Fighting dementors was a strange experience, the dementors avoided his sword like it was an actual patronus. When he was quick enough to strike a dementor it left a glowing blue mark, which seemed to hurt the dementor even after the sword struck.
Each dementor inevitably fled after being struck, which prompted the patroni to herd dementors towards him where he could slash wildly at them. It was easy for him to tell when he had struck a dementor, a rush of cold spread from his sword arm up to his chest.
It was unpleasant, but bearable, especially when compared to losing his soul. He was spurred on by the noticeable decrease in dementors, allowing him to see the trees behind the horde. Some of the dementors didn't even need to be hit to flee, some decided to leave by themselves.
But those that stayed seemed more determined, some taking four or five hits before they fled. It was lucky that it didn't matter where his sword struck, he could hit them in the neck or hand and they would react the same.
There was also another problem, he was very quickly tiring, each jolt of cold made it harder to raise his sword. With one final slash his sword clattered out of his hand, he then collapsed to his knees and could only watch as Sirius dashed forward and picked up the sword.
It was like the man was possessed, he clearly already knew how to handle a blade. He jumped from dementor to dementor, getting several strikes in every time. The entire time the man looked every bit the crazed murderer he was portrayed to be, complete with manic look and flaming sword.
Harry found himself scared of the man, as he quickly banished half the remaining dementors. Neville's patronus had pulled back to protect the three of them, while Sirius' patronus acted as sheepdog.
Apparently the dementors had a sense of self preservation as they all turned and fled as one, leaving the clearing… clear. All that remained of the dementors was the frost covering and large piles of dementor ash, along with the dead dementor's cloak.
He wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep, unfortunately for him Ron seemed to have lost the memo.
"Err… Mr. Black, I think you should get away while you can. The teachers will be coming to find you and if they catch you…" While Ron sounded apologetic, Harry couldn't help resenting his words. He wanted to spend time with his godfather, without something trying to kill them.
"Your right… I'll be in touch Harry, that is… if you want to keep in contact?"
Harry nodded, giving Sirius a thumbs up before letting his arm fall back at his side. Sirius stumbled over and tried to give him back the sword but Harry stopped him.
"Keep it, you need it more than me. Besides I can make a new one should I need it." Harry said wearily.
Sirius nodded and made his way out, apparently they were close to the boundary of the wards as he soon apperated out. Leaving the three of them to look after an unconscious werewolf, as an animal Moony was ignored by the dementors, but that didn't stop him being affected by their aura.
It was only then that Harry would have smacked himself if he had the energy, he quickly fashioned a mithril tablet and wrote a short message describing roughly where they were. He then sent that tablet to Dumbledore's receiving plate, which he had finished the year before.
One improvement over the first version was that it left a magical trail, which Dumbledore could use to apparate. It was with a strange sense of gratitude when Harry saw a look of utter confusion on the headmaster's face when he appeared, evidently he hadn't expected to see two 3rd year Gryffindors, or a werewolf.
Seeing Dumbledore begin to take over the situation, Harry let his weariness take over and drifted off into unconsciousness.
Dumbledore looked on Harry proudly, from the accounts of Ronald and Neville the boy had single handedly held off over a hundred dementors, without a patronus.
But when the boys had told him they thought Sirius was innocent, he had immediately sent them down to Madam Pomphrey to check for memory charms. When she had been unable to detect any he had done his own check, as his check came empty he had to make a difficult choice.
With Ronald's permission he had viewed the boy's memory of the night, starting from when the two had gone down to Hagrid's to celebrate Augusta Longbottom's decision to revisit the Buckbeak case. He watched until he used Fawkes to enter the clearing, at which point he exited the memory and returned it.
Unfortunately, Dumbledore knew how well Sirius could lie, he and James had honed their skills from pranking. By their sixth year both boys could make almost any lie sound believable, getting them out of plenty of trouble. He didn't think Sirius was lying to the boys and Remus certainly seemed to believe him, but without the man in front of him he couldn't confirm his story.
He could only hope that when Remus returned to the castle he would have conclusive evidence. Until then, he took his customary seat next to Harry's bed in the hospital wing and trudged through the near endless supply of paperwork.
Pomphrey seemed to take some delight in putting troublesome students in the bed nearest her office, which she had clearly learned from her predecessor since he had spent his fair share of nights in that exact bed when he was a student.
When the boy finally awoke he noted how the first thing the boy did was to look for his mithril, his items were both his power and his weakness. They allowed him to do incredible feats, without them he was far too weak. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but given the boy's track record of finding the biggest danger and diving right into it, the boy needed more flexibility with his magic.
The goblins were seen as invincible with their own mithril, until the Unspeakables learned how to neutralize their weapons, with the goblins going from easily winning the war to hopelessly losing. He didn't want something similar to happen to Harry, even if he wished the boy could spend the rest of his life in peace.
"Professor?" Harry asked groggily, having finished going through his checklist of belongings.
"Good morning Harry." He replied cheerfully, glad to see the boy seemed unhurt. "I've heard you had quite the adventure, however I fear if I let you tell that thrilling story before Madam Pomphrey will have both our hides."
The two settled on simply talking until the matron strolled over and gave Harry a final check over. "Well, you've regained control over your left arm, although you may find it occasionally going stiff. If you start to feel sudden pains or numbness in your arm come to me or another healer immediately, regrettably your arm is tainted with dark magic, which prevents most forms of healing."
Poppy had privately told Albus she suspected the combination of basilisk venom and the dementor's aura had left the irreversible mark. This meant that the magic she had cast to heal his arm would slowly unravel, at best he had until his early 20s before he lost it.
They could only hope that by then they could find a way to heal the arm. The boy's other injuries included minor magical fatigue, heavy bruising over his back and low blood sugar, all of which were already sorted. With his only injury being untreatable Madam Pomphrey begrudgingly let Harry leave, allowing the two to go up to his office.
First Harry told Albus what had happened since he had left Snape's office, leading all the way up to the hospital wing. Albus then told Harry what he had missed within the castle.
"Severus, upon realising you hadn't returned, went up to Remus' office to find it empty. When he saw the wolfsbane hadn't been drunk he immediately called me, we then ran down to the shrieking shack to find it empty. We then searched and sealed the common rooms and set about searching the castle, all except Severus, Filius and Rubeus who valiantly stood guard at the school gate.
"Imagine my surprise then, when I received a message saying you, a werewolf, a mass murderer and two of our missing students were in a clearing in the forbidden forest… Which leads me to ask, why didn't you tell me when you left Professor Lupin's office to meet with a mass murderer?" He kept his anger out of his voice, he wasn't going to undo everything he had worked for with just a few angry words.
To emphasise his point he withdrew the small mithril plate, Harry's message still stuck to it.
"I… Well Lupin said they couldn't tell you till term was over…" Harry said hesitantly, refusing to meet his eyes. "And… I wanted to find out myself, he had either killed my parents or knew where to find the killer. I didn't want you to take things into your own hands."
"Oh and how were you planning to kill Sirius should it turn out to be a trap?" He didn't like seeing Harry flinch at his words, but he needed Harry to understand that his actions had consequences. It was one thing to end up with his life in danger, it was quite enough to deliberately go out searching for it.
"I didn't think that far ahead. I was so focused on meeting him, I didn't think about what I was actually going to do." Harry said sadly
"And now, because of what happened tonight, it will be much harder to convince the ministry of Sirius' innocence… However, we will get his innocence proven. For now, I suggest you try and get some sleep." He then waited till Harry had opened his door before he called out "I'll leave it to you to tell Bathsheda and Nyphadora what happened tonight."
With his last days at Hogwarts looming, Harry was spending as much time in his workshop as possible, he and Bathsheda were sat at his table inspecting his gauntlet while Luna sat across from them quietly painting.
Where the veins of the Philosopher's Stone ran through the mithril, tiny green crystals speckled the metal. Using some tweezers Bathsheda was working one of the crystals free and held it up to the light, revealing it to be a perfect crystal, with no lines or fractures.
She then handed it to Harry, who instantly felt the amount of magic within the speck, it easily held as much power as his saber, despite the huge size difference. It seemed he had figured out how the goblins had made the mithraite crystals on the sword of Gryffindor, he simply had to blast the mithril with a huge amount of magic.
He could only hope that the magic could come from his mithril, with that hope in mind he set about making a mithril box. He then made a pedestal in the middle with two prongs pointing towards it, finally a large mithril ball was balanced on top of the pedestal.
Bathsheda then helped him roll the first ward generator over to the box, next he plugged the generator directly into the box. Instantly magic started pooling into the prongs, which only increased when he turned the box itself into a generator.
Raw magic started arching from the two prongs into the ball, making it start to glow. This wasn't good enough for Harry who told the mithril coating the walls, floor and ceiling to stop emitting magic and instead directed it into the box, dramatically increasing the power.
Luna and Bathsheda instantly noticed their loss of magic, prompting Bathsheda to pick up Harry's shield and go over to Luna. For his part, Harry remained unaffected seeing as his magic completely saturated the room.
However that didn't stop him slowly backing away as the box started glowing ominously, the prongs having melted back into magic only to be sucked into the ball. The ball itself had melted into raw magic a while ago, but the ideology of the box forced it to maintain its shape.
He kept the magic flowing until the box itself started melting and being sucked into the ball, at which point he shut off the connection to the walls and unplugged the generator. But rather than cool down, the ball started pulling in more magic until it suddenly sent out a huge wave of magic.
Seeing as the wave was made from his magic it barely touched Harry, the rest of the room wasn't quite as lucky. Shelves melted and their contents started cascading onto the floor, his couch flew across the room and slammed into the walls and his table flipped onto Bathsheda and Luna.
Knowing that Bathsheda had his shield up, which would have absorbed the impact of the wave and table, he went to check on the ball. He willed the pool of magic to be absorbed into the floor, leaving the remains of the ball. Instead of a perfect crystal, he was left with a very shiny mithril ball the size of a golf ball.
A shiny ball, a destroyed workshop and two very angry friends.
Prisoner of Azkaban is finally over! As I said some time ago I'm going to take a break from writing this story to focus on finishing Time Heist, when I return to writing this story I am planning on going from weekly updates to every two weeks, during the 'off' week I'll be writing other stuff which may be uploaded.
When I started writing this story over a year ago I easily wrote several chapters a week, while now it took me 5 weeks to write 1 chapter. Hopefully by adding some variety in my writing I won't get writer's block again.