A few days later Harry was called into Dumbledore's office, when he reached the gargoyle he swore it smirked at him. As Dumbledore hadn't bothered to tell him the password Harry decided to break in again.
He waved his hand in front of the gargoyle and let his magic scan the door. 'He's improved his security' Harry thought smugly 'But the question is it will it be good enough?' Dumbledore had enchanted the lock so that whatever was said to the gargoyle would be checked by something in his office, that object would then send down a coded signal to open the office.
This meant Harry couldn't just trick the gargoyle to move by making it think he had entered the password, what he could do however was make the gargoyle move manually and just bypass the password.
One overpowered levitation charm later and he was inside the stairwell, he could give in and try and guess the password or just get Dumbledore to let him in... or he could double down and get in by himself. He pointed his wand up at the ceiling and cast a strong summoning charm, the charm started pulling him upwards until he reached the doorway.
He needed to grab hold of the door frame to stop himself falling back down, so when he managed to open the door his entrance was a rather embarrassing stumble. Fortunately he recovered his balance quickly which gave him enough time to see Dumbledore dispel an image of the stairwell, which assumed had been a live feed.
"Very impressive, although perhaps in the future it might be more prudent to just ask to be let in? Just because you can use magic to get in doesn't mean you should use it for everything." Dumbledore said knowingly "But your methods of entering my office aside, I did have a reason for calling you up here, please have a seat."
Dumbledore waited until Harry sat down before continuing "Sherbet lemon? Well as you know several students missed lessons due to the attacks, I could move them down a year but that means they'll just be wasting more time going over subjects they've already covered.
"So my solution was to get them a private tutor to let them catch up on what they missed while staying with their year group. Obviously they needed a tutor that knew the subject material and had the time to help them. My choice was obvious."
Harry wondered who Dumbledore was talking about before he saw Dumbledore's expression "You… want me to teach them?" Harry asked, astonished.
"Only if you want to, I know you were concerned you would find this year too easy. If I recall correctly you were tutoring Mr. Creevey before he got attacked anyway."
"Fine, I'll do it… but only if the students behave, if they don't want to learn I'm not going to waste my time on them."
Harry looked around his new classroom warily. He knew Colin and Justin well and would've helped them anyway, he had worked with Neville and knew he would put the work in. It was Draco and the Hufflepuff boy he distrusted, Draco hadn't stopped sneering ever since he had stepped in and Jackson had looked at Harry disdainfully before turning away.
He had to admit to himself that as Jackson was two years ahead, his attitude wasn't unjustified. Fortunately the teachers had been kind enough to supply him a general list of lessons from the first attack onwards, it would be up to him to pick out what lessons to cover.
"Right everyone, I have the list of lessons here and I think the first thing we should do is find out what lessons you missed and any you want to go over again and we can go from there?"
"This is so stupid" Jackson scoffed "I don't need a third year to tell me how to study."
"Fine, then leave" Harry replied coldly, here was confirmation that he had been right, the students weren't going to put the work in and were just going to waste his time. Deciding to mock him he said "Feel free to tell me how you got on at the end of the year"
This had Jackson freezing at the door and turning to glare at Harry "You think you know more than me?" He asked through gritted teeth
"Yes, frankly I'm surprised you managed to reach fifth year if this is the sort of effort you put into your learning."
Jackson obviously didn't like that as he started marching towards Harry with his wand drawn, as Harry had expected that response his wand had been drawn before he even opened his mouth so he just glared at Jackson as menacing as he could.
"Prove it, cast every spell on that piece of paper." Jackson growled.
Harry barely needed to glance at the list of spells as he had made sure he could cast each and every one the night before, therefore he simply handed the list to Jackson and moved to the middle of the classroom to begin the gauntlet of spells.
"The first spell is Protego, the wand movement is a circle starting at the top and ending at the top finished by a flick straight down. When done correctly you should have a circular shield in front of you, often blue or silver, that can stop spells for as long as you can hold it.
"Next is Ascendio, this wand movement is a curved line downwards at the object you want to move then a sharp flick up. This spell will send an object flying straight upwards, if cast incorrectly it will instead target the closest object which is inevitably the caster and send them flying up instead.
"Bombarda, curved line to the side then a straight line back to the beginning, causes a controlled explosion wherever you aim. Colovaria, diagonal slash across the target, changes the colour of that object. Diffindo, small loop then a hard slash in whatever direction you want a cut to appear, basic cutter spell which will work on most materials although accuracy varies."
Harry ran through over two dozen charms and hexes, after the first few spells Jackson had lost his smug look, after the tenth he had looked at Harry slightly fearfully. While he was giving each spell the least amount of power possible, even a dozen low powered spells were still a drain on anyone's magic, as such he had started to draw upon his mithril supply a while ago.
But as none of the other students knew he was cheating, they incorrectly assumed he had enough raw power to just slug through several fourth year spells in a row.
"Now any more useless questions or can I get on with getting you lot caught up on what you missed like I was told to?" Harry asked sarcastically, despite his cocky ulterior inside he was thankful he had planned for somebody to question his knowledge of the spells and had loaded himself with mithril accordingly.
Harry glared at Dippet's book angrily, he had just unlocked the third conditional enchantment. Dumbledore had obviously had a laugh while doing it as Harry had needed to go to the astronomy tower at midnight and say the word "please". Harry had tried brute forcing the conditional the same way he had broken the first two but he had been unsuccessful.
Now that he had unlocked it he wasn't sure if it was worth it, the book had translated itself into what Harry thought was French and he couldn't find a way to turn it back into English. In order to break through this magic Harry would need to properly learn Loquela magick, which meant asking Nicolas for help.
Verbarn and Loquela were twins in that they acted similarly. As Nicolas had said in a more recent lesson where they had gone over past material
"Any spell with an incantation, regardless of what language it is spoken in, starts as Verbarn magick. After the magick has determined the intent of the spell it will use the other families to apply that intent upon the world.
"Loquela takes magical intent and translates it into a language and method the caster can understand. For instance, the translation charms interpreters use when exploring Egyptian tombs. When the interpreter casts the charm it uses Verbarn magic to form the intent, then Loquela uses that intent to turn all written words nearby into magical intent, then it translates the intent into the caster's primary language."
Despite how complex it sounded when broken down, in practice the charm was cast just like any other. In order for Harry to translate the book back into English he would need to learn to use Loquela in its pure form as the book somehow resisted Verbarn magick.
Harry already had some experience working in pure magic as his mithril worked best when he programmed the ideologies with magical intent rather than words. It was extremely hard to think in terms of ideas rather than words and Harry didn't even know where to start trying to apply that to casting magic.
There were other benefits to learning how to cast magic in other magick families as well of course, Nicolas had started teaching Harry a spell referred to as 'Divine Shield' and as the name suggested it would block most divine magick. But any magic that wasn't from the divine family would pass right through the shield.
Likewise divine magic would pass right through a protego as that was Verbarn magick. The various magick families rarely interacted with each other which meant it was important to have a defense for every magick family, Fiendfyre was widely feared because as divine magick it could only be blocked by a divine shield.
For now Harry had no idea how to use Loquela magick so he was stuck using an old fashioned French to English dictionary. The problem was that while the dictionary may help Harry translate the book into English it wouldn't help him translate the intent of the French magic.
"Focus, Potter! If you want to truly see how much power you possess you need to focus" Snape snapped impatiently, the two had been sat on the astronomy tower for over an hour and had made no progress. If Harry opened his eyes he knew he would see Snape sat cross legged barely a few feet from him.
He knew Bathsheda was nearby but he didn't know where. After he had closed his eyes she had placed a mithril plate near Harry, his task was out where it was by using his connection to the mithril. With a sigh Harry started to spread out his magic to find it's signature only to have Snape slap it back.
"Do you intend to send your magic across Britain to find your mithril?" He asked sarcastically
"But the plate is only a few feet away, I don't need to send my magic far" Harry whined.
"Today maybe, but what about tomorrow? What about in a year's time when you need to find your mithril in France!" Snape said waspishly, Harry knew the man had a point but it was irritating to know he had the ability to find the plate in seconds but was being denied.
Harry knew he was frowning but he couldn't bring himself to care. Snape had obviously noticed as he audibly sighed before continuing in a less heated voice.
"You told me that when you're in your workshop you can sense everything that happens within the room, even modify mithril without touching it correct? Just try and copy that effect here."
"But the only reason I can do that there is because the magic in the air has my signature!" Harry argued
"How do you know? This is your chance to prove your room is a fluke and not just a shortcut to a power you can use."
Sighing once more Harry rained in his thoughts, on a whim he activated his mage sight so that he could see if the plate was in front of him. As he had learned some time ago his mage sight wasn't physical sight, but despite this he had fooled himself into thinking that shutting his eyes would stop his mage sight.
As magic worked on belief and intent, his belief that the mage sight would stop ensured that his sight did stop. This became a feedback loop as he was given evidence his belief was true, it was only when Dumbledore had challenged him on the issue that he had opened his eyes.
He easily recognised Snape's dark blue signature, which easily stood out from Hogwarts bright magic. While at first glance Hogwarts magic appeared to be a blinding white, a closer inspection revealed it was actually a conglomeration of many different magical signatures.
Carefully he rotated his 'sight' around him like the beam of a lighthouse, but while he identified Bathsheda's magic he couldn't find the green of his mithril.
"Using your mage sight is cheating Potter, fortunately we took this into account." Snape said scornfully.
Harry had one more trick up his sleeve however, he turned his magesight inwards and told it to find his signature. He suspected it was only the mithrilium in his head which let him do it, which corresponded with his increased occlumency and the general range and power of his mage sight normally.
Like a radar he swept his magical sight around him, expect now it seemed like he was floating in an empty void. It wasn't black for that would just be another colour for magic, this was the absence of all magic. Even Privet Drive had partial atmospheric magic which had meant his vision had never truly failed.
Then slowly that void was filled with flicks of green, first he glanced down at his body and two rings which glowed brightly. His gauntlet looked strange when he only saw his green, the ring looked much smaller without the red of Voldemort at the edges or the coating of the basilisk's poisonous green.
The only indication of the Philosopher's Stone was the occasional flickers of green magic where the magic of the Stone met the mithril.
After another sweep of his sight he identified a veiled green plate at his 9 o'clock, he was going to point at it to show he had beaten Snape's challenge when his sight did another sweep. A bit to his right was a small box of green, at first he didn't know what it was as it hadn't been there before.
It was only as more tiny dots of green started appearing did it occur to him he was seeing the outer walls of his workshop, two floors below and far to the right. He concentrated more and carefully pushed his sight into the room, almost immediately he snapped his eyes open and it was as if he was within his workshop.
His sight wasn't that of a human, he could see almost fully around him and he felt nauseous just looking at it. He then sensed the mithrilium in his mind adapting to the situation and suddenly he found he could make sense of the chaos.
While he could now understand what he was seeing, he was still struggling to believe. He tried to move forward only to realise he had no body to move, looking at the couch cautious he pushed his sight into the couch and suddenly his sight shifted.
When he regained vision he cheered mentally as he realised he was now looking at his room from the perspective of his couch. It occurred to him that as the couch didn't have eyes he shouldn't be able to see but he slapped the thought away, when it came to his mithril sometimes logic just couldn't be applied.
He was perfectly happy to spend several minutes flitting around his workshop when he felt a sharp sting in his shoulder, in reflex he looked down to see what had struck him only to remember he currently didn't have a shoulder. With a great deal of effort he pulled his sight out of the room and back to his body, it was with some concern he realised it took more effort to get out than it had to get in.
"Harry!" Snape said with concern, Harry slowly opened his eyelids and blinked wearily. It felt weird to be using his eyes when he had been seeing differently, he bitterly compared his vision from his eyes compared to the crystal clear vision of his mithril. True the vision from the mithril had been purely magical and all sense of colour had been in relation to the magical signatures within the room but he had seen objects both close and far away in perfect detail.
"I did it!" Harry said excitedly "I detected my mithril, even the workshop down below! But when I pushed my mage sight into the room it was like I was seeing it as the room!"
"I didn't detect your magical intent leaving your body… How far could you 'see'?" Snape asked excitedly
"Never mind that, are you okay Harry? It was like you were in a trance or something, you didn't respond to are calls and even shaking you did nothing, you were like that for several minutes." Bathsheda said worriedly.
Harry was going to tell her he was fine but the moment he opened his mouth a huge yawn escaped him and his eyes started closing by themselves. He gave Bathsheda a thumbs up just before collapsing onto the tower floor.
Harry's dreams that night were strange, at first he was floating in his workshop, various pieces of mithril floated and formed around him. They came together and formed incredibly complex artifacts, only to then break apart and rejoin the other pieces of mithril.
It was power and control like he had never imagined before, it was as if the mithril knew what he wanted, seconds before he could even knew it himself. He felt unstoppable but still he desired more, before him his mithril formed into the shape of a ring.
Atop the ring was a black square gem with the symbol of the deathly Hallows painted in white on top. Next to the ring the elder wand formed, energy crackling between the knots in the wand. Finally a sheet spread out and took the shape of the invisibility cloak.
Despite their appearance Harry knew it was impossible to copy the true powers of the hallows, even in a dream his mithril wasn't capable of mimicking the impossible paradoxical nature of them.
But then he was pulled away from his workshop, he was flying over open countryside with the wind whipping at his face. He hated the feeling and willed it away, to his surprise the feeling vanished.
As time dragged on he grew bored and wondered how long this would take, eventually he slowed down and he took the time to look around. With some alarm he recognised the location, he had arrived back at Azkaban.
He had no control as he walked to the heart of Azkaban, he crouched and pressed his hand against the mithril. Ice started forming over his hand but he pushed his magic out, slowly his green overtook the cold magic of Azkaban.
As his magic took over the cold and dark of Azkaban faded, Harry didn't know where the prisoners had gone but at the same time the thought seemed irrelevant. Eventually it seemed like the entire prison was glowing green except for one lone source of darkness many floors below.
The floor then gave way beneath him and he found himself falling into a void that shouldn't exist. The impact with the floor should've killed him but being a dream he just got to his feet and looked around, the room he found himself in was either extremely large or very small, it was so dark he couldn't tell.
What he could tell was he was at the foot of a gigantic throne, the throne itself was just a slab of rock shaped into a chair. But it was the being sat on the throne which drew his attention, at first it looked like a huge black dog with glowing red eyes. But then he morphed into a huge humanoid figure, he was impossibly huge and was made entirely out of pure black magic.
"You are reaching for magic far beyond you, child, you are not worthy of the powers you seek. Yield before you draw attention from those that have slumbered for many of your years."
The being's voice was eerily similar to the dementors scream, the voice echoed so that Harry heard each word many times. But the voice wasn't restrained to his ears, it also echoed within his head.
Harry had thought his mental defenses were impenetrable but the being plowed through them like they were paper. Despite his best efforts to reject the being, his own powers were no match for the raw strength of the attacker.
"For better or for worse you have gained my personal attention, I would find it inconvenient for you to enter my realm before you have shown your true potential. Now awake and think upon my words."
When Harry awoke, he was struck with a huge headache. Whether that was because of his dream or pushing his consciousness into his mithril he couldn't tell.
He noticed he was in his workshop bed, which meant somebody must've carried him in. A levitation charm would've failed after encountering the magic of the room, he and Bathsheda were working on a way to allow other people to use their own magic within the workshop but so far had no success.
A quick look at the time revealed it was close to lunch time, it was just fortunate he didn't have any lessons that morning. He was surprised to see Bathsheda sitting at the table etching runes into a stone, from the angle he was standing he couldn't see what she was writing.
Having known her for over two years now he knew her various expressions, from the way her tongue was sticking out slightly he could tell she was struggling with a problem. From where she was sitting she easily saw him enter and quickly set down her tools.
Harry couldn't help smiling when he noticed she was using the mithril tools he had gifted her some time ago. The main part of the present was the chisel, rune maker's chisel set was more than just a stone mason's chisel.
It needed to channel its user's magic like a wand, on top of that it needed to be able to carve into various materials. Unlike a wand the chisel couldn't be made out of wood, high end rune maker chisels were often made out of petrified wood like the hilt of Harry's wand.
The problem was that often made them extremely expensive and didn't last long. Stone and some metals were great stores of magic, which was why they were used to hold runes and enchantments in the first place. However this meant magic didn't flow through them, regardless of the intent of magic passed into stone the intent that came out would always be the same.
As with most magic, there was an exact opposite to the nature of stone, wood was being this reverse. Wood was great for wands as it completely avoided the intent of magic, instead it wrapped its own supply of magic around the magic. This meant any magic that went into enchanted wood would come out stronger, which was why wands were made out of wood.
But this meant wood couldn't hold an enchantment, any runes scribed into wood would fade over time. This also meant wood could never store magic for any length of time as magic rolled in and out of the wood like waves, taking any extra magic with it.
Petrified wood was a middle ground that didn't store as much magic as stone and didn't wrap as much magic over a spell. But it could both store and channel magic which made it near perfect for rune makers, but this also left the chisels fragile and an incorrect strike could shatter it.
Harry had solved this with his mithril. While it was far worse at channelling magic compared to petrified wood, it was also a great store of magic and completely indestructible. When combined with the ideology to remain razor sharp at all times the mithril chisel could carve extremely complex patterns into the toughest of stone.
The fact it struggled to channel raw input was also obsolete considering Bathsheda knew enough to channel her own intent into the mithril, which then used its own power to fuel the rune. She couldn't program mithril anywhere near as efficiently as Harry could, as she had told him "I just can't make my mind work that way."
As such Harry had needed to program the chisel to act like a wand and interpret her intent from her mind. Getting the mithril to gather intent from her surface thoughts hadn't been easy but eventually he had gotten it to work after much trial and error.
Now as long as she had a clear image of what she wanted her rune to do when she powered the chisel it could provide the intent continuously, which meant she could focus on actually cutting out the rune.
"Good morning" Bathsheda said warmly, cutting him out of his thoughts. Judging by her smirk she knew she had just brought him back to present time. "Severus wants to 'debrief you of what happened last night' so he's going to meet us in my office after our lesson. As such I'm going to hold back on finding out what happened last night."
"Cool… Out of interest what happened after I fell asleep?"
"Well after we figured out you were fine, good job scaring me to death with that bloody thumbs up by the way, Severus picked you up and carried you here. He didn't want to use magic on you in case you somehow reacted negatively, he was quite cute actually."
"Huh, shame I missed that. Anyway I'm off to get some breakfast, I'll see you for a lesson I guess."
"It's lunch time!" She called after him teasingly, it had become a sort of game for them to argue over what meal it was. Harry preferred to wake up around lunch time and referred to his first meal as breakfast regardless of how late it was, Bathsheda in turn was determined to get him to slip up and call the meal its proper name.
"Welcome, my children… In this room you shall explore the noble art of Divination!" The woman stood in front of the room with her arms spread wide, reminding Harry of a preacher, her exuberance as she described her subject definitely did nothing to dispel that image.
"In this room, you shall discover if you possess the Sight. I am Professor Trelawney and together we shall cast ourselves into the future. This term, we'll focus on Tasseomancy, the art of reading tea leaves so please, take the cup of the person sitting opposite you."
Harry turned and saw he was sitting opposite Ron Weasley, the boy gave a lopsided grin that Harry took to mean "Are you okay with me being here", Harry gave a slight nod and passed his own cup over which saw Ron relax considerably.
"What do you see? The truth lies buried like a sentence deep within a book, waiting to be read. But first, you must broaden your minds… First, you must look beyond." Before he had entered the wizarding world Harry would've scoffed at such talk, but now with three years of magical experience under his belt he gave the subject the benefit of the doubt.
By the expressions on most of the student's faces they didn't believe the woman and were just playing along, but Harry couldn't help drawing parallels between what Trelawney was saying and how he had moved his consciousness into his mithril the night before.
He let his mind rest as he picked up Ron's cup and started trying to pick out images in the tea leaves. His mage sight easily picked up the subtle flecks of Ron's magic within the leaves, as he stared he swore he saw the flecks move slightly.
When he leaned back and let his normal vision overlay his mage sight he saw a pattern emerge, at first he thought he saw the blade of a spear but upon turning the cup slightly the spear turned into two crooked lines. He turned the cup back slowly and managed to catch the magic moving subtly, when he finished turning the cup the leaves had gone back into a spear.
"First you have the spear… which means you will champion a belief or idea… Next comes the crooked lines, which means you have a tough path to follow, possible in relation to championing a belief. Finally you have the chain wrapped around the sun, which means responsibility and either power or new beginnings… Basically you're going to go through a tough time and become responsible for new beginnings." Harry told Ron slowly, he kept having to scan through the book for the meaning of the symbols.
When he looked up at the boy he thought he saw a flicker of fear before he grinned, Harry couldn't help grinning back at the ridiculousness of his prediction. Unseen by the pair of them Trelawney had snuck up on them and startled them from their levity.
"A fate to be proud of to be sure, although grave times approach you, my dear." Trelawny told Ron sagely. "Now, look at the cup. Tell me what you see."
Ron fumbled with the cup and it looked like he was going to hand it to the professor before pulling it closer to him. "Oh, yeah. Um… Well, Harry's got sort of a wonky cross. That's trials and suffering and that there could be the sun and that's happiness. So... you're gonna suffer, but you're gonna be... happy about it."
Harry shrugged at Ron's incredulous look, he felt he had suffered a lot already and so far he had never felt happy to have suffered. Professor Trelawney apparently shared his disbelief as she waved her hands impatiently at the cup.
"Give me the cup… Oh, my dear boy. My dear... you have the Grim."
I had planned to have this chapter carry all the way to the end of the day, but I woke up this morning and just had no inspiration. I will also take the time to restate that this version of Harry is already incredibly powerful, technically he could just send a mithril bird straight to Voldemort and have it blow up since he has Voldemort's signature.
But 2 reasons why he doesn't do this; 1. It would be bad for the plot and 2. This version of Harry just wants to learn magic, he doesn't want to fight a war (yet). Despite this Voldemort still wouldn't survive a straight up fight against Harry since Harry is immortal through both the Philosopher's Stone, Cloak and mithril, as such Harry could just keep fighting Voldemort until Tom just runs out of energy.
To counter this I currently don't see Voldemort as the final boss, the shadowy being from the dream is a possible tie into future villains. In other news I've started reading 'Deal with a Devil' by Silently Watches and it is really good, it is a crossover between Harry Potter and Dresden Files and despite being the first story I've ever read about Dresden Files I haven't felt lost the entire time.