them by their magic, the elves were voraciously curious and passionate and used their magic to do more than those without, instead of using it to do what everyone else did lazily.

---

Niduen loved every minute of their flight to Surda. She had previously only known Harry in passing, and her only close friend among the other eleven elves was Ilentha, who she enjoyed for being so different to her. Harry called their time a 'think tank,' where every wild and audacious idea was taken seriously and between the magics at their command and the unlimited resources he had in the facility, they could immediately test it.

The Range had started as an unfathomably large room a league across and a league wide and evolved into cells of terrain mocked up by elves familiar with those biomes and under the skilled 'transfiguration' Harry used to shift entire forests. Filvendor helped build siege engines that transfiguration allowed them to scale up to life size and duplicate. They tested different kinds of rounds against them, practicing shooting the entire three and a half miles across the range with incendiary rounds that zoned off entire trebuchets and siege towers with blazing, sticky fire that burned for twenty minutes at a time, or blowing them apart into shrapnel with high explosive rounds.

Harry very, very cautiously tested another round later painted with a purple tip which sucked in and crushed a spherical area twenty feet across into a little ball no more than a foot wide, which was added to everyone's ammo kits. Val asked for a non-lethal, incapacitating round and sparked the development of 'flashbangs,' subsonic rubber tipped bullets that did not penetrate flesh but which felt like a strong punch and dazed with an awful screaming noise and brilliant white flash that temporarily deafened and blinded targets. Harry had insisted on being the first to be struck with it and reported immediately developing tinnitus, an endless ringing noise in his ears that had to be fixed with magic. They were tipped with bright, "nerf" orange tips.

They practiced using the vitality scope filter on bales of stacked sunflower heads that showed up bright red in the scope, then ran drills where they were to quickly pick out and shoot the brightest and dimmest stacks from an arranged crowd, controlled by how many were stacked up to simulate fatigued or active enemy magicians.

Harry had revealed to them a massive stockpile of diamonds filled to bursting with magical energy, and a similarly enormous, flat room containing nothing but endless, neat rows of trees beneath an eternally noonday sun that constantly leeched its power into racks of fist-sized, cubic diamonds. Vru had the most experience with spellcasting and accurately estimated each diamond was worth about eight humans of energy. With a practically unlimited amount of energy to experiment with, they went about exhausting an eighth of a diamond on various wards against projectiles cast upon sunflower heads, then pitted the weapons against them.

Niduen was sobered by the results. The purple-tips never failed to kill a target through any amount of warding and any amount of energy. Harry had lined up as many as sixteen full diamonds into warding against compressive damage and Niduen had watched the spatial collapse completely ignore it. They hadn't been sure the wards were even helping until Illo devised an experiment to check the remaining power of the wards, revealing that even 128 humans working together could not stall the death of one person by spatial collapse for even an instant.

The green-tips were on the border. A quarter of a gem typically saved the sunflower, where an eighth tended to fail. Niduen was surprised when Harry explained his rationale. "In practice, it will likely usually kill a human, though I would not bet against an elf surviving," he said. "The key is energy demand over time. A log of firewood has the same energy output as a typical grenade, the grenade just releases all of its energy in a fraction of a second. If we've reached the border of a human's capability to stop the round's kinetic energy, the shock of having all of their chemical energy instantly ripped away and converted into magic to stop the bullet will probably kill them."

She remembered Harry's claim that a single bullet carried the kinetic energy of 100-200 arrows. It was a lot, but arrows and bullets were dangerous because they could pierce important bits of the body, not because they were unstoppable like a boulder hurled from a trebuchet. Except, the entire hefty power of a massive bullet larger than her thumb and longer than her finger traveling several times the speed of sound was focused down to the tiniest point of completely and utterly unyielding material. Depleted Uranium, Harry called it, a single crystal of the heaviest naturally-occurring metal on earth.

Red-tips, they unanimously agreed, were never to be used on living targets. The sticky fire clung to whatever they shot at and burned and burned and burned. They exhausted well past the human capacity to ward against fire and took tricky, wordy spells to safely extinguish. They burned even without oxygen at thousands of 'degrees,' which was the unit of measurement Harry used for heat. Red-tips were only for zoning off strategic portions of the battlefield and for siege engines they had already slain the operators of.

Black-tips straddled the definition of being inhumane. They invariably, instantly killed whoever they struck. The issue was that it might not kill nearby combatants, merely crippling them. Explosive rounds would be reliable workhorses at cowing or disrupting cavalry charges and were extremely effective against siege engines and 'softer' fortifications made of wood or unmortared stone.

While they experimented with their gruesome weapons, the reality of their mission began to sink in and Niduen could spot the chipper mask Harry wore slip a bit. She felt bad for him. When he was building up siege engines with Filvendor with every intention of obliterating them minutes later, he was cheery and curious. He asked endless questions about torque and materials and which parts might be made unbreakable or heavier or longer in order to make the trebuchet or ballista more effective, shifted entire hills and rivers with sweeping wand motions like an artist putting together some play battlefield and releasing great big boulders to shatter trees with a mad cackle. Filvendor was quietly thrilled by their common interest and answered every question to the depth of Harry's technical understanding, which was usually deep enough to comprehend the full depth of nuance he knew.

Yet when Harry got behind the scope of his rifle and watched the life-sized ballista go up in sticky, furious napalm-thermite, the initial awe faded and a tiny sliver of horror and disgust slipped beneath his mask. War games, Niduen thought, were a lot less fun when there was an actual war on the horizon.

Harry seemed relieved when he got to show off something that was outside the field of war. He had produced and distributed twenty 'bug-out' tents for them. "The extras can go to people on away missions we haven't met yet," Harry explained. They were short tents, easy to pitch while crouched, requiring only three stakes that could be stomped into the ground under the sole of a boot or driven into the ground with a rubber mallet. There were hooks for custom camouflage netting, but they went over a thin sod carpet that made the entire ensemble look like a little hill. The opening had to be entered while crouched.

Inside the tent was nicer than her treehouse. The only evidence Niduen was inside a tent was the pathetic-looking door outside that ended at her knees. Straight off to the right was a med-station. A single reclining cot against the corner was within arm's reach of a rack of plastic, single-dose bottles. They had bright colored labels in giant text describing in both common tongue and the Ancient Language what they did at a glance. Their caps could be popped off easily with one hand and the bottles merely deformed when fumbled. Even stepping on them served to do no more than dirty the label. Stomping on them, Harry had advised, would shoot the contents of the medical potions all over the floor, but that only served to waste the potion, since nearly everything in the med-station magically cleaned itself of blood and dirt. Touching each bottle caused the container to verbally announce its contents and effects. "Skele-gro. Fixes bone fractures. Lagar beinbrot." An embossed bone symbol was depicted on it in raised ridges.

Illustrated, pictographic guides instructed even the most ignorant person on how to survive and heal slash wounds, stab wounds, gunshots, and compound fractures. The rack was organized so the most urgent potions were on the first row; blood replenisher, concussion cure, anti and pro-coagulant, generic healing, sight and hearing restoration, and in a black bottle on the far side, the Draught of Living Death.

When the cap of the Draught was popped, it notified whoever held a linked tablet that the user of the tent was incapacitated and revealed its location. Niduen was to take the Draught if she had been injured enough that she couldn't survive her injuries with what the med-station provided. If she had a partner within the tent, the tent's location would not be revealed, else if she were alone, the entrance would seal itself until presented with the tablet. That way, even if she were at imminent risk of death, the Draught would put her in stasis until someone could come heal and restore her.

Opposite the med-station in the entryway was an armory. It had the full 'medieval' arsenal, as Harry called it, a set of magically forged, nigh-indestructible weapons. It had a cavalry spear, a footman's spear, a pike, a poleaxe, eight swords of various lengths, styles, and weighting, a compound bow, a recurve bow, two enchanted bottomless quivers, a warhammer, broadaxe, four throwing axes, shields and armor, so many differently-styled knives Niduen didn't even know where to start, and a literal wooden figurine of a partridge in a potted bonsai tree. There were other, less familiar weapons too, weapons Harry said he'd explain later in Surda. Balls the size of a clenched fist called 'grenades' which they were never to pull out the pin of unless they were ready to kill everyone in an area within throwing range, capped thick paper tubes that would pour out thick smoke of different colors which could be used to designate things like enemies, allies, themselves if they were wounded, or just to block off visibility in the case of thick grey smoke. There were backpacks with cords emerging from the shoulder straps that when pulled, would release a 'parachute' that could save them from falling or jumping off dragonback, and even more esoteric equipment.

"The goal is to give you control of the battlefield," Harry announced, showing them off one by one in the open field. "For the more tactically-minded, you'll know that factors like time of day, weather, windage, and terrain all factor into how you attack. By giving you control over environmental factors, you can pick the battlefield every time, and leave the enemy guessing until it starts."

He showed off white tennis balls that would float in place at the apex of their arc when thrown and flood the area beneath with light, and black tennis balls that would do the opposite and turn noon into midnight. Brown balls would render the ground in a wide radius around its landing spot squishy and treacherous, tan ones firmed it up like a dirt road. A sky blue compass's white needle could be oriented to change the direction of the wind, though they were warned that it could only do so much; if it was gusting from north to south, about the best the compass could do was render the gales into a stiff breeze. Completely flipping the direction of a strong wind was beyond it.

More selfish equipment generated an invisible, semi-permeable window that could be shot through on one side, yet blocked returning fire. A disk termed 'environmental control' bristled with dials that could modify the environment in a dome the radius of which could be controlled by yet another dial. On the subtler side, it casted a bubble air couldn't penetrate or escape that held scents in and refreshed with oxygen. Another silenced any sound emerging from the area, though it also muffled incoming sound. It casted the suite of wards Harry had used during the Horcrux hunt. They were impressive against normal muggles, but he warned that anyone who searched the area with their minds would immediately find them. The fidelius could not be anchored to a moving object and cover the area around it, so absolute protection was out of the question.

There were other options. The bubble could keep out or let in rain, control the temperature inside or generate a subtle, artificial shadow, and so on, but the options were increasingly more obvious. They were invited to observe an active bubble through their scopes and filters while Harry sat inside toggling each setting in turn. It was glaringly obvious to Niduen looking through the thermal scope if temperature control was active. A perfect circle of cooler or warmer ground stood out like a target on the landscape, the air filter was much subtler but the barrier still showed up as a thin film of distorted temperature where the membrane struggled to equalize the temperature. And any and all wards were a glaring red wall on the vitality filter. The one-way shield was a red rectangle, the dome was red, if anyone other than them had a scope with the same enchantment, spotting them was a certainty.

Finally, straight down the hall from the entryway to the tent was a normal house. It was two storeys, with three bedrooms and ensuite bathrooms, a storage closet, a laundry room and a lounge. The main floor featured a furnished living room, fireplace, big enchanted windows that currently displayed a third person view of the tent they were exploring as an example, pitched on an empty bit of dirt just inside the Range, and a kitchen/dining room.

"It's designed to be comfortable." Harry explained. "While on missions, outside might be a terrible, muddy, bloody battlefield that you have to return to every day for months. Inside, this is supposed to be a shelter. The pantries are deceptively well-stocked with groceries and pre-made meals for four people for a full year, plus another year of alchemical nutrient powder if you manage to run out. Nothing will ever spoil. There are board games and books, there's even a nursery and pre and post-natal care for women. Everything I could possibly think of, and if I missed something, please tell me and I'll add it. There's no point in these tents being anything less than perfect when I have the ability to improve them. There's racks of filled power gems and a grove of trees to passively replenish them, portkeys to a safe bunker in the middle of the salt flats past the Endless Plains, and a fertilized baby chicken egg under stasis you can hatch for emotional support."

Niduen smothered a smile. There was just one question on her mind though. "How did you manage to do all this in time? Do you not consider any of this to be a waste of your time?" He had only been absent from Ellesmera for months. Just one tent had to take at least a month, even factoring in his ability to use transfiguration. The lot of them lounged in the living room, sighing and sinking into the cushy couches.

Harry shook his head. "Some of this took some time, but less than you'd think. Everything that uses no magic, I can copy as many times as I want in an instant. The structures are all identical down to the paint on the walls. I had to enchant the fridges and pantries and the tents have real plumbing and electrically wired lighting. Only the water supply and waste pipes are enchanted to cut down on enchanting. All the medieval weapons, I'm producing en masse for the Varden anyways, same with the medicinal potions in the med-station. Parachute packs can be duplicated, food is produced en masse, books and board games were copied, and the emotional support chicks I did on a whim. Figuring out how to magically duplicate enchanted bullets was a harder single project than the entire structure of the tent, which Arya helped me with. Actually, if any of you are musicians, we can sit down together and record some music and songs on vinyl and I can copy them so you can listen to music on campaign."

Filvendor stood. "I think I speak for all of us when I say that this equipment is beyond anything we could have hoped for. I'm honored that you thought so highly of our safety with your med-stations, and provided us with everything we could ask for and some things we couldn't in your armories, Lifebringer."

"Aye," Vru nodded, turning a knife in the light of the living room and watching it play off the black-and-white colored steel. "These are queenly accommodations."

"It's the least I can do for asking you to risk your lives and do the dirty work I'm asking of you," Harry disagreed. "I saw works at the Agaeti Blodhren that took at least as much effort to make as all twenty tents in their entirety took me. That I can do more with less effort, I'm investing the same amount of effort you might expect from a masterwork sword into your tent. Now I want to know what else you want. It can be anything. Something you might use your own magic to accomplish but wish to save your energy for instead, or something outlandish that my magic might let me do anyways."

They mulled it over. Niduen saw Illo raise his hand first. "You have given us many things to start fires, Lifebringer. Mayhaps something to stop them?"

Harry nodded. "Good catch. Let's see." he didn't even get up, instead conjuring another tennis ball. "What colors intuit fire extinguishing?" he asked. "I would presume red, white, and black, but you're the majority."

"Those colors do fine," Illo assured him. The rest of the elves nodded. Harry furrowed his brows in thought.

"I know a spell, inflammare exstinguere, which extinguishes fire," Harry mused. He set a handful of cold-burning fire onto the table where it licked merrily, leaving the varnished wood completely untouched. With a flick, and a murmured "infmammare exstinguere," it winked out. Harry produced a glass tablet and tapped it, producing an image on the surface. He poked at it for a moment, then read something off it.

"This passage claims it can't extinguish fiendfyre, obviously, but that sort of implies it can extinguish everything else. Conceptual alteration means it probably just ends any actual flames, but I wonder if it still leaves any fuel hot enough to remain above its flashpoint," he thought aloud. Niduen listened intently. To watch a miracle worker at work was a unique privilege. Her fellows were likewise silent and attentive.

Pointing his wand at the now red, black, and white ball, Harry muttered to himself. "Delayed activation spell, triggered by subjective zero-g or probably also ricochets off a surface. Radius: how about a hundred meters? How does a sphere a hundred meters in radius sound for area of effect?" he asked aloud.

"Plenty, except in the case of a massive fire in a huge building or a forest fire," Illo assured. "Presumably in those cases, we could use more than one."

"Brilliant," Harry announced. "We don't want it so big that far away hearths are extinguished, anyways. Shall we go outside to test this, first?"

No objections were raised, so they ducked each in turn through the tiny exit of the tent and out into the empty section of the Range. Everyone cleared away from the designated area wherein Harry abruptly conjured a withering inferno a hundred meters across. Despite standing dozens of meters clear of the border, Niduen could smell the fire, hear the roar, and feel both the heat and the gusts of oxygen it was sucking up from behind her, nearly pulling her towards it. Orange flames shot up several meters, dancing in the empty space like the hell superstitious humans believed in.

Harry chucked the ball into the air. At its soaring apex, the entire area just…vanished. The fire was suddenly gone, leaving so quickly it was shocking to Niduen, who had expected the inferno to gradually recede. The dirt floor was soot blackened. Harry produced his rifle out of nowhere and awkwardly brought the scope up to his eye.

"Well, the ground is showing up super hot still, so stay back. I want to test-" the rifle vanished to wherever he kept it and a sheet of paper and folding table appeared in Harry's hand. He deftly folded it up into a wedge shape and tossed it, the paper wedge soaring to the middle of the blackened patch. It landed for a brief moment before bursting into flames and shriveling up. "That's what I was worried about," Harry hemmed. "If a building's really on fire, putting out the flames might not be enough if it's still hot enough to catch fire again. I was thinking…fridgeidero!"

A blast of icy air washed over them and dissipated behind Niduen. Harry produced the rifle again and peeked through the scope. "Looks good," he announced. Another paper wedge glided to the middle of the black spot and sat innocently next to its shriveled and burnt predecessor.

Another red-white-and-black ball appeared. The inferno exploded into existence without warning, causing Niduen to jump with alarm. Harry chucked the new ball into the air. This time, the fire vanished with a blast of chill. The rifle reemerged, and the third paper airplane once again acted the canary in the coal mine and announced the efficacy of the fire extinguisher balls.

"That was something," Filvendor murmured. Except Niduen could see it in Harry's eyes; he was not done yet.

"Not quite," he said darkly. "I've made this mistake before and almost killed a whole field of livestock."

Niduen and her fellows watched on with disapproving gazes. Harry produced a single rat, and it was obvious that rat was unlikely to survive the next minute of its life. Niduen hated feeling the death of a living thing she was in the mind of, but she could not help but think the rat deserved someone to witness and understand its final moments. The other presences in its mind revealed that her fellows had thought the same. She was heartened to find that Harry, too, respected life enough to not waste it and be a solemn observer.

It went into a reflective box Niduen could only imagine was designed to shield it from the initial inferno, and floated to the middle of the black patch. The inferno returned and Niduen felt the heat in the box rise alongside the rat. It grew unbearable within seconds, but the fire extinguisher ball was already on its way up.

COLD. Cold beyond anything Niduen had felt. She gasped. The frigidness permeated her very soul. It was as if she stood on a barren moon in the absolute void of space that no sun nor star had ever smiled upon, and she would never be warm again.

Nigh instantly, she keened and fell to her knees. The light of the rat's mind was snuffed out by that frigid cold before she could even see it coming. She was left shivering in the dirt, huddled up and wishing for the fire to return so that she might warm herself to feel alive again.

It was a few minutes before the elves recovered. Harry had conjured blankets and floated them over them. Niduen recovered about when Illo did. Filvendor was already up, yet Val took a minute longer and was the last to get to her feet. Lifebringer, she thought with bitter irony. A cruel joke.

Harry had taken a seat in a hitherto nonexistent chair and labored over another ball. Niduen found another doomed rat in that silvery box. He looked sad, but not half as affected as even Filvendor, who she knew to have one of the most stoic composures of any elf she knew. "Will this kill your subject, too?" Niduen asked before she could stop herself. Her manners had not yet reasserted themselves. Horrified, she clapped a hand over her mouth.

"No," Harry shook his head. "The most it will do is make the rat slightly sick. It's destined for Hedwig or Blinky's plate in any case, but I don't intend to make it suffer."

Niduen could not tear her eyes away from the box as it drifted to the center of the soot circle. The blast of flames surprised her less. She had to force herself to extend her mind to the rat. Her eyes followed the ball's arc without deliberate effort, too busy bracing herself for the soul-leeching chill she expected.

The rat suddenly felt chilly, like it had been outside for a while in the winter, but it quickly recovered. The air felt blessedly warm to it. Niduen felt hot air on her own skin. Harry checked his scope once more. "98.6," he announced. "Exactly at human body temperature. It'll be cold to smaller animals, probably warm for reptiles, but it shouldn't do more than make them a bit sick."

Understanding dawned on Niduen what Harry had done. They watched him conjure enormous racks of stacked tennis balls, thousands upon thousands of them in a single pallet, hundreds of pallets stacked upon each other in a giant block of balls and racks. He made a grand, encircling gesture with his wand, magic washing over them all. When Niduen extended her mind to the extinguisher balls, they had begun to glow very softly to her senses. Harry rolled one pallet away from the rest. "I'll put one rack in each tent, that's 5675 extinguishers. The rest go into storage," he waved his wand again, shrinking the pallets and directing them into a conjured box labeled 'fire extinguisher balls.'

Harry clapped his hands together. "So, what else?"

---

Niduen was uncomfortable asking for anything after Harry's demonstration. It took him no more than ten minutes to do, but the scale had been intimidating. It didn't matter if you knew someone could move mountains with ease; asking if Harry could "please move that mountain a few feet to the left" remained an absurd thing to ask. He seemed to have recognized this and instead asked them to produce a wishlist together and that he'd look it over later. He departed the Range and went to go hang out with Elva, who had been left more or less unsupervised during the demonstration.

"That was terrifying," Filvendor announced cheerily, swaggering over to his seat in the workshop.

"Agreed," Illo nodded. "I hardly dare ask Harry for anything else."

"He was very responsible, though," Niduen observed. "To use the extinguisher on a building full of people before it was fixed…" she trailed off.

They shuddered. "Indeed." Val clicked her pen experimentally and put it to paper. "We've been asked by a miracle worker to demand miracles of him. What outrageous things can we come up with?"

Once the blasts of fire and chilling deaths of test rats faded a bit from their minds, 'brainstorming' up miracles began in earnest. Vru wanted an AOE heal ball for use after a battle's conclusion, Virien came up with a repair talisman for structures and a mapping tool that could give them the plans to cities and terrain, Anzi suggested a cure for sickness or failing that, perhaps an AOE quarantine that would stop the spread of diseases. Inath thought of one for watering and/or growing crops in cases of famine, and that really got them started on the realization that Harry's awesome power could extend beyond wartime. Could Harry increase fertility like a portable, deployable Dagshelgr celebration? Could he quell bloodlust in an impending battle or as a tool to prevent impulsive murders? Could he kill weeds in a defined area? Could he generate enough freshwater for the nomads in the Hadarac Desert, or stem the dwarves' reliance on hunting for meat? Could they seal off residential areas or otherwise prevent civilians from harm during sieges and city sackings? Could he restore the state of the wilderness behind an army's marching where it had been ruined by the trampling of fifty-thousand feet?

Ealyi, Eru, Wime, and Illentha quietly wrote by themselves for a while. Later, they presented their ideas. If it was so easy to make portable housing of a quality surpassing even that of Ellesmera, could they do the same for permanent housing for those humans without shelter? Though they had left the celebration early, all of them were ecstatically aware that dragons, far from verging on extinction, had been all but guaranteed to thrive once more. During their brainstorm, it began to truly dawn on them:

Alagaesia was never going to be the same again, was it?

One last obstacle existed before that utopia could begin, they realized.

One man's long and terrible shadow. One last thing.

Their resolves firmed. Galbatorix would not, could not stand in the way of the world Harry could make. To wield their rifles and inflict suffering and death in the coming battle was a terrible thing, but they would do it without hesitation. Another golden age, it wasn't some dream where a lifetime of relentless effort and sacrifice merely ended one step closer, Niduen could practically make a list of steps to achieving it.

When Harry returned with a young girl in tow who introduced herself as Elva, Ilentha asked a question that had been weighing on the minds of a few of them. "Can others learn your magic?"

Harry grinned. "Yes, actually. Arya has been my first student, so to speak, and she's better than me at combat magic. Those of you who are already accomplished with Alagaesian magic will start out much further along than a complete novice, too. However, I only have so many wands and I'm already running low. Wandmaking is on my to-do list, but it's lower than defeating Galbatorix. You all can peruse the ones I have left but if none respond well to you, I would advise you to wait, and unless all of you bond with wands, any who manage it will have to study on their own in the meantime while we work together on the Sniper Corps. I have a feeling Nasuada will have no end to the jobs she wants me for and my time will grow increasingly rare. So I guess, probably not right now, but definitely in the future. In the meantime, what did you all want from me?"

They glanced amongst themselves. Virien spoke first. "Can a talisman be made to repair things? Perhaps buildings or city walls?"

"Now I feel like an idiot," Harry groaned.

At first, he produced a rubber mallet with an embossed wrench and screwdriver emblem on the head, but it soon became apparent that the variety of magical effects the elves wanted available would be cumbersome to carry if each had its own mallet. Instead, Harry decided on a flat case of drill bits which Niduen was sure was a reference to some private joke, especially once he insisted on calling the handle the spell-heads screwed on to a "sonic screwdriver." The screwdriver, he warned, would draw upon the strength of the wielder to affect its spells. Single-charge balls were all well and good when the initial power he'd infused into their creation was enough for the single expenditure of energy its effect required before it vanished itself. If they wanted powerful, reproducible spell effects on the order of repairing cracked city walls, the energy of the initial cast wasn't going to cut it.

The consensus among them was that the sonic screwdriver was a crutch intended to last only for as long as it took for Harry to crack wandmaking and then for them to master the respective spells of the spell-heads. Niduen had fun thinking up icons to make it obvious at a glance what each spell-head did. Brackium Emendo, the spell to mend broken bones, was represented by a little carved, femur-shaped bone. Reparo was a little hammerhead, Vulnera Sanentur was a red plus shape, Episkey, a caduceus staff. Herbivicus was a green leaf, Geminio was two overlapping paper icons, Aquamenti was a blue water droplet, and Evanesco was a purple star.

There were spells Harry explained that he wanted to give them access to, but which just wouldn't work no matter what he tried. The Patronus, he explained, was effective against Shades and malignant spirits, but it was a deeply personal piece of magic individual to the caster. Niduen badly wanted to be able to produce a patronus of her own after seeing the beautiful, sinuous white dragon Harry could cast, but it wasn't to be.

"Magical mediums tend to fall on a sort of spectrum," he explained after the AOE heal artifact was proposed. "Potions for potency, artifacts for complexity, wandwork in the middle for convenience. That's not to say that artifacts can't be stronger than wandwork or that potions can't be more complex, but past a certain point, magic stops being free and you need to power it, and the amount of steps and ingredients increases exponentially with the complexity of the potion's effects. Brooms draw from the user to empower their flight. Potions are strong because they consume all the magic of all their ingredients to produce something beyond what wands alone can produce. AOE heal bombs would probably demand an entire filled gem to produce a single one, and the healing they distributed would be superficial cuts, bruises, concussions, etc. It wouldn't save someone who was going to die. Triage requires potions or failing that, dedicated healers."

"What about an artifact that draws from the wielder?" Ilentha proposed. Harry got a calculating gleam in his eye.

"That has potential. Let me get back to you on that."

Another common request was a scope that wasn't mounted to any rifle. Holding the whole rifle up to her eye was unwieldy, but Niduen still valued the ability to spot anyone no matter how far.

"I can do that," Harry agreed. "Enchanting the scopes was the hardest part, so it might take a day or two."

Requests for potent artifacts like that usually elicited similar responses. Harry rarely shut down requests entirely, but the expressed desire for something that would accelerate crop growth, first initially accepted, was later amended to 'later' when Harry heard the request to keep out weeds. Niduen realized that Harry planned to unify the two features and just needed a bit of time to develop it instead of producing something on the spot.

Their helmets were updated with enchantments that pressurized their entire head and let them breathe indefinitely underwater without releasing any telltale bubbles.

In the case of very unfavorable terrain, the elves received flying carpets designed to be perfectly stable midair and whose undersides were disillusioned to reflect the sky above. They were imperfect, Harry warned. Disillusionment worked best against a single person with a single perspective and could project an accurate image to them, but two different people with different perspectives would confuse the enchantment and make it blur out of perfect invisibility. Nevertheless, on days with clear skies or days with even cloud cover, it didn't matter since the whole sky would be the same color, and if there were no hostile fliers like Lethrblaka or magicians with so much energy they could lift themselves, they could always fly above the range of arrows and forgo stealth altogether.

The carpets drew from their riders to stay aloft, but in the case of having absolutely no other option, their tents could be pitched on the carpets high in the sky, and had hermetic seals that could keep in high-altitude air pressure and stave off hypoxia, but Harry warned that they were never to exit their tents without their helmets on if they did so, lest they risk hypoxia and quick but silent death.

"I almost died mere days ago to the same thing," he warned them. "It's no joke. The carpets don't know when you're unconscious, so they'll just float there in the thin air, holding your corpse up for the rest of eternity unless someone brings it down, feeding off the grove and gems in the tent. Hypoxia prevents you from thinking straight almost immediately, and it's not obvious enough that you'll notice it before it's too late. You won't even notice yourself pass out, and you'll die in your sleep."

On creating entire buildings, Niduen understood Harry's reasoning for refusal. "It's easy enough to duplicate buildings for me, and it's harder to abuse healing than it is to drop a whole fucking house on someone's head. If these tools are to be available to everyone, they need to be hard to abuse. For this same reason, I'm going to veto a talisman of horniness. It sounds like a love potion, and I have no intention of handing out a date-rape talisman to the whole world. Farmers can figure out how to get their livestock to get it on by themselves. If the world needs housing, let them have apartment buildings."

The last thing they proposed was something to restore the wilderness behind the march of an army. "Do you want to?" Harry asked. "Conserving the environment is a noble goal, but it occurs to me that if one wanted an Alagaesian road network, laying it in the wake of the Varden's march sounds like a fair idea to me."

The idea sounded implausible. Were the races of Alagaesia really going to trust each other so much in the wake of Galbatorix's death that they would accept open, convenient borders with each other? Now, the idea of a road leading straight to Ellesmera sounded like a horrific security risk. Except, wouldn't Du Weldenvarden feel more lively with regular visitors? If the world changed enough, it dawned on Niduen that maybe they did want a road.

"Perhaps a road-paving talisman?" Filvendor cracked, grinning madly.

Harry paused. "I'll get back to you on that."

---

They reached Surda within the next few days. Harry had only managed to produce two of the discussed items in the meantime: the sonic screwdriver and the secondary scope. The spell-heads came in a separate flat case that could be stored in a pocket on their gear next to a holster for the handle designed to wick strength from them. The scope could be clipped on and had a cap to protect the lens, but was too bulky to be seamlessly integrated into their gear like the flat bit case.

"Some customization and selection is up to you," Harry explained. "There's too much gear here for you to carry everything such that you can just grab it whenever. Once you manage wands, I can try to walk you through creating and accessing a soulspace pocket, but for now you'll have to try and predict what you'll need for an upcoming mission. Do you clip grenades onto the bandolier in anticipation of clearing rooms indoors or extinguishers while guarding convoys? Are you bringing dark spots or light spots, does the windage actually matter to you, and so on and so forth."

Niduen stood before the mirror in her armory, fully kitted out. She had her assembled rifle slung over her shoulder, a long knife and a throwing knife in her thigh holster, enchanted, fitted carbon fiber plates over vital areas and limbs attached to her polymer bodysuit, her invisible helmet over a blonde ponytail and a spear parallel to her rifle over her back. She wore in her bandolier two grenades, an extinguisher, a black spot, her wind compass in a pouch on her belt, and slotted into her rig, the black-tip explosive round box and the purple-tip crush box. The rifle was already loaded with green-tip AP. They'd prepared dead grass ghillie and lush grass ghillie in anticipation of spring and summer.

She examined herself in the mirror. If Eragon could see her now, he'd be struck dumb, Niduen thought with a fierce grin. She looked sexy and dangerous. Firnen would be dropping them off outside Aberon behind whatever cover he could find. There was no use giving the game away to Galbatorix's spies immediately. Eventually, she knew they would come to fear the Sniper Corps, but at the moment, they were even more terrifying; they were silent and unknown death from miles away without warning. All twelve of them had sung themselves soft human features and wore the winding diamond charms of Du Vrangr Gata, playing the part of late arrival magicians to the Black Hand and their prying eyes. They were not spellcasters on the level of Blodhgarm or Wyrden, but they could easily blend in with human magicians.

Firnen dropped them off behind a hillock of slushy dead grass and a budding tree. He flew low enough that one jarring jump was all it took to get on the ground, dirtying their human traveling clothes. Niduen and her female fellows weren't quite willing to put up with the human 'barefoot and pregnant' ideal most men expected of their women, but they had toned their lethality down a lot. The Urgal tents started half a mile from their drop off. Aberon's walls started about three quarters of a mile walk from them.

When they arrived, Arya had managed to get word far enough down the command chain that the guards at the gate let them in without much trouble, though it grew increasingly more challenging to pass, the nearer they drew to the dining hall in Langfeld Hall.

Finally, Harry greeted them before the herald managed a word edgewise. "It's been forever since I saw you!" he called in deliberate defiance of courtly rules. "How were the spellbooks?"

Filvendor managed the 'nervous peasant is called upon to ignore court rules by a powerful person' demeanor magnificently. Niduen watched amusedly as he hesitated just the right amount before committing to a response.

"Excellent, Ascudaruna. I've never seen the likes of its ideas. I'm afraid we hadn't the courage to try the more…adventurous spells."

Despite rudely telegraphing his disinterest in court intrigue, King Orrin valiantly drew Harry back into conversation. "Du Vrangr Gata, I assume? I've heard and seen excellent things about your colleagues. Might I ask why you lag behind those I've already had the pleasure of meeting?"

Filvendor bowed obsequiously. "Of course, your grace. We've been waiting for the dwarves to be prepared to march, and are honored to be their envoys. King Hrothgar sends his regards."

Niduen bowed. In truth, Harry had checked with Hrothgar across their linked scrolls to set everything up, and Nasuada and Orrin were both clued in to the Sniper Corps. If not their true roles and duties, at least their identities as very much not ordinary Du Vrangr Gata magicians. Orrin did well enough selling the lie, Niduen supposed. She didn't know him well enough to tell either way.

After they feasted (a notable, non-vegetarian downgrade in the food they'd been eating from Harry), said wizard invited her and Filvendor to a meeting with Orrin and Nasuada. Apparently, they were the two of the Corps he knew best. Niduen supposed they didn't need all twelve of them to make plans, and wondered where Elva had gone before spotting her eating with Angela the Herbalist in a corner of the hall.

"You've still not told me the true purpose of your group," Orrin started, settling into his sealed office behind them.

"I would like to know as well," Nasuada added. She appeared healthy for surviving what would have spelled certain death to anyone not next to an incredibly strong and skilled healer magician a mere month or two ago.

"They're a bit of an experimental force," Harry explained. "Without going into too much detail that could be snatched from your mind or accidentally leaked to a "trusted" advisor," he made air quotes, "Niduen and Filvendor are part of my solution to enemy magicians. They'll have broad control over the battlefield and the tools to quickly shift it in our favor. Posing as Du Vrangr Gata is effective because they're skilled magicians, but their true strengths lay elsewhere and unlike the best of the best magicians of the elves, I hope these guys can actually benefit from sitting in on and learning with Du Vrangr Gata's meetings, which serve both as a cover and an opportunity to expand their skillsets. If either of you have anything to add?" Harry asked them.

"You know that we're elves," Filvendor added smoothly. "While we would doubtless be very effective as simple ground troops, It is not too risky to say that the role Harry has devised for us will have a greater impact than frontline fighting. I have some experience with siege engineering and can pass on some of what I know to your engineer corps. Ilentha is an expert healer and can contribute to the pool of knowledge your own healers draw on. Many of us have incidental specialities we can contribute to the effort, but the duties Harry brought us for will take precedence, and I believe you will be very pleasantly surprised with our effect come the first major battle."

"I'm glad to have you back as well, Arya. I admit, the scrolls somewhat obviate the need for an ambassador, but you are a visible symbol to the people that the elves stand behind the cause."

Arya nodded. "There remain issues too nuanced or complex to properly put to pen, and I am happy to represent the needs of my people in such cases, King Orrin." She was very different in front of dignitaries, doing "her real job" than with just her colleagues.

"It's heartening to hear," Orrin said. He poured himself a cup of wine, then withdrew another empty goblet. "Any of you?" he offered. They politely turned him down. "I admit, I feel more useless than a King is used to, sitting in Aberon and reading about your daring do infiltrating citadels and learning from the elves, Harry, so please accept my sincerest gratitude. I know that among nobility, those manners you so courageously ignore can make it hard to detect sincerity among us," he chuckled. "Know that I genuinely am grateful. You've contributed incalculable support to the cause, and your contentious personality is refreshing among the stresses of court in wartime."

Harry was taken aback a moment. Then, a real smile stretched over his face. "Thank you, King Orrin. You sell yourself short. I loathe administration, and they say you only notice it when it's a problem. I haven't noticed it, which is glowing endorsement. Wrangling contentious personalities is tough and you do very well."

Orrin detected the sincerity in his voice and returned the genuine smile. Niduen thought with wry amusement that he had no idea the kind of force of nature the friend he just made was. Though from the look on Harry's face, he was about to find out.

"So, we were chatting on the flight over and Filvendor had this brainwave," he started. Filvendor groaned good-naturedly. "Obviously, marching a whole fucking army of a bajillion humans, Urgals, and eventually dwarves and elves, tends to tear up the grass and trees and flatten the dirt. We'll probably wind up taking an efficient route from Aberon to the Empire, and it occurs to me that once the Empire becomes a Nation instead of an Empire and the…problematic elements of its administration are gone, it might be nice to have a nice, shiny new road between the capital of Surda and the friendly new Nation."

Understanding dawned on Nasuada. "You want to pave the path we take," she murmured. Harry nodded.

"Won't that expose Surda to easy reprisal?" Orrin shook his head.

"If this campaign fails, Galbatorix will not leave Surda around for a repeat a century from now," Arya disagreed. "The true risk is that he might launch a counter invasion to tie up some of our resources, and I remind you that our source of supplies needs no baggage trains or convoys. Leave enough troops in your cities to force sieges instead of assaults and Surda will last at least until the war is decided one way or another. If he is determined to counter invade, Galbatorix will not need roads to do it."

Orrin was silent for a minute of thought. "Can you spare supplies to garrison my cities?"

Arya glanced at Harry.

"Yeah. You'll be responsible for transporting them. It'll be small enough for one person to carry, but they'd better not lose it," Harry warned. "Food, water, and medicine for everyone in the city for a year of siege."

Nasuada raised the next objection. "We had not planned to make directly for Aroughs or Feinster. Galbatorix seems prepared to meet us in open battle before we can proceed to sieging cities. We planned to fight at the Burning Plains, away from collateral damage. There is nothing there worth paving a road to."

Harry shrugged. "There's nothing there yet." He glanced at Filvendor and Niduen. "It occurs to me that if Du Völlar Eldrvarya wasn't on fire, it'd be the best farmland on the planet. Peat deposits have smoldered untouched there for centuries, haven't they? Something of value can be built there. And failing that, it can be a junction for a road between Aroughs and Feinster."

"The easiest route for an army may not be the best route for a road," Nasuada warned. "We will skirt terrain too densely forested to penetrate and search for adequate bridges even if they are far out of the way."

"Du Vrangr Gata was almost capable of letting you take the direct route anyways, and now that I'm back with twelve new helpers, we can take the best possible route," Harry countered. "Crossing a river with magic is no huge obstacle, assuming our magicians can't just make a bridge really quickly if we put our heads together."

"I am hesitant to commit the resources of all my magicians to a route we will not be able to turn back from. You must be absolutely certain you can do this." Nasuada's dark eyes bored into Harry's, daring him to crack and admit he'd overestimated his capabilities.

"How much time do we have before departure?" Arya asked.

"How wide must the path be, and how much weight must the bridges bear?" Filvendor added.

"The instant the roads are passable," Nasuada answered. "It is slushy and muddy, and the stress of thousands of horses, feet, and wagons on the paths will ruin them if we go to early, but already, I am marshaling the camps and having them break down their winter lodging. As little as weeks. Beating Galbatorix to the Burning Plains lets us set the battle as much in our favor as possible, and we desperately need every advantage we can get to overcome their numbers."

Niduen glanced between Harry and Filvendor. Not necessarily.

"How about this?" Harry proposed. "Filvendor and I will bring the squad out to the bit of Petrovya river between here and Lithgow and build a brand new bridge. Without dragons, we can teleport so it won't affect our availability during the campaign. If we can make one to your specifications in a time frame short enough to be acceptable to you, then the direct route is on and we steamroll through whatever stupid forests and rivers are in our way. If not, Surda still gets a sparkly new bridge that makes trade with the dwarves way easier and we take the long, boring route."

Niduen saw the map of Surda unfold in Orrin's mind. Did he think it made his kingdom too difficult to defend? There were other bridges of course, but each one costed a garrison that could hold off Galbatorix's army. To add another was to spend that amount of forces again on defending it. Bridges were expensive and time consuming to build the normal way, and having a new one in such an advantageous location for free was convenient, but convenience was a small factor in the face of an existential war with Galbatorix, the most threatening foe in the history of Alagaesia.

"I worry of opening another avenue of invasion for Galbatorix," Orrin said finally.

"You have far firmer control of the east side of lake Tudosten," Arya reminded him. "An invasion through the proposed bridge all but requires Galbatorix to take Petrovya anyways, lest he be fought off from both sides. And it enables the dwarves to more easily aid you in defending Surda should he try. Remember also that Harry can bring himself and his twelve troops back and forth across Alagaesia instantaneously. We can effectively attack the Empire and defend Surda at the same time."
Harry nodded. "I could take four people plus a young dragon with apparition two years ago. I can handle twelve elves now."

"Very well," Orrin agreed. "The Petrovya river bows deeper into Surda between Aberon and Lithgow. Build it upon the deepest stretch."

"The matter remains of how broad such a crossing must be," Filvendor reminded.

"Ten horses abreast would be sufficient," Nasuada said. "We could do with as narrow as two wagons, but no less."

"And how wide do you define a 'wagon,'" Harry asked. A glowing line appeared midair. "That's one meter. Here's two, three, four…"

"Broader than ten meters," she decided. Orrin nodded his assent.

"Excellent," Harry clapped. "I thought you would give us a challenge. Now what's our timeframe? How many weeks?"

"No more than two," Nasuada sighed in that universal tone of a parent caving to their child's manic idea. "We can't afford to be stalled any longer than that. Even a fortnight will give cities too much time to fortify. On the march, you'll have to venture ahead."

King Orrin finished his wine and relaxed into his seat. "It seems impossible to manage a bridge big enough to carry an army in mere weeks. The scrolls are one thing…"

Nasuada shook her head. "Harry provided us with food to feed the whole army a year ago, and we have yet to get through even half of it despite careless rationing. The scale of his magic can be deceptive until he is given cause to use it to its fullest. The fortifications at the Battle of Farthen Dur came out of nowhere."

"Right." Harry stood up. "Should we get going, then?"

Nasuada sighed. "One last thing. Part of the value of having you here at the Varden's camp is morale. Our troops saw you cut swathes through the Urgal invasion in Farthen Dur. They know you are responsible for the fresh food they get in abundance, and their spirits will be bolstered by your presence. Despite your…oddities, you are a leader, Harry. Being present, interacting with the troops, showing them you care, it all helps keep people feeling safe. You and Eragon are who the simple swordsman expects to stand toe to toe with Galbatorix. While Eragon is beyond our reach, it's even more important to have someone here they believe can defend them against magic they don't fully understand.

The troops would benefit immensely if you were visible at public events not obviously suffering their presence. I understand I have no authority to order you to look and act happy while King Orrin's court tries to get you to marry them, but I ask that you take the time to consider it."

Orrin smiled sheepishly. Harry paused. "How in the world did Brom manage this?" he muttered. "Fine. I didn't think of that. I won't promise to be visibly happy during stuffy feasts, but I can promise to be visible and accessible to the common troops."

"That's all I ask," Nasuada smiled. "Good fortune with your bridge, Harry."

"Thanks, Nasuada. I'll see you later."

---

The agreed-upon bit of river was unapologetically undomesticated. Thick piles of dead reeds and ferns clogged up five or ten meters of icy, muddy wetland on both banks, whereupon the Petrovya river's fast, deep current ran about two hundred more meters. Just past the ferns, dense forest clogged up the land on either side, barely budding green and red. It was beautiful out.

"At least the Hadarac doesn't start for a few miles," Filvendor offered. He sat next to Harry on a flying carpet a couple kilometers up, surveying the river.

"Do they run boats on the river?" Harry wondered. "How tall are the tallest ships?"

"They must," Filvendor answered. "Surda trades with the Empire and lake Tudosten is connected by river."

"But do they boat this far downriver? Orrin's maps don't have any major cities marked on this eastern gulf."

Filvendor shrugged. "I wouldn't risk the livelihoods of several small towns on it. They probably don't run ocean liners on the river. It's not exactly shallow, but it's much less treacherous than the open sea, and smaller craft are sufficient. Thirty meters clearance will be plenty."

Harry had only brought Filvendor with him. The others had to be seen with Du Vrangr Gata establishing their covers, and since only Arya knew transfiguration well enough to be useful and was otherwise occupied in Orrin's court, Harry only bothered to bring Filvendor, the best structural engineer. The plan was a cable-stayed bridge supported on either bank and by a pillar on either side, just past the marshes. Harry had brought premade steel girders, 8cm steel cables, and a metric shitload of wet alchemical cement, along with uncountable nuts, bolts, and the like.

Surveying the ground revealed bedrock was a respectable eighty feet down. Atop that was a basin of clay that surrounded the bore of the river, atop which was eight feet of healthy topsoil. Courtesy of passive mapping charms on the flight over, Harry and Filvendor had plotted a course for a road to Aberon that bent slightly west initially, then split between a route to the capital and a route to Lithgow.

The terrain lent itself to easy road paving. Surda's eastern border featured a few straggler mountains where it bordered the Beors, smaller than both the Spine and the behemoths in the dwarves' territory, but that was the extent of difficult terrain. Surda featured rolling hills and small river branches that split off from the main border river. The absence of mountains meant that even though Harry would probably be forced to cut through hills and fill small divots to keep the route straight and level, there was no terrain that would force him to bore tunnels through stone, and without cars, King Orrin probably didn't care if the road was curvy to fit the terrain or not.

An hour of surveying and he and Filvendor agreed on a patch of land between two hills with a similar feature on the opposite bank. The hills got them closer to bedrock without any extra effort, so bolting supports to the ground would be easier. Harry started out by ripping away everything except grass that lived in the area. He was meticulous about fully uprooting trees and the whole of their root system and not simply chopping them down at the stump. The last thing he wanted was for some trees to crack the pavement in an attempt to grow back out of the ground.

Filvendor watched the careful extermination with mild distaste, but kept his reservations to himself. Harry understood the elves' dedication to environmentalism, but he took a more reserved view. He wasn't obliterating the entire ecosystem of the river bank, he was just displacing some wildlife.

Next, they added dry supports high up on the banks before the dig site and used the pressure of the upstream river to force the water through a narrow gate, drying up the area they needed to dig up. Filvendor marked out the eight sites where three-meter diameter holes had to be bored down to bedrock. Two on the Surdan bank, two on the Surdan half of the river, and another four opposite them. Harry drove moulded casks into the ground like a cookie cutter into the clay soil, then ripped the terrain out inside before repeating the process. Each dig telescoped smaller. At the top, the twenty-meter apart holes had actually merged, and at the bottom, the size was no larger than the planned pillars would be. The water table had been sealed out by the sheaths, and the granite bedrock gleamed a muddy brown.

Harry drilled six deep holes in the bedrock with a diamond bit and floated down a tremendously thick steel beam, which was anchored to the ground and shored up with unbreakability and anti-erosion and rust enchantments. The beams were Harry's first attempt at industrial scale spellforging and had shrugged off unbelievable stresses without any visible damage. Up top, Filvendor checked the beam with a level and called down to Harry when it was exactly perpendicular to gravity. Harry froze it with the impediment charm and sank six spellforged steel bolts deep into the bedrock, anchoring the beam to the ground.

They installed plastic braces to shape the concrete pour into a pillar and installed two centimeter rebar all up and down the length of the brace before Filvendor acted the part of an airport landing guide and helped Harry line the aperture of his cement mixer tank to the opening of the brace. Normal cement was too viscous to pour over such a distance through rebar without any problems, and had to be shaped by hand, but with a bit of alchemy involved, Harry had produced a cement mixture with a thinning agent that brought its consistency to that of water. When exposed to a finishing charm, the thinning agent would react with the magic and polymerize and flash-dry the mixture, allowing the cement a tiny amount of flex that would let it endure even more stress.

"It's finished," Filvendor called down, once the white, watery mixture had reached the mouth of the brace.

"Finite!" Harry exclaimed. The water in the mixture crystallized, expanding the pillar just enough to pop the braces off, revealing a smooth concrete pillar all the way down to bedrock, reinforced by a massive steel beam and loads of rebar. The top of the pillar peeked out two feet from the dirt. Harry levitated the loose clay, soil, and detritus into the excavated area and tamped it down.

Seven more times, they repeated the process. The sun had nearly set when they finished undamming the river. Harry and Filvendor sat with their backs against the new concrete, eating thick sandwiches and gazing at the sunset.

"Why not use transfiguration?" Filvendor asked. "I got the impression this could be finished in a few hours."

Harry chewed for a bit, thinking on how to reply. "Transfiguration is a bit like magical plywood. It's really useful and super easy to use for rapid prototyping, quick fixes, and stuff. With the proper reinforcement and an understanding of its limits, you can do a lot with it, but nothing will ever change the fact that it's the cheap shit. I can enchant the ever living hell out of a conjured steel sword, but pitted against one of Rhunon's, an amateur blacksmith's first project made out of pig iron and duct tape will hold up better.

"Temporary housing, interiors, exteriors, really any non-structural components do perfectly fine with conjured stuff, but it's too easy to destroy with a bit of magic. All the materials we used today were premade and magically-reinforced. The trick to it is batch crafting. What does it matter if I spend a day developing and enchanting steel beams with every reinforcement I know of if I do it to a bajillion of them at once, and now have a supply of indestructible building materials for my next hundred building projects? Bridge collapses kill people. I'd rather spend a few days going the extra mile to make it last for eternity than half-arse it and have a forty-car pileup on the bottom of the riverbed on my conscience."

Harry summoned a couple glasses and filled them with Faelnirv. He passed one to Filvendor. "Rhunon always says the pleasure of creation is in the act, not the product." He grinned at Filvendor. "I can't believe she's not a mother. She's damn right about that being true for babies."

Filvendor smiled. Harry continued. "-But I've found that a good product is its own additional reward. I prefer a combination of the two philosophies; putting in the effort to create something beautiful that will last, now that's rewarding. I use magic to enhance the end result, rather than as a crutch to get an inferior product lazily."

"An enlightened perspective," Filvendor agreed, sipping.

Harry laughed. "I'm not even thirty, I do stupid shit all the time. It always tickles me when some great dignitary like Islanzadi or Orrin calls me 'enlightened' or 'mighty.' Maybe you'll notice this with your super-strength compared to humans. It's weird to be worshiped when in the confines of your own head, you're just…you."

"Apologies," Filvendor deadpanned. "You embody the elven stereotype of a foolish human."

Harry burped. The flavor of elderberries burned through his sinuses. "That's more like it. How about we take a nap, then test out the light-balls and finish the superstructure before sunrise?"

"A stupid plan." For a moment, Harry was confused. Then, he turned to see Filvendor wore a mischievous grin. Harry smacked him on the back.

"Those are my favorite, anyways."

---

"If you don't let me in, I'm going to leave, and then Nasuada will chew you guys out for sending me away because I know she hates how evasive I am."

Nasuada had been eavesdropping on her guards' interactions with Harry for almost a minute now, and was immensely amused by his behavior.

"The lady will call when she's ready," one of her Urgals rumbled.

The wall to the left of the door shimmered and became glass. Harry immediately spotted her, then caught sight of her grin before she managed to smother it. His irritation melted into delight. "Nasuada!" he called, crouching and waving. "You troll! I didn't know you had it in you!"

"Come in," she rolled her eyes.

Her Nighthawks had made to grab Harry the moment he casted his spell on the wall. "Ah ah ah," Harry skipped away. "Hands off, ladies. I've got a meeting with your boss. Don't make me report you to your manager."

The door closed behind him. "What news?" Nasuada asked.

"It's done," Harry announced. "One brand-spanking-new bridge. It's big, it's bad, and Galbatorix himself couldn't collapse it without serious, serious effort. Wanna see?"

Nasuada tapped her finger on her desk. "It's been four days, and you only brought one helper. I admit, I'm expecting a rather sorry bridge."

"Can we go now?"

Nasuada eyed his eager face. He was like a little kid showing their parents a knife they'd begged from a smith or a cat presenting a dead rat. "Fine."

"Brilliant-"

"-We're bringing my guards."

"Ugh." Harry rolled his eyes. "What the hell are a bunch of buff guys going to do with a sword that I can't."

"Their visibility is a potent deterrent," Nasuada reminded him. "Many assassins might consider going through with an attempt if I'm guarded by one young man with a runner's physique than two massive Urgals, two burly dwarves, and two armored humans."

"Security theater," Harry's face soured. "I've heard tales about the TSA in airports. You're contributing to the problem, Nasuada. I thought better of you. Fine, let's go grab your beefcakes and check out the completely deserted stretch of land that has been of zero interest to anyone up until four days ago."

"Captain," Nasuada raised her voice. The door to her office was nearly smashed down in the Nighthawks' haste to reach her. All six of them had bared weapons and stared Harry down with the intent to kill. "We're all going to take a brief trip. Harry, how do we do this?" The wizard had drawn his wand in alarm, but had not yet stood from his chair.

"Right." he got up. "We're all going to link arms in a circle."

Nasuada did not enjoy apparition one bit. Were it not for the fact that she had just traveled dozens of miles with passengers in an instant, she might have never braved the method of transport again in her life. As it stood, she could do little more than gawk at the gleaming metal structure that stretched magnificently over the roaring river before her, gleaming in the sunlight. It was like no bridge she'd ever seen. The only stone she spotted was a flat black strip that formed the surface of the road, and beneath it, a couple feet of grey stone emerging from the earth. The rest was gleaming steel.

Two pillars rose from the bed of the river and rose above the surface of the pavement, each supporting a series of cables that anchored to the road in even intervals. Except that was almost beyond the point. The structure and the supports and cables represented so much steel, Nasuada could arm half the Varden over with it. Her guards were similarly awed.

There was plenty of space beneath the bridge for ships to glide underneath, and the terrain on either end had obviously been shaped to shallow the grade of the slope. The surface of the road was no mere dirt path, either. Rather than use gravel or flat pavers, the blacktop was like liquid stone, frozen into one smooth ribbon.

"How much can it hold?" Nasuada murmured.

"I don't think you could fit enough stuff on top to collapse it," Harry said. "The supports are anchored directly to bedrock, and the bedrock is the most likely thing to give. Everything is enchanted against weathering, wear, and deliberate damage. The steel is enchanted against heat, crushing, tearing, and snapping, and plasticity. It's elastic enough to sway a tiny bit in an earthquake, but Surda doesn't really have a history of earthquakes in any case, so it probably won't matter. My surveys prove there's no caves or empty space anywhere below, so the bedrock can only give if it's literally liquefied by pressure, which would require a ludicrous weight."

"You've proven your capabilities twice over," Nasuada said faintly. "It looks as though we'll be building a road."

And what else was there to say? She had expected little more than a pile of stones held together by magic and prayers, built only to last for the length of the crossing before more permanent bridges could replace them after the war. She had not expected him to rise to the challenge of anchoring supports down to the bottom of a swift river, and producing such an architecturally beautiful piece, it seemed a shame the world would weather away the shine. Nasuada was forced to again readjust her expectations for what Harry could deliver. If the massive bridge before her took him no more than three days to construct from wilderness, what in the world had he accomplished in the year he'd been gone? She was eager to find out.

---

"Need a hand?"

Urd grunted. The half-log he'd lain down as a skid to support the mess hall was stuck to the ground. The mud slurped at it, resisting every ounce of muscle he could put to the task. Abruptly, it was wrenched from the ground with an almighty squelch. He swore.

"Thank ye," he panted. "King Orrin says we're to leave the grounds outside the city as we found 'em, or else build properly." The man who'd helped him was slight, and his hands were undirtied. Awe came over him. "Yer one of the magicians, aren't ya? I never thought I'd meet one in person. Thank ye for everything on the march here," he gushed. "Terry swears one of ya saved his left arm."

The athletic man had black hair and striking green eyes. Urd thought he almost matched the description of the wizard who could rival Eragon Shadeslayer, but the man before him wasn't half so broad or tall as Harry, nor did he exude an aura of power that made the earth tremble, so Urd supposed he couldn't be.

"Supper is soon, isn't it?" the man asked.

Urd craned his neck back. Woodsmoke was rising from the the complex the cooks set up for supper. "I reckon it's started," he said. "We can swing by if you're hungry. Better not try the line twice. The servers have sharp memories and get mean when you try to double dip."

The man hummed. "Shit. I wonder why. It's not like the food is limited."

The smell of brisket wafted off the tent. The man peered into his eyes. "Urd, isn't it? I'm Harry."

"Like the wizard?"

Harry quirked his lips. "Yeah, something like that."

'Harry' was damn picky. Urd saw him wrinkle his nose at the wooden plate he was served brisket on. Had he expected genuine silver?

A stiff paper plate and strange, flexible glass utensils appeared out of nothing. Urd blinked. He was actually-

Harry chewed the brisket approvingly. "Tough, but not bad for army-sized portions. Sorry about the cutlery and plates. Look, Urd, I've got to run, but it was great to meet you."

"Ah, likewise, yer majesty," he bowed clumsily. A laugh erupted from the wizard.

"No one's ever said that to me, Urd. Just Harry is fine." the way he said it, Urd thought maybe the wizard was lost in memories. He watched him recede into the crowd once more, finished his meal, and got back to working twice as hard.

Later that evening, a big structure was erected. It was a stage big and tall enough to be seen all throughout the encampment. He turned away from empty slush and dirt and turned back later to find the whole thing had appeared out of the ether, just like that paper plate.

Urd looked up, awed. There Harry was, standing on a stage that made him look tiny. Great big lights pointed in every direction, brilliant enough that he could see the thousands of heads looking up at him. No chance in hell I 'kin hear him, he thought, except he was immediately proven wrong.

"Good evening, Varden!" he called, his voice rolling over the crowd like a god's proclaimation. Urd could feel the low parts of the wizard's voice in his very bones. Everyone hushed to listen closely. "Some of you don't know me, I'm sure. I'm Harry. I've got a title, but it's got to be a secret for now, and I'm sure I could do with a bit of humbling." He laughed self-depricatingly. The crowd seemed petrified, unsure if laughing along was acceptable.

"Tough crowd," Harry said, and Urd could hear the grin in his voice, even though he was too far away to be much more than a human-shaped figure. "You can laugh, I'm no Galbatorix. I like to think I'm the fun one compared to Lady Nasuada and King Orrin. We could all die any day now, so I'm here tonight to make sure we live a little first. I was away recently, some of you may have noticed, doing top secret things to make sure our mission to free Alagaesia is as easy as possible. Lady Nasuada has been asking me to come back often. She's wiser than me; I had no idea why until I asked her yesterday, and she told me: "Harry, these men are prepared to fight and die by your side because they believe you'll keep them safe from Galbatorix, should he show his ugly face." Not in as many words of course."

Urd laughed raucously. It was exactly the kind of thing Harry would say,, wasn't it? The guys next to him heard, and a ripple of laughter spread through the crowd and around the campfires.

"So now that I'm back here full time," Harry grinned, "I thought to myself, how can I make a connection with these brave warriors who are ready to stand behind me in battle and place their lives in my hands, trusting that I'll have their backs?" A cheer started again, and suddenly the Varden exploded into wolf whistles and roaring cheers.

Harry waited a good few seconds before he spoke over the crowd. "How can I be worthy of the honor you all do me, to trust in the skills of a mysterious magician none of you have ever met? Assembled before me are tens of thousands of the finest warriors Alagaesia has ever produced!" More cheering. "Toppling Galbatorix is a goal a hell of a lot of people can get behind!"

Urd felt the ground shake under the stomping and cheering. The atmosphere in the camp was electric. Euphoria leapt from person to person, jolting them with frenetic enthusiasm for the cause.

"My answer to you, Lady Nasuada, who I'm sure is out there somewhere listening, is this. The Varden is more than just a group of warriors who put their swords to a common cause; it's a people with a shared vision for Alagaesia, one free of tyrants who never die and cast their twisted shadow over the world for all of eternity. It's more than the men and dwarves who fought bravely beneath Farthen Dur to defend the dwarves that had generously housed them. It's more than Ajihad and his vision, Nasuada and her vision, It's more than even King Orrin and the mighty Surdans who now add their swords to our cause. It's more than the women who support us, the elves who will fight with us, the Urgal clans who fight with us, it's all of us together, and it's my hope that we can do more events like these where we get people up here on this stage to show everyone what the Varden really is: A commitment to a better Alagaesia and the best things about it!"

Urd clapped until his palms stung and whistled until his lips grew chapped. The thunderous applause seemed to echo off the empty sky back at them. In the crowd, Urgals bellowed and beat on their chests.

"You've all heard the news; we're heading out of Aberon the second the roads clear up." Harry groaned theatrically, prompting the crowd to echo him. "We've got ground to cover if we want to take the fight to Galbatorix, and breaking camp every morning is tough work, but I figure every other night, I'll set up this stage and we'll get a bunch of you up here to sing or tell stories or dance or whatever you want to share with the rest of us. I'll come up here at some point and give you all the news on how the war's going, then we'll all go to bed and wake up ready to haul ass to the Empire!"

Cheering.

"Magician and Musician are subtly different words," Harry joked. "I'm not the best musician, but I'm not evil enough to ask some unprepared musician up here to play in front of thousands of people, so I'll do my best to bring you some music from my home, and hopefully remind you of one thing we're fighting for."

He began to play an unfamiliar instrument. It sounded a bit like a fiddle, but richer and more bassy. The music washed over the crowd. Behind Harry, a handful of unmanned instruments floated in the air, poised to jump in.

Harry's instrument rose and fell. "You might hear some words and ideas you're unfamiliar with, and it's in the Ancient Language, so you might not understand it all, but one of the wonderful things about that particular language is that it doesn't really matter if you know the words. The meaning just gets across, anyways." His voice was gentle, quiet enough that the sound of the electric guitar was the focus.

The cheering receded. Everyone had been entranced from the first line.

"Music has this incredible power to bring people together, you know," he added. "I'm a wizard and I bend the rules of reality to my whim every day, but there's something truly magical about a shared experience like the one I hope to give you tonight. This is "Anna Sun," by Walk the Moon.

Screen fallin' off the door, door hangin' off the hinges.

My feet are still sore, my back's on the fringes.

We tore up the walls, we slept on couches

We lifted this house, we lifted this house.

Firecrackers in the east, my car parked south,

Your hands on my cheeks, your shoulder in my mouth.

I was up against the wall on the west mezzanine,

We rattle this town, we rattle this scene.

Oh, Anna Sun,

Oh, Anna Sun.

A line of fire raced up into the air behind the stage and burst into twinkling green embers. For an instant, Urd felt alarm, but Harry didn't stop singing. The bass and drums came in and added another layer to his music. Another starburst of embers lit the sky orange. The lyrics were…raunchy. Urd couldn't have written down the meaning, but it came through clear enough. The world was falling down around him, but the woman in his life made it all worth it. He got the impression of kissing a beautiful girl late in the evening, the sky illuminated like it was before him.

Harry's voice layered with itself during the next chorus, looping back overtop of the first one like he wasn't singing alone. The sound faded in and out controlled by what had to have been magic. The melody was simple enough that even though no one knew the words, the rise and fall of the tune rumbled from the humming throats of thirty thousand people.

"Anna Sun" faded out after only a few minutes, but it wasn't the only song Harry had prepared. The next hour, he filled the entire field outside Aberon with songs such as "All These Things That I've Done" by The Killers, "Mr. Brightside,""Welcome to the Black Parade,""How to Save a Life," and "Fortunate Son." Urd felt the depth of heartbreak, the inevitability of death in the human condition, the weariness of war, and guilt with thirty thousand others alongside him.

The music and instruments were unfamiliar, so much more than crude drums and the human voice alone could capture, but there was no pretentiousness in it, either. They came from the heart of a soldier, a jealous lover, a young boy, not from some stuffy noble who had never struggled a day in their life.

Harry was no perfect musician; he missed occasional notes and didn't always nail the key with his voice, but everyone could hear what it was supposed to sound like, and their minds filled in the gaps. The sun had long fallen and revealed the stars when Harry announced that was all he had for them tonight.

"Lady Nasuada and I bickered about this for a while before we started," Harry confided to them. The night felt too quiet to Urd without the resonant tones of Harry's music. A breeze whispered through his grimy hair, a blessedly cool wind to wick away the sweat of the energy in the crowd.

"She and I had a disagreement about operational security. She tends to be right, but this time I got her to compromise. It's easy for one or two people to keep a secret, and telling you all is as good as telling Galbatorix himself, so I can't tell you everything, but I think you who will fight for us, deserves to know the situation as best we can safely tell you.

The Empire will field a force that's probably going to hover around a hundred thousand men."

A ripple of unease moved through the crowd. "It's a lot of men," Harry agreed solemnly. "We number roughly twenty thousand brave men from the Battle of Farthen Dur, ten thousand mighty Urgals, and the standing army of Surda numbers less than five thousand. Farmers and tradesmen will likely join us, and the dwarves number no more than fifteen thousand. For those of you who do not count mathematics among your skills, that totals fifty thousand. They outnumber us two to one, but we all know that a man with a righteous cause fights twice as hard!"

The crowd cheered. Yes! The Varden seemed to exclaim. We are each worth a hundred of those sorry Empire conscripts!

"Galbatorix has dragged what seems to be every able-bodied man out of their home to fight a war they don't want to, for a king they hate!" Harry shouted. "They'll drag their feet, bang their swords on their shields and shout a bit, but will they fight with all of their hearts and souls for the future of Alagaesia!?"

"NO!" the crowd screamed back.

"Will the Varden?"
"YES!" they thundered.

"Eragon Shadeslayer will fly to fight with us when the time comes. Saphira Brightscales will fight with the ferocity of a thousand dragons, and Eragon will fight with all the wisdom of the Riders of old. Shruikan's black corpse has long rotted. We have a Rider, and Galbatorix can no longer call himself one! Islanzadi prepares to march with her elves, Hrothgar has already departed Tronjheim with his dwarves, Orrin prepares to add his army to our own, and the greatest and bravest Urgal tribes fight with us! The whole of Alagaesia rises against Galbatorix, can the Empire stand in our way?!"

"NO!"

---

AN: IT'S HAPPENING!

I was a bit nervous to include music in writing. The inability to really have music in writing is one of the medium's biggest weaknesses. You can listen along on Spotify or just make do with your imagination, but I hope you were swept up in the energy Harry's creating for the Varden.

FDR's "Fireside Chats" were the inspiration for Harry to keep the Varden updated with the war effort. Once Nasuada gave voice to the real reason she wanted Harry present in the Varden, it all fell into place for me that Harry wouldn't be some figurehead sitting at the head of feasts and politicking, he's the guy who learns new magic to teach the D.A. among his peers. I think he also knows about the tension between Urgals and humans and hopes to give them both a vehicle to tie themselves closer without violence. Setting up a concert with half-remembered songs he managed to reconstruct with Arya's and the Sniper Corps's help feels like the sort of thing he might do.