The immense Romanesque amphitheater that was used as the quidditch arena was far too large for just the few-hundred Hogwarts students. Between the desire to be closer to the action and out of the way of downward-hit bludgers, the students and staff mostly filled out the very top couple of rows, leaving at least a dozen beneath them empty. Well, except for the team alternates—Harry and Ron—who were in a box that was just above the field. This was the same field that was rapidly filling with Mindless Ones that seemed to be entering the stadium from all of the passageways out.
Harry had learned that they were technically called "vomitoriums" which suddenly made a lot of sense—because he wanted to throw up.
In the dark and driving rain, it wasn't clear that everyone above had realized the danger yet, though it couldn't be long before they started to feel the mental effects of so many mind-draining beings. Even if they looked down from the game being played in the air, they might not be able to make out the creatures as more than faint red smears of light far below. But Harry and Ron could clearly make out their baleful gaze, turning in their direction.
"Why are they always looking at me?" Harry complained, his soaked quidditch armor squishing as he moved to try to escape up the stairs toward the rest of the Gryffindor.
"Maybe they think you know where Black is," Ron shouted, argument forgotten as his tactical mind went to work. He splashed along right behind Harry, need for heroism counteracted by realizing he wasn't going to be able to fight a crowd of brain-draining monsters by himself.
"But I don't have any idea where… damnit," Harry said, before spotting something that he probably should have much earlier: a large, soaking-wet, black dog crouched down in a row of seating about a third of the way up, deliberately out of line of sight of most of the rest of the crowd. He must have sneaked in at some point to watch the match.
Even through the dark and rain, Harry was pretty sure he saw a look of doggy chagrin on Sirius' face as he was spotted.
"Well come on!" Harry shouted at his godfather, not breaking stride and thoroughly done with his day.
As the two boys and the big black dog pounded wetly higher and higher up the stairs, that finally drew the attention of most of the rest of the students. First was the wonder what Harry and Ron were doing. Second was noticing the warned-about black dog running along with them. Only then did they notice the glowing red of Mindless One eyes pursuing them up from the ground, and start to feel the malaise of their presence.
The rest of the crowd began to notice when two-dozen students instantly began to unload magical attacks on the pursuing extradimensional entities, a fusillade of orange and teal light drawing the eye even across a stadium and in the rain.
Harry briefly thought they'd be able to stand and fight with their housemates, but his chanced glance back saw the spells merely glancing off of the slick gray skin of the creatures. And each time one was hit, it turned its crimson gaze upon the caster, and another shooter cried out and began to back away. The barrage of Gryffindor spells quickly dwindled, and the boys' reinforcements parted like the Red Sea before them and their pursuers.
Toward the Ravenclaw students, where they were sitting next to Padma and Luna, he could see his friends being shoved back by the retreating crowd no matter how much they might want to help. In the distance in the other direction, he could make out what he thought was Dumbledore's amplified voice shouting, but even if the headmaster could do something, it might be too late.
"Really wish I hadn't loaned Ginny my broom right about now," Harry groaned to himself. He yelled at Sirius, "We're going to have to jump. I think I can handle it."
The slack-jawed look of astonishment on the dog's face quickly turned into grudging resolve as Sirius realized that Harry was right. The Mindless Ones had them cornered against the edge of the stadium, and it might only be seconds before their mental malaise brought both of them down.
"Harry, I have my broom!" Ron shouted a reminder. Harry was honestly surprised the redhead was still with them, rather than having broken off with the rest of the crowd.
"Then try to catch us if this doesn't work!" Harry ordered, not having time to come up with a better plan for how two boys and a dog could ride a broom to safety.
Later, he'd kick himself for not telling Sirius to just transform back into a human, and take the broom. He had basically just decided, "Dogs can't ride brooms," and discarded any plans involving it. It probably had to do with the fact he was barely functional with the growing whine of terrible memories at the back of his head, ready to incapacitate him at any moment. And the plan he did have wasn't awful, just never tested.
"Jump!" Harry ordered Sirius, as the both of them clambered up the back wall of the stadium and looked down at the multi-story drop off the back side. Vanaheim architects hadn't thought much about safety railing.
Right before they leaped, Harry managed to get his wand trained on the ground below and made a complex gesture. Teal light began to lift from the soil, and he bent his will as they fell toward it into making it as robust as possible. He'd had a lot of practice using the cushioning charm to create crash mats on stone floors for their martial arts practice, but he'd never had to do anything like this. He was basically trying to make a full-sized stunt performer airbag that they could land on.
The principle was sound, at least… he was pretty sure.
Fortunately, he also remembered at the last second an online video he'd watched about how stuntpeople landed on said giant airbags, and managed to turn and tuck his head properly so he landed in a way that wouldn't break his legs or his neck. It turned out Sirius was also no stranger to falls, and hit the magical crash pad on his furry back with a bark of shocked excitement. Both of them rolled to the ground and managed to stagger upright. "I think I'm okay," Harry said, quickly checking. Sirius barked an agreement after getting his four feet in order.
"Mate, that was awesome!" Ron said from above them, where he was hovering on his broom.
"It's not over yet!" Harry warned Ron. Looking up at the boy on the broom, he'd seen the red glowing eyes begin to look over the edge of the stadium down at them. "Sirius! Run!"
As they scrambled along the wet turf toward the forest, Harry risked a glance behind and saw the eyes slowly descending, barely making out the gray-skinned figures in the driving rain as they fell at some graceful rate inconsiderate of Vanaheim's gravity. On the plus side, it gave them a bit more of a lead. On the minus, it meant they weren't smashing to pieces on the ground where Harry had canceled his cushioning spell.
"Did you… did you come to see me play quidditch?" Harry asked the dog as they ran.
Sirius barked in agreement, keeping pace with Harry though he could likely go faster.
"That was nice. Stupid. But nice," Harry admitted. He remembered to tell the man/dog, "We think Pettigrew is alive and here. Somewhere. He was pretending to be Ron's pet rat for years. He ran away when knew we were closing in. Maybe."
Sirius growled loudly enough to be heard over their splashing footfalls.
"So you need to catch him if he tries to get off the grounds. And don't kill him," Harry insisted. "You need him to prove you're innocent."
Sirius' ability to emote as a dog while they were running for their lives wasn't sufficient to indicate whether he'd agreed.
"Harry! They're catching you up!" Ron yelled from above. When Harry nearly tripped glancing back, he realized his roommate was right. Despite not looking like they were sprinting, the Mindless Ones were strangely fast.
"You're going to have to sprint!" Harry insisted to Sirius, already feeling dizzy and hearing the echoes of his mother's death at the edge of his hearing. "They want you, not me." Sirius seemed to be hesitating, so Harry screamed, "Go!"
The dog began to pull away, almost to the trees, so Harry slid to a stop and turned, for a moment considering facing down the horde but then thinking better of it. He began to run sideways, flicking bolts of energy toward but not at the spell-resistant creatures, hoping to draw their attention.
As his mother's dying voice started to drown out the sounds of the rain and his feet stopped falling correctly one in front of the other, he realized he had been partially successful. Slipping onto the grass and sliding in the mud, he made out several red eyes looming toward him.
"Not Harry. Not Harry. Please, not Harry!" his mother's voice echoed in his head.
"Stand aside," a man's booming and gruff voice ordered. "I've killed enough of your family today. The child has to die, but you do not."
"Please, no. Take me. Kill me instead," his mother insisted.
The loud voice sighed and agreed, "There is no instead. But very well. Perhaps the three of you will be happy together in the afterlife…"
Through the haze of memory, Harry could barely make out the glowing orbs of the Mindless Ones. Circling him. Far above, Ron's courage seemed to have finally failed him as well as he flew away. Would the Mindless Ones spirit Harry off to the Dark Dimension? Or would they just stand there, forcing him to relive his mother's death until he also went insane?
He wasn't expecting the ghosts of Dumbledore and Snape to appear next to him. The Mindless Ones hadn't expected it either.
As soon as the shining translucent forms of his professors appeared, the extradimensional beings began to stagger backwards, and the pressure on Harry's mind lessened. "You idiot," spectral Snape told him. "Thirty points from Gryffindor for unnecessary heroics!" He then reached a ghostly hand out for the Mindless One nearest, who struggled to avoid it.
Meanwhile, Dumbledore's wraith was pointing the shadow of his wand at them and insisting, "Depart. Or we shall make you depart."
Harry glanced over the way that Sirius had been running and thought he saw other spectral forms blocking the dog's pursuers.
To Harry's amazement, the gray-skinned entities slowly retreated, forming into an enormous group, and then twisted. One by one, blips of purple light heralded each of them returning to the Dark Dimension until there were none of them left.
"Harry. Can you make it back to the arena?" Dumbledore asked, as the wraith of Snape sneered.
"I, uh, think so, sir?" Harry agreed, still unclear what was happening.
"Then we shall await you there," Dumbledore agreed. Then he, Snape, and the others in the distance disappeared in a flicker of light, though Harry thought he saw an afterimage of each snapping back in the direction of the stadium.
He just hoped there weren't any stragglers still chasing Sirius.
"Need a lift?" Ron asked, returning from wherever he'd flown off to as the rain began to relent before Harry had slogged more than a quarter of the way back to the stadium across the sodden ground.
"Uh," Harry grunted. "Sure."
After he'd tiredly clambered up behind Ron and the two of them poked along, an ungainly pair of soaked teens on a secondhand broom, Ron said, "That was crazy."
"The teachers are ghosts, or something," Harry agreed.
"I reckon that was astral projection."
"Oh. Right," Harry nodded. "I wonder why that works on the Mindless Ones."
Ron shrugged.
"I'm… I'm sorry. For stuff," Harry said, too mentally exhausted to renew their argument.
"It's cool. I'm sorry I'm not trying harder to learn to fight," Ron allowed. "I do want to be a hero. Like you already are."
"You didn't go running away like that rest of Gryffindor," Harry gave him. "That's not nothing."
"Huh. You're right," Ron agreed.
By the time they flew over the wall and back onto the stone of the stadium, the crowd was cheering. Above, in the returning sunlight, he could make out Ginny doing a flyby while triumphantly holding the snitch. It actually took their housemates a moment to notice Harry and Ron after the Gryffindor victory, but then there were renewed cheers for the two third-years who'd clearly been chased by Mindless Ones and survived.
Those that had been nearby had also been impressed by Harry's death-defying leap off the back of the amphitheater.
As Harry and Ron tiredly joined the rest of the quidditch team in their changing and shower room beneath the stadium, it turned out most of the team hadn't even noticed the Mindless Ones. "I was just so focused on finding the snitch," Ginny apologized, while handing Harry his broom back.
"We knocked some bludgers their way," one of the twins suggested.
"But the bludgers didn't want any more of them than anyone else did," the second admitted.
"What's important's that we won," Wood said, then, as an afterthought, added, "An' that ye're both okay."
The rest of the study group was waiting for them as they exited, showered and much less sodden. "We were so worried!" Parvati said, still not sure about their relationship, "But we couldn't get to you."
"I know," Harry said. "I saw you on the other side of the crush."
"How'd you escape?" Dean asked as they started walking back to the school.
"A bunch of professors astral projected and forced them off," Harry explained. "I don't know why that worked. I think we need to find out a lot more about Mindless Ones. We might need to be able to do that."
"Yeah, right," Hermione huffed. "None of the Masters think we'll be ready to astrally project until we're adults. It's advanced magic. You have to be very good at meditation."
"I know," Harry shrugged. "But you saw how magic just splashed off of them? If not astral projection, we need to figure out something. I bet that's not the last we've seen of them."
Surprisingly, Harry didn't get called into the headmaster's office over his ill-advised attempt to help a fugitive escape. It seemed that everyone was so mad that the dark spirits had made their way onto Hogwarts grounds that nobody was paying too much attention to the details. He'd probably have been in more trouble if he hadn't done so well escaping. Even the teachers seemed impressed by his quick-thinking and skill at the cushioning charm.
But even with that spellcasting, the teachers didn't have any confidence they could teach him to meditate well enough to astrally project. He asked Flitwick. He asked McGonagall. He asked his elective teachers. He even asked Binns.
He didn't ask Snape. On top of all the existing rancor, the chemistry professor seemed to be quietly seething that they'd helped Sirius escape the Mindless Ones and that he'd been forced to help.
Running out of professors, the afternoon after chemistry class, Harry randomly asked Lupin, "Don't suppose you know anything about meditation, sir?"
"Meditation? Oh, yeah. Uh, a good bit," the defense professor said, as nonplussed by the question as Harry was by his answer.
"Could you… teach me?"
Lupin shrugged, "Sure. Trying to control your emotions so those gray jerks can't get hold of them so easily?"
Harry blinked. "That would probably help with that too, huh? No, I was trying to learn to astrally project."
"That I don't know about," Lupin admitted. "But if you need meditation for it, I'm your guy."
"Great," Harry said. "When?"
"Any evenings, I guess," Lupin shrugged. He didn't seem exactly eager, but it was probably the least he could do for his old friend's kid.
On the way back to the Gryffindor dorms after class, the group was surprised to see Dumbledore walking with the Ancient One down the great staircase, presumably from his office. Well, the kids from Earth were surprised. The ones from Vanaheim were mostly confused about who the bald woman was. "Ma'am!" Hermione said, doing a little half bow that the kids had been taught. The Ancient One didn't really require them to do it all the time, but this seemed like the right circumstance. That really confused the Vanir as to who this was. "Are you here to help with the Mindless Ones?"
"Such that I can, Ms. Granger," the Ancient One said, amused at the confusion of the other children and at Dumbledore stiffening in slight upset. None of the kids ever bowed to him. "I believe that we can improve the wards of the castle itself, but the grounds may prove too much of a challenge."
"Perhaps Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley can come with us?" Dumbledore suggested, not wanting to draw more of a crowd on the third floor landing. "We were going to examine the site of the attack, and your viewpoints may be helpful."
"I'll be around at least until after dinner," the Ancient One said, before any of the others could object to being left out.
"Oh, okay," Hermione allowed. "We can take your bags?" she offered to Ron and Harry, who nodded and handed over their books to be taken back to the dorm, then turned to accompany the two ancient mages out to the grounds.
Ron was frantically trying to figure out who this was from context, but was chuffed to be included.
As they were walking across the grounds, Harry couldn't contain his questions any more and started with, "Why are the Mindless Ones only showing up some times? Is it because Sirius is closer to so many people?"
"Well reasoned," the Ancient One said, before Dumbledore could answer, shooting him a slight smirk. "They do not see the same way as most beings, and can find his mind better when it is close to others. Though if he and those around him become more emotional, that might also make him visible, even if he is not on a packed train or at a sporting match. Darkness also makes it easier for the Dark Dimension to breach into this one."
"He can only come to quidditch matches in the future when it's a nice day, got it," Harry nodded. "Why does astral projection work against them? Is it because they're basically ghosts?"
Dumbledore was quicker to step in and answered, "Partially. It is also to do with their peculiar mental state. When you are in your own body, they can siphon your mind's energy. When you are nothing but mental energy, they have no anchor to draw upon, and no mental defenses of their own."
Ron had a question, asking, "If they prove that Black is innocent and that, well, that Scabbers is a person and betrayed him, will the Mindless Ones stop coming?"
"Perhaps," the Ancient One shrugged. "Azkaban truly is an awful solution, not designed for anyone to ever get out again."
"And we must prove beyond a doubt for the Minister to even try," the headmaster admitted. "I must commend you on your actions last year to keep Hagrid from being taken there, Mr. Potter. It truly was a short sighted attempt at politics."
"He wanted to be seen to be 'doing something,'" Harry basically snarled, still annoyed at Minister Fudge. "How'd that guy get elected, anyway?"
"Vanir politics leans heavily on the voices of the most powerful," Dumbledore explained. "And quite a few families retained their power that probably shouldn't after the war. Ah. Here is the site where they left." They'd reached the space between the forest and the stadium where they'd been chased.
After casting divination spells for a few minutes and asking Harry and Ron questions, the Ancient One said, "Too much time has passed. I can barely detect the breach. This means it's not in danger of reopening, but I cannot use it to determine if there are more protections that could be implemented. Perhaps if I'd gotten here sooner…"
Dumbledore said, "I believe we can at least come up with an item to alert you faster than an owl the next time. Even tie it into the wards so you're immediately alerted if they re-enter the grounds. Travel here from Midgard will remain slow, however, with the difficulty portalling into the region."
They considered and didn't seem to have an answer, so Harry asked, "Do you think you could portal somewhere that connects to the Chamber of Secrets? There were lots of night roads into there."
The Ancient One had heard most of the particulars of Harry's ordeal in the spring, though second- or third-hand from him mentioning it at Kamar-Taj. It was possible that she had even hoped for him to suggest it. She looked to see if the headmaster would shut the suggestion down cold.
"I'm not certain we should rely on a connection that requires Parseltongue to open," he said. "But I admit to being curious."
"I don't think it needed it to get out, just in," Harry shrugged. "Which is kind of a security flaw. But I guess nobody has come in that way for centuries who wasn't able to speak snake…"
"It bears looking into," she agreed. "What do you think, headmaster? Still feeling young enough for an adventure?" Harry had a moment of dissonance realizing that the Ancient One had probably looked the same age over Dumbledore's entire life. He wondered if she'd even known the school's founders.
"We're going to Niflheim?" Ron asked, excited. "I've been wanting to go!"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Weasley," Dumbledore corrected. "But I think that this trip should be limited to fully-trained wizards. Harry, himself, will remain in the school, simply opening the portal."
As much as Harry thought it might be neat to explore night roads with the headmaster and the Ancient One, he sighed in relief at the unexpected break. "As long as nobody throws me through this time," he argued. "You know, since me waiting outside was the plan the last time too."
"Duly noted," the Ancient One smiled her little mysterious smile. "Well, no time like the present?"
"Perhaps after supper," Dumbledore demurred. "In case this takes more than a few minutes."
"I'm never going to get to go on a proper adventure," Ron complained. But at least he was grousing to Harry about it, rather than blaming him for it. That felt like progress.
"I'm sure your time will come, Ron," Harry gave him a pat on the back. He just hoped the boy wouldn't get seriously injured or killed when it did.