In the meantime, Harry, Hermione, Sirius, and Riddle had been escorted to the dungeons, except they were not nasty, dirty, wet, and filled with worms and rot; in essence, what one would expect to find in dungeons. Rather, they were hardly dungeons at all.

Their jailers treated their prisoners very well. Each was given an individual cell with a solid, polished door. The rooms themselves were spacious and bright, with a comfortable bed and even a window that overlooked the shining white city and the glittering sea. In the door was even a barred grille, through which they could hold discourse with one another. They had provided them with good food and water upon arrival, and the guards, despite not understanding their language, spoke to them in tones of courtesy. Harry wasn't sure what this said about the culture of their captors. They seemed incredibly arrogant, yet equally wise and benevolent.

'Not quite the Savoy, but it will do for now, children,' Riddle remarked lazily.

Hermione pushed her face against the grille, bristling with disapproval as she stared across at his cell door. 'Well, well, you're not quite so frightening without your wand and cronies about, are you? You're just a weak, cowardly old man.'

Riddle yawned loudly, but his face did not appear in the little window. 'Your insults need some work, Granger. You'll be seventeen in a few months, too. What is it you want me to do?'

She clenched her teeth. 'You said yourself you're the most powerful wizard since Salazar Slytherin. So get us out of here.'

There was a pause before Riddle responded. 'You saw those warriors. They're high elves –'

'Elves?' Harry repeated, thinking of the odd-looking little creatures with bat-like ears and bulging eyes that wore tea towels and pillowcases.

'Yes, high elves. At least in our world, presumably the ancestors of our little domestic friends.'

Hermione snorted, and Harry knew she was valiantly resisting the urge to launch into a lecture on S.P.E.W.

Riddle continued, as though he hadn't been interrupted. 'Immortal, magically powerful, and deadly.' His voice was relaxed, and it sounded as though he were lounging on his bed. 'What's the point in trying to escape? If I knew how magic worked here, it would be another story. But alas, you deprived me of my wand in the little time we had to figure it out. Potter, true to form, led us straight into a trap.'

Harry, in his cell beside Riddle's, curled his hands into fists and tried to stamp down his utter fury.

And now,' Riddle continued with a sigh of long-suffering, 'all our wands have been confiscated.'

'So do some wandless magic,' Harry growled. 'Surely the greatest wizard ever is a master in wandless magic.'

There was another pause before Riddle replied, 'But why would I ever want to leave such gracious hospitality of our immortal hosts? There is so much to learn from them.'

Hermione eyes narrowed, and she saw Sirius' face pop into his own grille.

'You'll never beat death, Voldemort,' he snarled.

'How do you know?' Riddle said, mock-petulantly.

'You just don't want to admit you can't access your magic here, even without a wand,' Hermione said loftily, crossing her arms.

Riddle scoffed and rolled his eyes, finally coming to the door to meet her eyes. 'I fear for your generation if you are the cleverest witch among them.' When he next spoke, he sounded thoughtful, as though he were puzzling something out. 'Tell me, Granger, what language is our magic accessed by?'

Hermione bared her teeth at the insult to her intelligence, but couldn't resist the overwhelming urge to answer academic questions. 'Latin, some Aramaic, Akkadian, Old English – but mostly Latin.'

'Very good,' Riddle drawled sarcastically. He put a hand to his chin in mock contemplation. 'And I wonder, could it really be? Is it too much to hope? That any of those languages were ever spoken here in this world?'

Hermione was so close to telling him to shut it.

'The Valar understood us,' Harry said loudly, but it sounded like his face was pressed into a pillow.

'They don't count, Potter, they're gods. Their language is universal,' Riddle said dismissively. He leaned against the door, crossing his arms. His brows huddled together in consultation. 'Language is inextricably linked to land and peoples. Isn't it?'

Hermione nodded, wondering where he was going with this. 'Yes, but what does that have to do with accessing magic here?'

Riddle began to pace in his cell. 'Magic isn't simply a never-ending well of power wizards draw from with a random Latin word. It is a push and pull, a swish here, a flourish there. We know the language of our world's magic from millennia of experimenting, language evolution, et cetera. Latin speakers happened to be the ones that most uniformly adapted magic spells as significant parts of their language. It derived from the language of magic, not the other way around.'

Hermione furrowed her brow, racking her brains. 'I've never read that in any books on spell theory.'

'Ha!' Riddle exclaimed, pushing his face against the grille. 'Goes to show how useful your textbooks are.'

'You made that up.'

'I've got news for you, Granger. All theories are made up.'

'Based on evidence–'

'Questionable.'

'You have got to be –'

'Would you two shut it!' Harry bellowed from his cell.

Silence reigned for a few moments.

Harry said more calmly. 'All right, Riddle, let's just say your theory is true. So what are you saying? We need to learn these people's language to access their world's magic? But even if we learned their language, we wouldn't know the spells.'

'The theory's a work in progress,' Riddle sneered with reluctance. 'But it may not be as hopeless as you think. The language of magic is, by some miracle, the same here.'

'You can't seriously think the same spells would work here. You just saw that they don't,' Sirius said.

'Why not?' Riddle jeered. 'Potter's stunning spell was pathetic, but it still worked. It may be the case that Potter simply is inept and can't cast a first-year spell–'

'Watch it,' Harry warned.

'-which, by the way, would make all this much easier for us if the weakness of the spell were merely due to Potter's incompetence. But no, the spell did what it was supposed to, only it was very reluctant to make any effect at all. Which leads me to believe that in our own world, a wizard's magic is dependent both on his own magical core as well as the magical landscape.'

'But we don't belong here - how would the magic here ever recognise us as master over it?'

'There may be a shortcut,' said Riddle at the same time as Hermione gasped.

Harry hauled himself up from his bed and joined the others at the grille. He was glad he couldn't see Riddle because he was just beginning to calm down and he knew seeing his face would set him off again.

'Of course,' Hermione was saying excitedly. 'Our wands and individual magical cores aren't connected to – to Middle-earth because they're inherently and physically connected to our world. But if we could create our own wands here, they could serve as the mediums that connect our magical cores to this world's landscape.'

Riddle inclined his head. 'Ten points to Gryffindor!' he said mockingly.

Hermione shot him a withering look. Then, as though suddenly remembering she was talking to Lord Voldemort, she looked quickly away.

'Now the question, Granger, is how do we go about finding and slaying a dragon for its heartstring?'

Hermione's eyes widened. 'There's no need for that. You said these people are high elves. They're basically more powerful versions of Veela – a strand of their king's hair might do the trick.'

'Good luck plucking out one of that git's hairs,' Harry said.

'Elves are too common here,' Riddle said, ignoring his comment.

'So what?' Hermione said incredulously, in spite of herself. 'Not three minutes ago you were mooning over their immortality. Not everything has to be the most powerful, rare object ever, plus it's more expedient than going dragon hunting, we don't even know if dragons exist here–'

'Didn't you see that massive mosaic of a dragon outside this place?' hissed Riddle. 'Obviously they exist.'

Indeed she had, and the black dragon was massive, if the scale of the picture was accurate, compared to the little warriors before it.

'And you think you can defeat one of those things without magic?' she scoffed.

'Who says I need to defeat it? I am a Parseltongue, don't you know,' Riddle replied, laughing haughtily.

She rolled her eyes. 'Oh, so the dragon is just going to keel over and die because you told it to, I see. What a clever, original idea.'

'He's Voldemort, Hermione, he can't be reasoned with,' Harry said loudly, wishing the pair of them would shut up.

Hermione glanced briefly at him, but was distracted once more by Riddle's verbal parry.

'For once, Potter's right,' said Riddle smugly. 'There is no need for reason here, only acknowledgement of facts. I'm the heir of Slytherin, Granger, our coat of arms isn't a serpent for nothing.'

'Not even you can be that arrogant,' she finally choked out after mouthing wordlessly in disbelief. 'Besides, how can you know they don't have some other master already, let alone speak only Parseltongue?'

Harry and Sirius exchanged glances as Hermione and Riddle continued to bicker over the merits of elf hair and hunting dragons. Harry personally suspected Riddle was just trying to provoke them. There was no way he was going to risk his neck without taking extreme precautions. Harry reflected. Perhaps Riddle already was plotting some sort of strategy to harness the power of a dragon, taking all necessary precautions. He couldn't underestimate Riddle just because he looked like the handsome seventeen-year-old from the diary he had destroyed in second year.

'We'll get out of here, Harry,' Sirius said quietly, unheard over the rising volume of the others.

Looking into his godfather's grey eyes, Harry knew Sirius was stamping down guilt and mustering up the courage to bear responsibility for two teenagers lost in an entirely new world, plus a mercurial, opportunistic dark lord. He had never been a parent, but Middle-earth was about to test his mettle.

Harry shook his head, recognising the burden of responsibility thrust upon Sirius' shoulders, a burden he had often felt himself.

'Sirius, it isn't your fault–'

Before he could finish, the door to the dungeons squealed open and one of the elves came through, a ring of keys jingling in his hand. He wasn't one of the guards. No, this elf appeared far nobler and powerful, like a warrior out of ancient song. He was as tall as the king, and his hair flowed like spun gold. His face was fearless and young, but full of wisdom. He wore a green mantle embroidered with golden flowers, and a large gold brooch in the shape of a sun was fastened at his throat.

Hermione and Riddle fell silent, but an expression of alarm crossed over Hermione's face as the elf unlocked her cell door and gestured for her to follow him. He made no move to release the others.

'Tolo ar nin, wendi,' he said in his strange, mellifluous speech.

Hermione swallowed and looked desperately in Harry's direction. 'I–I don't–'

'Áva sorya,' the elf said kindly. His voice was gentle and soft, and Harry felt a wonderful calm settle upon him. Why wouldn't Hermione go with him? Surely refusing to follow him would be the worst mistake of her life; she would miss out on so much….

He saw that Hermione's shoulders had also relaxed, and the lines of worry on her face eased. Without another word, she followed him out of the cell.

As she passed, Harry barely noticed as Sirius leaned forward and urgently whispered, 'Hermione, you're being enchanted, you must put down mental defences – a brick wall, numbers, sheep, anything!'

Hermione smiled serenely at him and nodded as though she understood, while the golden haired elf watched and patiently waited for this exchange to finish. Then, without another word, he led Hermione out of the dungeon and shut the door behind them.

A small, sharp voice in Harry's head was cutting through the fog, but it took until the door slammed shut before he snapped out of the enchantment.

'Ugh,' he groaned, 'what just happened?'

'You and Granger have demonstrated your incompetence for Occlumency,' said Riddle snidely.

Meanwhile, Hermione's own head had cleared after following the warrior through several corridors, but she couldn't be certain whether she had managed to snap out of it on her own or whether the warrior had lifted his enchantment. Whatever it was, it had been his voice that had ensnared her, so when he spoke again, she tensed.

They had stopped just before at the doors to an outdoor, circular terrace, where a great white tree with golden leaves towered above the round table in the centre.

Gesturing to himself, he said quietly, 'I eneth nîn Glorfindel.'

He was introducing himself, and although his voice was still like sweet honey, she was relieved that she retained her wariness. She looked into his eyes that were clear as a sky in summer, and moistened her lips nervously. He was certainly kinder than the king had been, and he almost seemed to be going out of his way to make her feel comfortable.

'Hermione,' she said, her voice sounding high-pitched to her own ears.

He inclined his head and said, 'Hermione. Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo.'

'Er, nice to meet you, too,' she said hoarsely.

To her surprise, he shot her a disarming smile she could not return, and led her into where two other elven lords were waiting.

On the table before them was a black crystal ball.

Notes:

I am sorry for the hiatus. This story is now on AO3. I will try to post every Saturday, and for longer chapters, every other Saturday. Thank you for reading!

Tolo ar nin, wendi - Come with me, girl

Áva sorya - Do not be anxious

Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo - standard Elven greeting: A star shines upon the hour of our meeting