[AN: A story of Harry falling through the Veil and being cast thousands of years into the past.]
Harry Potter was looking out at the endless forest in front of him. The wind was strong where he had climbed a tree to the top in order to see the land around him. The branches he clung to swung back and forth in the wind.
"So, this is where that black portal leads to?" Harry mumbled. The whispering voices from the portal that he had fallen through in place of his Godfather had really freaked him out when he had passed by it earlier in the evening.
But hearing those voices at the edge of his understanding was nothing compared to actually falling through the portal. The freezing cold and chorus of whispering and chittering had nearly been more than he could stand, let alone the horrible sensation of falling for so very long.
It was only when he landed in the forest clearing with bright and wonderful sunshine that he finally started feeling better. But now, as he stood on a branch and looked out at the endless trees…
A sense of panic and hopelessness was rising up inside him. He was lost in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but his wand on him. He had no idea where he was, or which way to go to get back home. He didn't know how to apparate, he didn't have a floo, and the knight bus never showed up when he waved his wand.
Hugging the tree trunk next to him, he couldn't even see any roads or smoke from chimneys or factories rising up in the air. With his wand in hand, he tried the variant of the Point Me spell that he and Hermione had come up with for the third task of the Triwizard Tournament last year.
The normal Point Me spell only pointed North, like a compass. But they had fiddled with it and come up with a variation that would point him to any object he named. In this case he tried to find the direction to Hogwarts.
He was pretty sure that Hermione was the best student around at altering spells based on their usability in specific areas. Was that even a word, usability? He wasn't sure.
His wand just continued to lazily turn circles after he cast the spell to find Hogwarts, indicating that there was no response from the spell. Hogwarts must be too far away to pick up with the spell. So he tried 12 Grimmauld Place. Nothing. So he tried his relative's home in Little Whinging. Nothing.
Maybe he wasn't in England?
He tried the Eiffel Tower. Nothing.
He tried the Empire State building. Nothing.
He tried the Catholic Holy See of Italy. Nothing.
He tried India's Bombay. Nothing. Wait, wasn't that the old name? Mumbai. Nothing.
He tried South America's Bogota. Nothing.
He tried Australia's Sydney. Nothing.
He tried China's Beijing. Nothing.
He tried Russia's Moscow. Nothing.
He really started to panic when nothing he tried gave him results. He had tried the famous places all around the world, and nothing had given him results!
He then tried to find the nearest road. Nothing.
The nearest house. Nothing.
The nearest human besides him. Nothing.
The nearest tree. His wand immediately swung around to point at the large tree he had climbed. So the spell was working fine, he just wasn't getting any results because there was nothing nearby to point to.
Harry really didn't like those implications.
He tried the nearest source of water. His wand immediately swung around to point in a direction to his left.
His spell was working just fine, but apparently there wasn't anything to point to from his world.
He looked in every direction around him. North, forest. East, forest. South, forest. West, forest. He saw absolutely nothing but forest. Nothing to indicate which way he should go to find civilization.
"Are there even any national forests that big anymore nowadays?" Harry rhetorically asked himself. "I'd expect at least a nearby road. I didn't think there were any tracts of land that there wasn't at least something manmade."
There should be something. He had to face the truth, though…there was nothing.
Seeing that the sun was getting closer to the horizon, Harry cast the Tempus spell. It was about half past five in the afternoon. It would be dark in a couple of hours. He had no shelter, nor food. He could easily get himself some water with the Aguamenti spell, though, so he wouldn't be going thirsty.
For the time being, until he figured out where he was and how to find home, he would have to rough it in the forest.
Upon arriving on the ground after climbing down the tree, he considered his next steps while he was looking at the dense forest. The first thing he needed to do was build a shelter. The air was already a bit nippy during the day, so it would no doubt be pretty cold at night.
Looking around, he saw various shrubbery, plenty of sticks, dirt, and a couple of fallen trees.
Pulling out his wand, Harry began clearing out a space between trees. He used the cutting curse to chop down some of the grasses and vines. He levitated out some stones and the plant debris.
Looking at the open land, he considered how he was going to do this. Scratching his head for a bit while he was looking around, he came up with a plan. He transfigured a stone into a shovel and dug a posthole near one of the standing trees.
He carefully positioned himself in front of one of the fallen trees and cast the cutting curse. Wood chips exploded out from where his spell impacted, causing Harry to cover his face to protect from the wooden shrapnel.
Looking at the results, there was only a wide but shallow cut. Harry scowled at the results. Apparently the cutting curse wasn't very good for cutting lumber. Thinking about it for a bit, Harry transfigured another stone into a saw.
Picking up his newly transfigured saw, Harry began cutting the log where he wanted. A few minutes later, Harry paused his work, panting in exhaustion. While his relatives had made him do all the chores around the house, it wasn't usually as physically strenuous as sawing logs. Usually he just had to cook, mop, dust, clean the bathrooms, and other household chores.
After a few more minutes, Harry was more than halfway through the log when he realized that sawing all the way through while the log was still lying on the ground was going to be hard, since the ground was in the way.
Harry then levitated up one side of the log and moved a stone underneath it. The log rolled right off the stone. Scowling at the uncooperative log, Harry transfigured the stone so that there was a dip in the top where the log could rest on.
After Harry settled the log onto its new rest, Harry returned to sawing the log. Another 20 minutes of work saw the log cut to the length Harry wanted. He then levitated the log into the hole he had dug, and packed the dirt around the log.
Looking at his new post, Harry nodded in satisfaction. He transfigured some of the debris surrounding him into a rope. Levitating a long branch up horizontally, Harry tied it to the tree and his post. He then began placing large branches against the horizontal log to create a lean to that he could shelter under for the night.
Once he had his lean to prepared, Harry then gathered plenty of wood for a fire for the night. He dug a small fire pit and started the fire. It was getting pretty dark by this time. He had finished just in time.
Settling down under his lean to, Harry finally gained the time to think about his disastrous day, and what led him to this predicament.
It was his OWLs year. A horrible year with Umbridge in charge of his favorite subject, Defense Against the Dark Arts. He hadn't learned a single thing from Umbridge except how much the Ministry sucks, and how little anyone could really do about it by playing by the rules.
Hermione had convinced him to help teach a secret club dedicated to learning DADA. They had called it the DA for Defense Association. Some of the members had joked about it standing for Dumbledore's Army, 'cause they knew that would piss off Umbridge.
In retrospect, taunting the overly paranoid and crazy Ministry Flunky hadn't been the best idea.
The year had almost been over. By this time he almost expected something bad to happen at the end of each year. And the hammer had dropped during his History OWLs. He had been in the middle of his History Exam, doing poorly he might add, when he got a vision about his godfather Sirius Black being held captive.
He knew how much Sirius had hated being confined in that house. Harry knew because it would have been what he would have felt if in 15 years he was forced to go live with the Dursleys once again with no way to get away from them.
So Harry knew how likely it was that Sirius had gone out for a breath of fresh air and got himself captured.
The only reason Sirius was even back in the country was to help him, so Harry felt guilty, concerned, and frantic to save one of the last links he had to his parents, and his last hope for somehow having a decent family.
Despite the good advice of his best friend, Hermione, he had charged ahead into the trap they all knew was there.
And they had been thoroughly routed by the waiting Death Eaters. It had been a running retreat. He scowled once more, thinking about how many of the Death Eaters he had stunned, only for their fellow Death Eaters to renervate them.
Sighing deeply at the thought that so much was his fault, Harry flipped over onto his back as he through about the fight and what he learned from it.
But even now, Harry didn't know if his friends were okay or not. Because in front of that strange archway of billowing black, Harry had saved his godfather from being blasted into the strange darkness, but fallen in himself.
At which point he had woken up here. Where ever here was.
A loud crash and pain suddenly interrupted Harry's reminiscing. He felt a weight on top of him, which he recognized as one of the wooden logs he had made his shelter from.
After pushing off the offending log, Harry climbed to his feet, cursing up a storm.
"Dammit! I forgot that I made that rope from transfiguration. Of course it would revert!" Harry realized that he had made a big mistake by not properly thinking things through.
He patted himself down, relieved that he only had a few scrapes and bruises from his stupidity. At least until he came to his wand. There was a crack in the wood of his wand. It wasn't so bad as to be snapped, but he could definitely feel the damage done to it.
Harry mournfully looked at one of his most precious items. He thought about Ron's broken wand in second year, and how problematic it was to cast with that wand. He looked around his dark surroundings almost in despair. There were no solutions to his problems evident.
He already had plenty of problems piled high on his plate; he didn't need to add a broken wand that couldn't cast to the mix.
With his heart in his throat, Harry cast a simple levitation spell on the nearby log. It lifted up smoothly enough, but he could feel a kind of strained feeling in his wand. Like if he tried to lift too much weight, then the wand would break.
Cursing himself for not being more careful, Harry dropped the log. Looking at his ruined shelter, he promised himself he would be more cautious. If he lost his wand out here in the wild, there was no way he could survive without the ability to do magic.
At least his fire wasn't put out or scattered by the falling logs.
Being careful not to strain his wand too much, Harry levitated the logs into a backrest. It wouldn't be as good for keeping the heat trapped as the lean to, but he could huddle up next to the fire and have the heat reflected by the back rest, so he wouldn't freeze from exposure at least. He would just have to keep the fire going during the night.
The morning sun shining down through the trees found a tired, cold, and cranky Harry Potter. He had dozed off here and there over night, but he was definitely miserable and not well rested.
Thinking back to what he had seen the previous day from the tree he climbed, he knew it didn't matter which direction he set out on. So he decided to find a stream first. There would likely be some fish that he could maybe catch to get something to eat.
After making sure his fire was out, Harry followed his point me spell east to where it said there was a stream.
Hiking through the dense forest in his ratty trainers and hand-me down clothes and school robes was a pain in Harry's ass. His shoes were soon wet from the dew and making his feet really cold.
He occasionally cast some drying and warming charms, but he was really concerned about putting too much strain on his wand so he kept his spells to a minimum, and cast them as lightly as he could.
He spent the next hour miserably hiking through the forest, occasionally using the Point Me spell to make sure he didn't stray from the course and walk in circles.
Eventually he arrived at the medium sized stream. Looking at the running water, Harry then drew a blank. How was he supposed to catch a fish again?
He could transfigure something into a fishing pole, but he didn't have any bait. Could he dig up some worms?
He could transfigure something into a spear, but how was he supposed to spear a fish?
What about Charms? Were there any there that could help him?
Harry sat down on a nearby log and began thinking over what he had learned in Charms class. While staring at the stream, he wracked his brain to think of ways the various spells he had learned could help him in this situation.
But how is a dancing pineapple supposed to help him? Harry almost face slapped himself. He could have used the locomotor spell to animate the saw yesterday, instead of doing it himself.
That wouldn't help him catch some fish, though. Harry refocused his thoughts on the problem at hand. Maybe he could just levitate the fish out of the water?
It was worth a try.
Harry stood up and looked in the running water.
And he kept looking.
He didn't see any fish. Were there even any fish there?
Harry suddenly thought of one spell that let him summon something to him, even if it wasn't in his line of sight. It was worth a try. After concentrating for a time, he cast the spell.
"Accio fish!" Harry called out while pointing his wand at the stream.
A second later a trout came flying out of the water and almost smacked him in the face. If it weren't for his great reflexes that caused him to block the fish with his off hand, he would have had a face full of fish.
Looking down at the foot long fish, Harry felt a sense of satisfaction. At least he would soon have something to eat.
He picked up the wriggling fish and set it aside where it couldn't accidentally wriggle back into the water. A couple more summon spells later, and Harry had three good sized fish.
With some transfiguration, he had a cutting board and a knife, and easily gutted the fish. From being forced to cook for his relatives, Harry knew how to handle fish. Now if only he had some potatoes, he could also make some chips to go along with the fish.
He soon had the fish placed on some sticks over a fire. Keeping an eye on the fish to make sure they didn't burn, Harry began thinking more about his schooling and what he had learned in his classes.
Transfiguration and Charms had been the most useful and practical magical subjects so far since he arrived here. History, Astronomy, Potions, and Divination had all been quite useless so far. Even Care of Magical Creatures hadn't given him any information on how to catch fish in the wild.
So Harry began wracking his brain for information on anything practical he could use to survive. Even something like the summoning charm had been useful when applied in a different manner than originally intended. So he couldn't really discount anything that might be useful.
His fish were almost done, causing Harry to drool. Even without any spices or salt, Harry thought the fish smelled so delectable. Hunger was definitely the best spice.
Roar!
Harry startled at the sudden noise, and stumbled, falling to his rear. Looking over, he saw a very large bear glaring at him from 20 yards away!
'At least it isn't charging me so far.' Harry thought. 'What have I learned in Care of Magical Creatures how to handle this situation?'
Harry's mind flashed back to lessons with Buckbeak the Hippogryph.
'I don't think bowing will do any good here!' Harry frantically thought as he palmed his wand in preparation while staring at the normal bear that certainly wasn't as smart as a Hippogryph.
The bear then started running directly at him. Harry cast the first spell that came to mind.
"Impedimenta!"
The bear tumbled to the ground, rolling forward. It began climbing to its feet, still growling at Harry.
"Petrificus Totalis!"
The spell hit the bear, but it continued to climb to its feet. The bear's limbs moved slightly stiffer, but apparently the spell meant to freeze a human had a less than useful effect on a bear!
Harry then focused on overcharging the next spell as much as he could.
"Stupefy!"
The red beam hit the bear square in the chest. It froze for a bit, before toppling to the side.
Harry sighed in relief, until he looked at his wand. The crack on the wood had gotten even larger.
"Damn, I wish I had some of that Spello-tape that Ron used." Harry groaned. Looking at the bear that would only be out for at most an hour, if he was lucky, Harry was undecided on what to do. He suddenly remembered his fish!
Looking over at the fire, Harry was relieved to see his fish were just fine. They weren't even burnt or anything.
"But what should I do with this bear?"
Thinking of the crack in his wand, there was no way he was going to levitate the bear anywhere. He was lucky enough as it was that his wand hadn't been backfiring on him due to that crack. He didn't want to chance enlarging it any.
Harry thought the bear had followed him due to the smell of cooking fish.
"Damn, am I going to have this problem anytime I cook some food?" Harry muttered while staring at the bear. "Levitating the bear away is out. Tying it up will only last so long until the transfiguration time runs out. Relocating myself and my fish? But there's no guarantee it won't just track me down again. Maybe it won't, but can I chance it? Kill it? Do I need to go that far?"
Harry was pacing back and forth in thought.
"But hold on a second here. There aren't even any bears in England, right? So I'm definitely far from home." Harry muttered. "Who knows how long it'll take for me to find my way to civilization. It could be in a couple days, or it could be much longer. And who knows how far from home I am, so I could definitely use the food..."
Harry's decision was made for him when the bear began waking up and growling at him. In a panic, Harry pulled out his wand and cast some piercing and cutting hexes on the bear. It didn't do as much damage as Harry expected, but with how slow and groggy the bear was, and with Harry repeatedly casting the spells at the bear's head and neck, he eventually killed the bear through blood loss.
Looking down at his even more strained wand with a crack in it, Harry cursed. He looked at the bloody scene of the bear's demise and cursed again.
"I'm going to have to come up with something better to deal with the wildlife here." Harry concluded. "My wand can't take it, and the spells that I know are all designed to deal with humans, not large and tough animals."
"But first, clean up." Harry began scourgifying the blood from the clearing and the bear's carcass so that the smell of blood wouldn't attract anymore predators to him.
Once he had the scene reasonably clean, Harry then sat down to eat his fish. He was feeling faint from hunger, and that may have been one reason that casting so many spells had tired him out.
The fish was bland, but filling. Harry discarded the fish bones into the fire as he ate. Once he was finished and washed his hand and face in the stream water, Harry turned to look at the bear carcass.
There were some ideas percolating in Harry's mind. The first was that the bear was his next meal. The next was that the bear fur would be nice at night when it was so cold. But he didn't really know anything about tanning furs. He knew that if he didn't properly prepare the fur, then the skin and fur would probably rot and become disgusting in only a few days.
Scratching his head as he thought about it, Harry realized there wasn't anything they covered in school that could help here.
"But there had to have been magicals in the past that tanned leather. I wonder how they did it?" Harry didn't have any information to start on. "Well, if I don't try, I definitely won't succeed."
Pulling out his wand, Harry transfigured a rock into a sharp knife and animated it to skin the bear's fur. It required Harry's supervision, including moving the bear around to allow access to the knife.
Despite all the cooking and chores that he had to do in the past, Harry had never handled such a large animal before. Seeing all its muscles being revealed by the skinning turned his stomach a few times when his imagination ran away with him, imagining it was his body that was being dissected by the bear. But he refocused and stopped imagining his own end if he had let the bear catch him.
After seeing some of the dirt sticking to the meat, Harry had then transfigured the ground into a stone square while he handled the bear so that the dirt wouldn't get ground into the meat.
Eventually, the bear's fur was separated from the rest of it. Looking at the bear and the fur for a moment, Harry hung the fur on a tree branch for the time being. Looking at the fur hanging there, Harry realized he could have done a much better job. There were occasional holes and rough patches in the fur from his clumsy handling.
Harry shrugged it off. He wasn't sure just how much practice he would get before he found a city, so worrying about the quality of his work wasn't a priority for the moment.
Harry then began dismantling the bear. The job was very messy, even with his magic to help. He separated out the organs and piled them off to the side, except for the heart. He remembered hearing how the heart was good to eat. He didn't know about any of the other organs. Maybe the liver? They ate chicken liver, after all.
Eventually Harry decided not to chance it and piled all the organs off to the side. Better to lose some food rather than chance eating something that made him sick.
He then worked on separating the meat from the bones. Harry piled up the bones of the bear next to the organs. Once he was done, he had a pile of meat on his stone platform. Looking at the meat, he figured it was about 100 pounds of meat. It would last him for a while, provided it didn't go bad.
Maybe he would make some of it into jerky, since that would last for a while. For the time being, he put the meat in a transfigured box near his fire. That should keep anything like insects getting into his meat. Or having the smell spread around too much.
Looking at the bear fur that was hanging in the tree branches, Harry decided to give it a go, since he didn't have anything to lose.
Since he had no idea how to tan leather the right way, he could only hope that his need and desire could direct his magic. He pulled down the fur and spread it out so the bloody and fatty skin part was up.
Harry first scourgified the fur, cleaning it as best as he could. He then began concentrating on what little he knew of tanning, as well as the final product of furs he had seen from time to time, in order to cement in his mind what he wanted his magic to do.
Closing his eyes to better concentrate on the final product, Harry began releasing his magic from his wand to the fur. He would occasionally wave his wand around when the mood struck him.
He didn't want a transfiguration that would revert back after an hour or so. He wanted the magic to permanently affect the fur from raw to processed, so it wouldn't rot anymore.
Harry kept his eyes closed for close to half an hour while he slowly channeled the magic. By the end, he was sweating a storm and breathing hard. He finally stopped, and hopefully opened his eyes.
Lying in front of him was the fur, but it looked very different. The skin portion of the fur no longer had any trace of the fat and connective tissue that was there before. It looked somewhat grey and clean. Harry reached out a hand and felt it, and it felt like it was a processed fur that he had encountered before.
He sniffed it, and it had no smell of the blood or meat of the bear.
Harry cheered in excitement. Apparently he didn't necessarily need a specific spell to do things. He could mentally direct his magic to do what he wanted!
His cheer soon died down, though. The crack on the wand was getting bigger. It now ran over half the length of his wand.
What was he going to do if his wand broke? When it broke.
Ignore for a moment all the work he couldn't do if he didn't have a wand. Just defending himself from the bear was the most important thing he needed his wand for!
It had only been a day since he was stuck here, where ever here was. And already the work he did to make sure he survived had already damaged his wand more and more. At this rate, he only had a few more days until his wand was useless.
And then where would he be without his magic?
After satisfying himself and stroking the fur for some time, Harry rolled it up and set it aside for the time being. This evening would be much warmer and more comfortable than last night.
He then moved on to the box of meat he had available. Thinking carefully about his magic, Harry decided to try to use as little magic as possible to get by.
The scent of the cooking fish had brought the bear to him, so he was concerned about tempting in more animals when he cooked the bear meat. Not to mention that pile of organs that would make a meal for something.
With those ideas in mind, Harry shrunk the box of meat, wrapped it up in the fur, and started walking downstream. That box of 100 pounds of meat would be too difficult to carry if he didn't shrink it.
Harry didn't even consider the fact that simply shrinking something usually wouldn't change the weight of the item in question. But his magic reacted to his desire, which was to make the item easier to carry. So his magic had shrunk and lightened the box in one go.
He soon found that staying on the banks of the stream was difficult because of all the overgrown plant life. Since he had magic to be able to find the stream whenever he wanted, Harry soon stopped following the stream closely and simply found the easiest path through the forest.
The hope in Harry's mind was that he could follow the stream to a river, and the river to a city. From what he vaguely remembered some historian buff saying at one of Vernon's parties, cities were always founded on the coast or along rivers due to the access to water for shipping. So it was his best bet at finding civilization and figuring out how to get home.
He spent the rest of the afternoon hiking south west along the path of the stream. When it was getting close to sundown, Harry found a place to camp for the night. He had learned from his previous evening's failures, and this time he constructed a proper lean to that would last the night without collapsing, using some of the slender switches he cut from the brush to interweave a shelter.
With a fire and the newly acquired bear fur, Harry's little shelter was actually quite cozy. The only thing he worried about was any animals sniffing around and attacking him. He solved the problem with something he learned from the Weasley twins.
One evening in the common room they had told him how they sometimes set up pranks to go off whenever someone got close to the spell. So Harry set up a perimeter that would set off a series of loud noises if anything wandered through. That should wake him up in time to respond to any animals, and it might even scare off the intruder.
Harry then cooked up some bear steaks to assuage his hunger. Once he started cooking the food, he suddenly remembered how the bear had found him due to the smell of cooking fish in the first place.
He thought about it, and decided to try something. Focusing on making his magic do what he wanted, he slowly spun in a circle, casting his magic out towards the ground. To test it, he stepped outside the perimeter he set. Once on the other side, he couldn't smell the cooking meat. Success!
With the absolute necessity of casting spells to accomplish nearly anything, Harry had found that he could finesse his spells slowly through his wand, and it wouldn't put as much strain on the crack as if he tried to do the spell quickly. But lifting heavy things, or frantic combat spells, would inevitably put too much power through the wand and cause the crack to grow.
While he was chewing on his bland bear steak, Harry began pondering ways to protect himself without using his wand and having the chance of it breaking completely on him.
He could make some weapons, like spears, to fight back against any animals that came his way.
But there were some problems with that idea. First, he didn't know how to use a spear other than "stick the pointy end that way". Relying on something he didn't know how to do to keep him alive seemed awfully risky.
He also wasn't very big or strong. So relying on a spear to kill or drive off a bear was really pushing his luck. His sole advantage for survival lay in his magic. Relying on physical means was just another way of becoming a bear's meal.
Not to mention that unless he used transfiguration, his weapon would solely consist of a sharp stick or a stone tipped spear. Not very effective. And transfiguration would only give him a decent spear for an hour or so at a time.
No, he had to come up with some way to use his magic, but without damaging his wand more.
That's when the memory of Dumbledore waving his hand and conjuring a chair came to mind. Dumbledore hadn't always used a wand when he did magic. Sometimes he did it wandlessly.
Harry remembered when he was a kid that he had turned one of his teacher's hair blue.
Sometimes the members of Dudley's gang would trip on nothing when they were playing their "Harry Hunting" game and getting a little too close to catching him. That was likely his magic at work. It didn't always work, but sometimes it did.
He remembered the time when he appeared on the roof to escape Dudley's gang that one time. Was that Apparation?
From seeing Dumbledore's example of wandlessly conjuring a chair, as well as his own accidents, Harry realized that he could do magic without a wand. It was possible. So he just needed to figure out how to do it.
Easy, right?
Harry snorted in amusement. All the other magicals were convinced that Dumbledore was amazing because of him doing things like wandlessly conjuring chairs. So either it was harder than it sounded, and it sounded plenty hard, or they just were too lazy to work for it themselves.
He decided that in the morning he would start making the bear meat into jerky before it went bad. And while he was doing that, he would begin practicing his wandless magic. The sooner he figured it out, the more at ease he would feel. Because then he wouldn't be in constant fear of his wand finally breaking and making him a sitting duck for a bear's meal.