The gate was closed. Eragon looked up at it dumbly. He was the only one who visited, wasn't he? Maybe Brom, too. But that was it. If it was closed after he'd been unable to visit for all of autumn, Harry might have gotten tired of waiting.
Except, that had not been there before. A pair of shiny, armored knights flanked the gateway, hands folded over the pommels of their swords, pointed down in front of them. Eragon approached one. "Hail."
The knight raised a hand in salute.
"Can I come in?" Eragon asked. "I'm Eragon. Harry knows me."
The knight bowed with a foot back, gesturing grandly at the gate. The massive doors swung open creaking, the iron portcullis behind rattling up into its recess overhead.
"Thanks." Eragon passed close by the knight. He frowned and peered closer. There was no man inside the armor at all. The suit caught his look, flipping the visor down cheekily to show an empty head, and the inside of the back of the helmet. Eragon shook his head and moved on.
He rounded the east pillar and gaped.
Harry had been busy. In the time since he'd left, the zoo had grown into its own smaller castle, connected by a skybridge held up on wooden stilts. The main castle had gotten much bigger. Harry's tower was no longer the tallest. There was an enormous one to the east that huddled right up to the cliffside, one thin one with a sundial-type device on its face, and one extraordinarily tall one two hundred yards to the northwest, backed up against and supported by the mountain face behind.
Another skybridge connected the new tower to a new and grand building in the shape of a rectangle which Eragon could not see inside. The other end of the rectangle had split-level hallways linking the second storey of the main tower to the new building, and a corridor beneath that which connected it with the Great Hall and the colonnade around the courtyard behind the Great Hall.
The lake was finally full, too. It brought the grounds together and seemed to complete what must have been Harry's vision from the start of the castle. The cliffside the castle sat atop was a good fifty feet of sheer rock into the lake. The second reservoir dam had been removed, leaving only the permanent one which had been built with beauty in mind. The river still flowed with frigid water, streaming out to the Falls and then to Carvahall.
The top of the tallest tower was unlike anything Eragon had ever seen. It was a great bulbous dome atop an open pavilion at the top of the tower. The dome had big glass windows in it, all facing to the sky. He could not guess at its purpose, only that it looked magnificent and unlike any drawing of a castle he'd ever seen.
But none of that was what caught his eye. No, his attention was drawn to that strange field of sand with its rings on their fifty-foot posts. For between them, flitting through the air and whooping like a madman, careening across the sky as a bird, utterly unsupported by the ground, Harry Evans was flying.
He zig-zagged like he was born to the sky, chasing a tiny glint that always seemed a step ahead of him. Harry circled left of the glint, then plunged into a vicious dive, herding the glint down. At the last second before ramming into the ground at what was surely fatal speed, he yanked- was that- was that a broomstick?
He yanked his mount upwards, a hand darting out to snatch up the golden glint. Harry curved around and coasted over to Eragon, landing like his broomstick was a part of his body.
"Eragon!" he grinned. His messy hair was even more windswept. He wore robes of a sort Eragon was more familiar with than his usual garb. They were crimson with gold embroidery picking out a lion on his chest. When Harry turned to look back at the pitch, Eragon saw letters emblazoned on his back above a great big 7 on it. "How was the harvest?"
Eragon picked his jaw up from the floor. "You can fly?"
Harry beamed, lofting the broomstick. He understood what Fisk had said. It really was the most handsome broom he'd ever seen. A length of polished and lacquered ash formed into a handle, gleaming brass footrests, and a tail of perfectly aligned twigs, it definitely looked too nice to sweep with.
"Took the better part of a month to figure out the enchantments. And I still had to fudge a few to make it all work. Flying broomsticks are a staple of wizardly transport." Harry lofted the broomstick proudly. "It's no Firebolt, but it's about as good as a Nimbus 2000, if a bit rough around the edges."
Eragon looked up at all the new buildings. The castle had doubled in size at least. "You've been busy," he managed.
Harry laughed. "You should see the inside. There's nothing else to do up here but magic, so that's what I do all day."
Eragon pointed up at the odd tower set into the mountainside. "What's that?"
Harry followed his finger. "Hopefully an astronomy tower. I've been trying to figure out lenses. I'm sure there's a way to express their shape with maths, but I never took Arithmancy." he tapped the corner of his eyes. "If I figure it out, I can make glasses again."
Eragon wasn't sure why Harry needed to know lenscrafting to make cups, but he let it pass. "You caught something golden?"
"Yeah." Harry unfurled his fist, pinching the contents of his hand between thumb and forefinger. It was a golden ball with little tiny golden wings, fluttering against his grip. "A snitch. It flies around; you gotta catch it." he released it into the air. The snitch zipped this way and that over his head, barely within arm's reach. Harry snatched it out of the air with unerring precision and stuffed it into a pocket.
"What brings you up here? Lessons, just for fun, social visit, or…?"
Eragon felt his pack for the giant sapphire. If there was anyone to ask about its nature, it was Harry. That, and he wanted to ask if Harry would take him as an apprentice. But as he opened his mouth to ask the question, something stayed his tongue. A tiny nudge from his conscience suggested he hold onto the gem.
"I guess for fun," Eragon decided. "We hadn't seen you since I came here last. I saw Brom snatch you up when you visited in midsummer and worried he'd drove you off or something."
Harry shook his head. "No, he just threatened me if you got hurt on my watch. I reckoned you'd be too busy harvesting to visit, so I just made do with my free time." he gestured behind himself at the growing network of towers and halls connected to the castle.
"Fisk said you visited him a couple weeks ago," Eragon pointed out. Harry nodded.
"Yeah. I needed some kind of polish for the broomstick. The rest of it's made from real stuff, even the brass footrests. It seemed wrong to get so close to fully real components only to skimp on the last step. It was a bit of an experience learning alloying and metalwork through trial and error. Did you know you can use the summoning charm on ore? Just rips it straight from the ground. But hey, now the foundry and forge have both been used. And the woodworking shop. So they were all good suggestions." Harry smiled. "How was your autumn?"
"It's not over yet," Eragon pointed out. "Autumn doesn't end until Samhain next friday. But it was good. I finally told Roran about my magic and he didn't decide to hate me."
"Good." Harry rubbed his chin. "Good for him, too."
Eragon relayed much of what had gone on since his midsummer visit. He described the harvest, and how he was able to discretely practice magic while scything wheat and digging up vegetables. He mentioned Roran's increasingly serious relationship with Katrina, and how much gold Garrow made selling the surplus they had thanks to Harry growing their field.
"Now Roran wants to work next summer in Therinsford to make enough money to start a family with Katrina," Eragon said. "I told Garrow I'd like to spend more time up here, if that's possible."
"Of course," Harry dismissed. "I have plenty of room."
They spent a few more minutes chatting. "The traders ought to be here soon," Eragon told him. "If you're looking for more exotic things, or just stuff that's more valuable than Carvahall usually keeps around. You've got that duplicating trick for coin, don't you?"
Harry rolled his wand between his fingers. "You can't transfigure gold," he said idly. "I don't know how that affects the geminio charm, but I'd rather not make fake money that could disappear on the traders later on."
"Do you have the money you need then?" Eragon wondered.
Harry laughed and gestured at the foundry. A column of smoke issued from the chimney. "Oh yes. I can summon all the ore I want and mint it myself. Since I got a crown from Gertrude for the burn cream, I have a full set to go off of."
The stone weighed in his pack and on his mind on the way back. Why hadn't he told Harry? If anyone would know about it, it would be him. Eragon put the thought out of his mind. He kicked at the dirt and twigs on his way down, sending them into the brush. Soon snow would cover the whole mountainside. During the winter, Garrow would not need him. He could easily spend the winter with Harry learning magic.
When he got back, Garrow welcomed him inside. Even as night was falling, candlelight flickered behind the shuttered windows.
"How was your trip?"
"Unsuccessful," Eragon grunted, taking off his pack. "Something spooked the deer I was tracking right before I could shoot. Something magical."
"Oh?" Garrow raised a brow. Eragon drew out the blue stone. His eyes widened. "I see. And this isn't Harry's?"
Eragon shook his head. "I thought when the traders come, we could sell it."
"For the best," Garrow agreed. "Something like that is bound to draw attention. Did you mention the apprenticeship?"
"No," Eragon grumbled. "Not yet. Something about it felt off. And if Roran is going to be gone next summer, I can hardly go too. I need to be here to help."
Garrow smiled and patted him on the back. "Thank you."
Eragon headed to his bedroom and put the stone on the shelf that held the rest of his oddities. Especially smooth stones, convoluted roots, a chunk of milky quartz, things of that nature.
He went to bed dreaming of the castle, kicking himself for the way he handled the day. It all felt…off. Like he shouldn't have made the decisions he did, and he didn't know why.
According to Eragon, Samhain was coming up in a week. It did not feel right to let Halloween pass by without acknowledgement, so Harry had spent the day conjuring pumpkins, putting up cobwebs, and animating conjured bat dolls to flutter through the halls.
The festive decorations rang false though, adorning empty rooms.
Far from making the castle feel more like home, adding all the extra halls and towers had only increased the feeling of emptiness inside. Harry had started working with paintings as well as statues and stonework. He'd made one for just about everybody he knew, even people he did not like. Umbridge's painting, for example, was of her being harassed by the Weasley Twins' fireworks. Harry could get the paintings to move, but not to come alive like true wizard paintings. They did not speak or have a spark of intelligence or personality, they just shifted in place, looking around, and occasionally standing to stretch out.
When he was feeling productive, Harry worked on experimenting to try and produce lenses. By grinding a concave side into a piece of glass, he could get it to warp what he could see through it, but it was trial and error, and none of his attempts came close to helping fix his blurry vision. He'd actually come to somewhat adjust to not having glasses. It was just frustrating to lose the details of his hard work on the castle to swimming blurs once he stood more than a few feet away.
When he wasn't feeling productive, Harry flew.
The broomstick was an unexpected and highly welcome boon to his boredom. He had gone into the project expecting to only be able to produce feeble imitations of the brooms he knew from back home, which must have been the work of many master enchanters who knew all sorts of trade secrets he couldn't begin to guess at. As it turned out, with enough visualization of what he wanted, the levitation charm was nearly enough by itself.
It had been harder to get the unenchanted broomstick than to put the right spells on it. He'd done the whole thing right; he'd gone out into the mountains and found a healthy ash tree, cut it down, and pared down the branches. He'd bundled it all on a sled to avoid having to shrink and regrow it, stripped the bark, and lathed a good sturdy branch down to the right shape. He'd summoned copper and zinc ore from the ground (this had caused a minor earthquake and totally ruined the ground around the ore) and used the foundry to alloy them into brass. He'd forged them into the shape of a footrest and mounted them on the broomstick. He'd meticulously aligned every single twig on the tail of the broom, and bought real wood lacquer from the carpenter in Carvahall.
It was part of his hypothesis that conjured and duplicated materials were inferior for enchanting. If the results were anything to go by, he could submit his proofs in his journal right away. It also provided him with a way forward in getting the ceiling of the Great Hall to properly show the sky. If he went and got real wood beams, rafters, and shingling to replace the conjured stuff, he felt certain the enchantment would work.
Maybe it was another point to his theory on the emergent property of many spells. Like the hoppers that carted produce from the greenhouse, Harry had layered on enough spells and imbued them with a clear enough intent that the broomstick had taken on his vision.
The bees were doing exceedingly well. Even though they were slowing down for winter, he had already harvested dozens of blocks of honeycomb and jars upon jars of honey. Harry had cast warming charms to keep the apiaries warm when the temperature began to freeze. The wax, he melted and turned into candles by dipping twine into a tub of wax, over and over again. He was unsure what he was going to do with real candles yet, but when he figured out Gubraithian fire, they were going up in the Great Hall.
A suit of armor saluted him on his way past. Harry had found a workaround for them. Conjuring the entire suit and sword made the charms he cast on them feeble and glitchy. But he didn't have the talent to forge them by hand. Instead, he conjured one set, made a clay mold from it, then cast metal dies for the different parts. Then all it took was a hot sheet of steel between the two halves of the stamp to make a true piece of armor. The suits filled the empty pedestals, nooks, and crannies of the empty hallways and brought some semblance of life to the empty castle.
And so it was that Harry sat alone to have supper on Halloween Eve when a suit of armor signed to him that someone had been let through the gate. "Eragon's back already?" he wondered aloud.
He stood to open the smaller side door to the Great Hall and looked down the hill. The wintry air ruffled his hair. Harry waved to the blurry figure on the steps up to the fountain square. A spot of cold touched his cheek. Harry touched his fingertip to it and peered closer. A snowflake. He let his eyes unfocus to see millions of the tiny white flakes falling through the night sky, lit by the firelight that came through the doorway behind him.
Harry laughed in delight. It was snowing! "Eragon!" he exclaimed. "Back already?"
"When did Eragon have time to come up here during the fall harvest?" A cranky voice called back. "Do I look like him?"
"I can't hardly see anything without my glasses," Harry called back. Brom brushed the snow from his hair and shoulders.
"The suit of armor is a new trick. I'm glad you're taking my advice to heart."
Harry snorted. "I didn't make them to defend me. I made them 'cause I was lonely."
Brom sighed. "Well, it's something. Are you going to invite me inside?"
Harry gestured to the open doorway. "Please. I was ready to eat alone on Halloween."
"Never heard of it."
"Another word for Samhain."
Brom craned his head up at the floating candles in the Great Hall. They were all conjured, but for just one night, Harry had lit them all. For one night, the usually dim and gloomy hall felt like home. "That's something else," Brom murmured. "The bees are doing well then?"
Harry grinned. "Very. Come, sit. I wasn't expecting guests, but I made enough to feast for one. There's plenty for you."
"You don't have to, I brought supplies and ate before I left."
"Anything I can't finish is going to the pigs," Harry said firmly. "Eat. It won't be a feast if you just sit there looking sad the whole time."
Brom gave a long-suffering sigh, but his lips were twitching. "Since you twisted my arm. Did you grow any pipeweed?"
Harry flicked his wand. "Accio weed." A moment later, a bag of buds came zipping through the halls. Harry caught it and handed it to the storyteller. "Your lungs are probably molding."
"Probably," Brom admitted cheerfully. He was already tamping some into his pipe. "I don't suppose you could call one of those candles down?"
Harry helped him with his light and conjured more plates and silverware. As always, the conjuration made him uncomfortable. "Do you keep all these things somewhere else, or are you really making them from nothing?" he asked.
Harry shrugged. "As far as I can tell, from nothing. They come straight from my imagination."
Dinner was a point of pride for Harry. With the right application of the orchideous charm, no mundane plant was out of his reach. Thus Halloween was marked with apple cider, pumpkin pie, caramelized vegetables, mashed potatoes, and eggs. Brom took little convincing to dig in around puffs of his pipe.
"Have you tried any?" Brom gestured to the bag of weed. Harry shook his head. The man snorted. "If you're so far away from Britain that you don't know how to get back, they probably won't catch you smoking."
"They can test for it," Harry remembered. "Usually in urine, but if they really want to be sure, I've heard marijuana can be tested in your hair follicles for months afterwards. And I don't have a pipe."
Brom gave him the most unimpressed look he had ever gotten. It made Snape's disdain seem kind. "You were incapable of making one," he deadpanned, sitting in the middle of his colossal castle. "This one task, your magic was insufficient for."
Harry grumbled and snatched up the offered pipe. "Geminio." The duplication spell copied not just the pipe, but the weed inside. The buds were even lit like the original. "Weird."
"What's weird?"
Harry frowned at the pipe. "You're not supposed to be able to conjure food. That's a named rule of transfiguration. No making food from nothing."
"Mayhaps you were copying mine," Brom pointed out.
Harry rubbed his chin. If food could be duplicated, it gave him ideas. "Maybe." He put his lips on the pipe and breathed in through it, immediately going into a coughing fit. Puffs of dank smoke curled from his nose and lips.
Brom laughed. "Amateur," he grinned. "That was a hell of a drag for a first-timer."
Harry's cheeks burned. "What now?" he asked nervously. He'd never done drugs before. Kind of hard to believe the first hit he did was with some random medieval peasant in another dimension. If he told the details to anyone else, they'd think he was on something right then.
"Give it a minute or two," Brom advised.
Anxious, Harry ate until he felt it. Like all the anxiety he'd been feeling just melted away. What he was going to do about Voldemort, worrying if the villagers would find out about him, wondering if he'd ever be able to figure out all the magic he'd never learned from Hogwarts but might eventually need, it all fell from his shoulders.
It was like taking off a leaden jacket from his shoulders. "Woah," he mumbled. "I get why you like it."
Brom cackled. "You poor Britain-dwellers."
When dinner was finished, they moved to the armchairs near the hearth in the northeast corner. Harry put his feet up on the coffee table. He'd gotten high enough and set aside his pipe, but Brom was just getting started. The storyteller made a show of popping smoke rings from his mouth while he prodded Harry for another story.
Harry relayed the tale of the Triwizard tournament to Brom. He left out any mention that his entry was irregular, of Barty Crouch Jr. at all, and generally avoided implying that he was anything but a legitimate competitor. Brom stopped him when he first reached the four dragons in the woods.
"These dragons," Brom held up a hand. "Can you describe them?"
"Er, yeah. Why?"
Brom hummed. "I have heard many descriptions of dragons over my life. But few alive today have seen one, and fewer still have spoken to me about it."
Harry gave Brom his best description of the three models first. They were the best view he'd gotten of the Fireball, Welsh Green, and Short-snout. Brom nodded along, as if trying to put together an image in his imagination. Harry cleared away the tables in the middle of the Great Hall for the Horntail. The tables screeched on the flagstones, skidding to the sides and out of the way. He fixed the image in his mind and flicked his wand.
Brom cursed and leapt back in his chair. A life-sized stone horntail blinked into being, wings spread at the moment of takeoff, face contorted in rage and jaw agape, ready to blast fire at the target of her ire.
"Hellfire," he swore. "I don't suppose you can bring it to life like the suits of armor?" Harry considered it. "Woah. No need to test." Brom said warily. He got up and started circling it. "What colors?"
Harry hummed and gave it another flick. The colors filled in under the power of the color-changing charm. Glossy black for the back scales down to the sides, turning greyish-brown on the way down to the belly. The spikes down the spine and titular tail were a gleaming, vicious bronze, terminating in a morningstar-like tip. Brom circled the statue, bending down to examine details like the dragon's crest, the shape of the ears, and the club tail.
"This is accurate?" he checked. "No artistic license, perhaps panicked misrememberance due to the threat on your life?"
Harry shook his head. "I had plenty of time to get a good look. Why?"
Except, the more he looked at it, the more he noticed the differences between the dragons he'd been seeing in his dreams, and the dragons he knew from his memories. The tails of the prismatic dragons Aupho and the little purple one, they both ended in normal tips. And the spine spikes had connected to the head differently, hadn't they? There weren't really crests on the gemlike beasts.
"This is not like the dragons I've heard described."
Harry was suddenly suspicious. One didn't learn anatomy from second-hand accounts. "You've seen a dragon," he said flatly.
"In sketches," Brom averred.
Harry worked with that for a moment. If he'd seen a sketch, he wouldn't have needed to poke and prod like a doctor examining a patient. He'd have seen a handful of different perspectives in some 100-year-old journal which he'd have been able to verify from a distance.
Their eyes met. Brom's gaze was challenging. Harry sensed a point of serious tension, like calling him out would not only be rude and unwelcome, but perhaps dangerous.
He looked away.
"Are dragons commonplace?" Brom put to him as if nothing had happened.
Harry shrugged. "There are reserves, I know. And dragon parts are a crucial part of a lot of things."
"Dragon parts?" Brom said dangerously. His demeanor flipped in an instant. "I saw the chained and nesting mother. And the blinded one in the caves. Are they not intelligent?"
Harry frowned. "Should they be? I know poachers are reviled, and I doubt the people on the reserves are slaughtering dragons like livestock. They probably just render the body once one dies of old age."
"The dragons of Alagaesia are fabled to never succumb to age," Brom murmured. "These must be different species."
"Ah yes," Harry said dryly. "The other flying, fire-breathing lizards."
"Not impossible," Brom snapped. "There are fanghur, or wyverns in the common tongue." Harry conceded, he was familiar with wyverns. "What parts, and what purposes?" Brom's questioning turned intense, his brows darkened. "Have you any with you now?"
Harry shook his head. "I arrived naked with three items. My cloak, this wand, and a pebble. Even my clothes are conjured."
"And the parts," he demanded.
"Basically everything," Harry remembered. "Dragons are creatures of magic. Everything can be used. There are potions that call for eyeballs, tonsils, flesh, powdered talons, in Herbology nearly every magical plant thrives in dragon dung. Dragon blood is one of the most common ingredients in potion brewing. Dragon heartstrings are one of the three common wand cores. Dragonhide is used for herbology gloves, for handling dangerous plants. And they're rather big, so one dead dragon probably keeps the world going for a while."
"Dragon hearts?" Brom said dangerously.
"Heartstrings," Harry stressed. "After they're already dead. They're like little tendons inside the ventricles of the heart. And they probably only picked them because they fit well in long and skinny sticks, and came from the heart. I never worked on a dragon reserve. I just bought a wand from Ollivander's, same as everybody. And I didn't even have a dragon heartstring wand. Mine was a phoenix feather. Dragon's blood comes in little glass vials at the apothecaries where everyone shops."
"Complicity is little better than responsibility," Brom said, disgusted. "Without the economic incentives-"
"Dragons would still be incredibly valuable and powerful," Harry interrupted. "It'd just be that only poachers and dark wizards would use them, and they would not be as conscientious as the legal dragon handlers. I know they are usually treated humanely, but frankly there are too many dragons and reserves to watch over, and living in society means taking on some responsibility for the evils they commit. If you wanted to avoid complicity in any wrongdoing, you'd have to huddle and starve on an abandoned island in the middle of nowhere."
Brom worked his jaw for a moment. Harry added 'loves dragons' to the list of traits he was compiling about Brom. The storyteller, the legilimancer, and now, the dragon enthusiast.
His eyes flicked to the dragon in the room. Harry could almost see the gears turn in his mind, deciding he could let it go, that Britain's dragons were not the same as Alagaesia's dragons, and thus he could put it out of his mind.
"Fine," Brom growled. "I shall put this out of my mind. But if your wand breaks, do not think you can just replace it with one of our dragons."
"I can't even bring myself to slaughter my cows and chickens," Harry said dryly. "What makes you think I'd be up for murdering an intelligent being?"
He huffed. "Just thought I'd head off any bad ideas at the start."
Harry led Brom on a tour after that, before showing him to the guest dorms. They walked around the halls flanking the Great Hall. Though the biggest tower was connected to the Great Hall, it made for a poor nexus for the castle. Harry had built an interchange of sorts right off the back of the Great Hall. It had its own entrance on the southeast side, with a main path that wound beneath the towers, turrets, and colonnades that connected much of the castle on that side. Inside was a grand staircase made from wood paneling, limestone, and gold leaf detailing.
Though conjuring gold was impossible, summoning ore from the ground was not. He got limited quantities out of this method, but a tiny bit of gold went a long way when it could be hammered so thin it was nearly transparent. A grand clockface hung over the entrance, made from iron hammered over with gold, detailing an angel with a trumpet in flight.
Brom gawked at everything they passed, following him up the grand staircase where a hallway led to the northwest wing and eventually, the skybridge to the Astronomy Tower. Harry skipped it and headed up the second flight of split stairs on either side. He pointed back at the glass-fronted doors to the left of the main entry hall. "That's the library. Or at least it would be if I had any books. The other side is a study hall, just tables and chairs in rooms with dividers."
He pointed to the left side of the landing after the grand stairs. "That way goes back to the East Tower. The guest dorms are about halfway up, through the door with the Rook on it. To the right is the path over the top of the covered walkway around the Great Hall courtyard. That one leads to the Fat Tower, the rafters and attics for the Great Hall, and the greenhouses all the way on the west side."
"And up?" Brom asked, pointing to where the top of the second flight led into a big stone hallway with many windows.
Harry led him on. "Classrooms and offices. If the king ever becomes less of a problem, or even just if I can find enough wizards who want to learn so we could hold our own, hell, if I can put up just the right wards, I want to teach magic. Most of this is inspired by Hogwarts. Another magic school in a castle."
His vision was strong. He had many fond memories of students walking through the halls, laughing or badmouthing professors, sprinting to make it to some distant class on time, struggling with an armful of books and parchment, or just having fun on the weekends exploring.
Harry showed Brom a few classrooms, empty save for rows of conjured desks, blackboards and chalk, and unlit chandeliers. The man took them all in quietly.
"Sometimes I feel sure I know what the greatest of Galbatorix's crimes are," Brom said, mostly to himself. "But then I remember that he casts this shadow upon all of Alagaesia, and wonder if what he does today is even worse than what he did."
Harry paused, confused. "What?"
Brom shook his head. "Nothing. But coincidentally, when the traders come to Carvahall, I may have cause to tell some old stories of great import. The King does not like this story heard, which is exactly why we must tell it. You would be very well served to be among my audience. You labor under a misapprehension about the type of enemy Galbatorix would be."
Harry gave him a long look. Warily, he nodded. "I'll be there."
"Good," Brom said. "Now I want to see what kingly accommodations you have magicked up. This way, you said?"
It was not long before Brom was squared away. The guest dorms were about as impressive as the ones back at Hogwarts. That is to say less so than Harry's personal quarters atop the Fat Tower, but miles beyond anything Carvahall had ever seen. Nice, carved bunk beds with mattresses, layered bedding, and pillows, desks with lamps, candles, and lighters, glass windows with shutters and curtains, drawers and cabinets and a mirror, all were luxuries Carvahall had little of, or none at all.
And Brom seemed perfectly at home among luxuries like that. Harry briefly explained the function and operation of toilets and indoor plumbing (a lesson Eragon had needed as well) and left the man to his devices.
He walked down the guest tower until he was sure he was far enough that Brom wouldn't hear the crack of apparition as he skipped the rest of the way to his bedroom.
One of these days, Harry would put up the wards. Like the gate, he didn't actually believe he was in enough danger to require precautions, but danger didn't usually come predictably with lots of warning. Quite the opposite. It was just…putting them up felt like acknowledgement that he was under threat. He could pretend Brom was overreacting and paranoid, that all was fine and that danger would not come to his castle.
And Harry wanted to preserve that a little while longer.
Harry bolted upright. His blood sang to him. All the drowsiness of sleep was gone in an instant. Out of nowhere, he suddenly felt more alive than he had ever been. Harry frowned. He threw off the covers. It had to be close to morning, right? He groped over the bedside table for the Elder Wand, determined to check the time.
His fingers closed on something else.
The Resurrection Stone fit in the palm of his hand. Only it wasn't the shiny onyx he was familiar with. The little pebble shone white with a hint of color. It danced over the whole room, casting multicolored spots over the furniture and walls. It was as if the whole room was underwater.
He had not used the Stone since the Forest. For good reason. Harry did not believe for a second it was a coincidence that minutes after first touching it, he had died. But this…
You didn't just ignore things like this.
Who did he want to come out of the Stone? Dumbledore? His parents? Everyone he'd seen in the Forest?
Harry looked at the pebble and examined his feelings. He was surprised to find that no, he did not feel a burning need to speak with his parents, Sirius, or anyone else like that. Perhaps Dumbledore, but Harry knew if he saw the old man, his emotions would get tangled up in a massive knot again, and it'd take him weeks to get to the point where he could think of the man's name without a mix of heartache and anger.
What he really wanted was answers. There was so much he wished he'd learned, wish he knew that only the people back home or the dead could answer.
He cupped his hand over the Stone and turned it over three times.
And like that, he was no longer alone.
"We weren't sure you'd ever call," a soft female voice said. The woman was no one Harry had ever seen. She was short with red hair and freckles, but there her resemblance to Lily ended. Her eyes were black through and through, as if her pupils did not end until the edge of her irises. Her features were distinct, and she had a smaller build. The finer details were hazy, as if Harry was seeing her through fog or a gauze veil.
"Who're you?" Harry asked.
She smiled mysteriously. "Names have power, Harry Evans. Especially over the dead. I shall keep mine to myself."
"Did you make the Resurrection Stone glow?"
The spirit shook her head. "The veil is thin tonight. Thin enough for even my side to poke through in places. Since your first death, we waited for you to pick up the Stone again."
"Why?" Harry frowned. He could understand his family wanting to visit. But he had never seen this woman before in his life.
Her lips twisted. "For those of us who have died and are not yet done living, these fleeting moments on your side make us feel so-" she breathed deeply, her eyes flashing. "Alive."
AN: Hmm…
Also, what a throwback. I got a review from BeeeTeee, (hi if ur still reading) and I was sure I recognized the pfp from a great fic I read years ago. I loved Adversity Breeds Excellence, and I was always sad that it never got fully finished. I am pretty confident I'll finish this fic, all things considered. I wrote a complete version of this one, if much rougher, already, so I know vaguely what to expect.
I know some people are allergic to OC's (me too usually) but there's a good reason for this one and I think you will come to like what I have planned for her...
