Small note: I now have a discord, more at the end.
With a gasp, Harry remembered something. Getting up, he left his shield on the floor as he ran into the garden, moving behind the shed to find the near forgotten stack of bismuth Dumbledore had gifted him.
It took some time to shift enough bars out the way, but there within the stack was the ice covered golden cauldron he'd hidden the summer before. Cautiously cracking open the lid, he groaned as he saw most of the dementor ash had vanished, as he'd feared.
When Snape had given him the ash that previous summer he'd even been warned the ash likely wouldn't last a year, and he'd planned on preserving it and messing with it over the winter break, after he and Snape had experimented with the professor's batch.
Instead, the Triwizard tournament had both robbed him of the winter break, and banished the golden cauldron completely from his mind. But now he'd remembered it, and confirmed he did still have some left over, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. First, he used the Gauntlet to transmute a spot of the ground into another golden cauldron, this one far smaller than the other.
Feeling curious, Harry went into the shed and pulled out the largest pieces of bismuth from his broken kiln, and did his best to line the new cauldron with it. Gold naturally resisted magic, including containing the dementor ashs' aura. His hope was the bismuth would help reflect that aura, allowing the ash some further longevity.
Which was entirely theoretical, as nobody had ever been idiotic enough to try and store dementor ash. The usual procedure was the ministry would occasionally gather up the dementor ash Azkaban would steadily generate, and then auction it off to potioneers and alchemists.
What was not the standard, was getting mobbed by a hundred dementors, warding them off with a burning sword, and covering an entire forest clearing in dementor ash.
Even after they'd split that ash between themselves, Harry alone had likely lost more ash than most people ever owned. Which unfortunately meant if anyone had done any research into his current issue, they hadn't made it accessible.
Between Nicholas and Snape, their combined knowledge on the ash was mostly made up with what they'd discovered by themselves.
Harry's plan was to take the ash, and use it as chalk for the ritual of imbuing his coat with the dementor's cloak. Snape's knowledge was exclusive to using the ash with potions, but there was a chance Nicholas would know the answer.
Something that would need to wait, as his mentor wouldn't return from France for another day. So, with some regret he buried both cauldrons back within the bismuth ingots, further insulating the magic within them.
But, not before he'd scooped a handful of the ash into a bowl, to experiment with inside.
"Hey Tonks, I know it's your day off, but would you mind going on a small shopping trip for me please?" Harry called, as he started rummaging through his many pockets for his old mortar and pestle.
"Maybe… What do you need?" She replied, getting up from where she'd been modifying her own coat in front of the radio.
"Coconut oil and spruce sap, about a half ounce of each. The apothecary will have the coconut oil, but you might need to go into the Botanical Novelties' for the sap, which might also be called spruce gum."
"That is completely nonsensical, but I'll do my best. I'll probably only be able to go down to a jigger of each, but that should be fine right?"
Baffled, Harry stared at her for a moment, before his brain clicked back to the wizarding world's standards. Rather than consistently use a simple method, like the measurements he'd grown up with in Muggle school, wizarding shops used whatever measurement they wanted.
So, Slug & Jiggers Apothecary had their smallest bottle size as a 'jigger', almost three times what he needed.
"Yeah, that'll be fine. Nicholas will use the leftovers if I don't. Thank you, Tonks."
Although that combination was strange, Harry didn't expect her to struggle, it would just take some time. In the meantime, he'd busied himself by trying to find his old first year potion kit. He'd gotten better equipment years ago, and hadn't touched them since.
But, as the dementor ash would ruin any potion equipment over time, he wanted to sacrifice his old kit rather than the more expensive replacements. Which was a good plan, if he knew where to find them.
His main coat pocket only contained the supplies for the previous school year, which left another 5 pockets for it to be in.
By the time Tonks had returned, she came back to a small mountain of clutter in the living room. The last time he'd fully emptied his pockets had been the last time he'd upgraded the coat, and even then he'd put everything back in.
Leaning around the clutter, Tonks finally found Harry half buried in the junk, still shifting things around.
"Wotcher… Having trouble with the expansion charms?"
"Eh? Oh, no, the charms are fine. I'm looking for my old potions kit, mainly the pewter mortar and pestle. I'm fairly sure I put them in my coat. I don't want to ruin a good mortar and pestle with the dementor ash." Harry replied, carefully crawling out of his mountain.
"Did you at least try an Accio?" She asked, looking at him in fond exasperation.
She found it funny to see how his face quickly swapped between reactions, before he finally settled on looking pleased with himself.
"No wand, remember? Besides, an auror like yourself surely wouldn't ask me to break the law." He countered, smirking up at her.
Tonks raised an eyebrow, letting her amusement show. "You can use all this incredibly wandless magic… an Accio is where you draw the line?"
"Summing the mortar would require already knowing the exact location of the item before I can summon it. By then, I might as well fetch it myself," Harry explained.
"I could wandlessly summon something like that Firebolt, since I can see it. But if I don't know where it is, my magic can't do anything about it."
"Firebolt? Harry, why do you have a Firebolt with all this junk!" Tonks exclaimed, instantly saving the broomstick from its own mountain and cradling it protectively.
"Sirius gave it to me after Third year… I kind of just put it in a pocket and forgot about it."
Seeing the way Tonks held it, Harry couldn't help feeling guilty, mainly at Sirius. He'd been brought an incredibly valuable broom, and had then completely forgotten about it, just because he hadn't liked flying as a firstie.
"I'll… take better care of it. Now, would you mind casting that Accio please?"
He couldn't help frowning in concern when Tonks' spell found several, including one he didn't even remember owning, but not the cheap pewter one he'd definitely used in his first year.
"Where else could it be?" Tonks asked, looking around, "I'd have thought it would be in your room, but the spell would've summoned it from there."
Groaning, Harry only then realised where he'd likely left it.
"They're at the Dursleys, I probably left them behind when I ran away. I'll just use something else."
As he had no desire to return to that landmine just for some scrap potions kit, he'd put up with wasting a higher quality mortar. But it did make Harry realise the mortar likely hadn't been the only item he'd left behind.
Certainly nothing he'd felt like he'd miss, but Voldemort had already shown an ability to use the goblet of fire against him. The last thing Harry wanted was for Voldemort to make a visit to Privet Drive, and walk away with any mithril.
"Well, what about this mortar, it's like cast iron?" Tonks frowned, holding up the mortar she'd accidentally summoned. "For that matter, why not just transfigure something? You won't have to worry about ruining anything then."
"I can't, not because of the ash though. I'm making alchemy chalk, which has some fairly specific requirements. One is it can't even touch anything transfigured. As I'm already messing around with using ash that actively breaks down magic, I don't want to take any chances."
Harry replied, blowing the dust out of the cast iron mortar Tonks had found. Looking at it up close, he was certain it wasn't his, but with the heavy build up of rust and dust, it wouldn't be missed.
"You got the ingredients right?" He asked, only to look up and see Tonks already had both bottles held out to him. "Ah, thank you. Right, I probably have three goes with this, until I run out of ash."
"Sure, and while you're doing that, I'm going back to the Weird Sisters."
"You know, when I mentioned 'No experiments', this is exactly the type of thing I was talking about." Nicholas commented, holding up a bowl of Harry's new chalk to the light.
He'd returned from France with both a letter and enchanted wood from Fleur, only for Harry to spring his creation.
"But I didn't do anything with the cloak. It wasn't anything dangerous." Harry protested, "I even took every precaution I felt it deserved, it's not like I'm not banging rocks together here."
"Fair enough." Nicholas suddenly said, catching Harry off-guard. "You are old enough to make your own mistakes, and your own success. That said, I am now going to run a few tests on this new chalk. While I'm doing that, you can read Fleur's letter and test the new sigil."
So, a day late, mostly because I was watching Peter Pan goes wrong yesterday, highly recommend. The fact this site has also managed to kill its email alerts doesn't hurt. In light of that, I've started a discord, mainly to make alerts for this story easier.
It will also eventually contain cut content, images etc. I also expect it will contain more accessible conversations about this story. I've had some good PM talks with readers, and it would be cool to get more people involved.
Discord: vUHyMWjDRJ (Take this link code, and then inside discord go to add server, join a server, and paste it there)
Things I think need explaining:
- A jigger: Apparently according to the wiki, it's a canon unit of measurement, which happened to work quite well with a similar real ash chalk recipe I'd found.