Planning Stage 3: Learning
January to July 1998
They ended up going to Germany.
With Hermione and Ron's careful planning, it took them a few weeks to actually get out of the country and a few more to cross from France over to Germany and then they still had to somehow find the location described in the letter Rhea's undead owl had delivered to them.
Sephoneia Totengräber had invited them to a nice, secluded house she occasionally used to get some time away from her family and happily agreed to train them in combat magic. Harry was delighted to be surprised by finding Hedwig waiting for him at the house right next to Murr, Lynea's undead cat, both steering decidedly clear of Inpu, who was watching from the shadows.
It was good to be finally reunited with Hedwig.
Clearly not bothered by any urgency they might be facing, Sephoneia put Ron and Hermione to work on learning the Old Magics first while Harry and Theodore received necromancy lessons (Lynea was staying with the main branch of the Totengräbers for the time being) – for if they wanted all five of them to stand on equal footing, they all needed to be proficient in the Old Arts.
(Lynea later explained that Sephoneia simply didn't know a whole lot of 'ordinary spells', hadn't used a wand in over a century, and therefore literally couldn't teach them anything combat-related that wasn't based in the Old Arts.)
In a way, Harry was strongly reminded of their Hogwarts days, when he and Theodore had received private lessons from Professor Totengräber to catch up with Rhea and Lynea. It had often been just the two of them, working side by side.
But it also felt like they were abandoning their people back home, even though Harry knew it was necessary.
They had done what they could to make both the Ministry and Azkaban more bearable without giving themselves away, but it wasn't nearly enough.
Still. Harry had to keep telling himself that he couldn't be impatient here. Catching up to the literal decades of Voldemort's experience wouldn't happen overnight. Harry needed to be as prepared as he could be or he would end up dead. He might still end up dead, but as long as he took Voldemort down with him, everything would be fine.
And he knew he didn't have to – Prophecy or not. There was no obligation for Harry, specifically, to take down Voldemort. But he wanted to. He had already come this far. He owed it to his own conscience more than anything else to get rid of the pest plaguing his home. His world wasn't perfect, Harry knew that. And he was by no means clever enough to see the full picture here – aware only that pure-blood supremacy was merely the tip of the iceberg – never mind changing things. But Voldemort was a start. And with Voldemort gone, others would have a chance to change things for the better. Hermione, he knew, would certainly take it.
„Das wären dann 96 Mark und 58 Pfennig, bitte."
Harry blinked at the woman behind the counter. "I – I'm sorry," he stammered, "I don't –"
The woman squinted at him, then pointed at the cash register displaying an alarmingly high number. Panicking a little – he had only ever accompanied Lynea or Hermione to carry the bags and never actually done the grocery shopping, himself – Harry fished out several bills from his little mokeskin pouch and carefully counted out the coins, assuming the comma marked the decimal.
The woman's frown deepened. „Wir akzeptieren keine Pfund, nur Deutsche Mark."
Harry's face flushed.
"Theodore?" he called out – squeaked, rather.
He frantically looked over his shoulder, looking for his friend, who had wandered off to take a look at the small selection of books and magazines next to the entrance.
Theodore poked his head around a shelf. "Everything alright, Harry?"
Harry gave him a helpless look. "A little bit of assistance?"
Arching his brows, Theodore wandered over. Harry saw the moment the other boy realised what the problem was and his cheeks heated up some more.
"You are using the wrong currency," Theodore explained. "Muggles use different currencies depending on the country."
Harry … felt like an idiot. To be fair, it had been seven years since he had actually lived his life in the Muggle world and it wasn't like he had ever left Britain before. But Hermione had also explicitly handed him more Muggle money together with the list of groceries when she had asked him to go in her stead, because she was too close to figuring something out to go out and interrupt her own studies. Harry had been a bit confused at the time, because he still had more than enough money left, but now it made sense.
He hadn't even realised the notes looked different.
He felt so embarrassed.
When he finally managed to pay properly and fled the little shop with a hasty, completely butchered „Vielen Dank!", Theodore a quietly amused presence by his side, he heard the woman mutter derisively, „Touristen" and Harry's cheeks erupted in flames.
"I never realised prices were so high," Harry said on their way back to Sephoneia's house, his mind still stuck on the way he had made an absolute fool out of himself back in the store.
"I believe they're working on fixing the inflation by the end of this year," Theodore replied.
"How?"
"By introducing a new currency, likely. The Deutsche Mark has been one of the most stable currencies in the past, but even that couldn't last."
"Did something like this ever happen in the magical world?"
"Not really. It fluctuates, but I suspect working on a smaller economic scale and only having actual, physical coins helps a lot. But we would likely face the same issues as the Muggles if the goblins weren't keeping such an extremely tight leash on the value of our money."
"I see."
Once they arrived at the house, they busied themselves sorting away the groceries they had bought into the kitchen of their tent while waiting for the Polyjuice to wear off. Sephoneia's house didn't have any furnished bedrooms nor a kitchen they could use for cooking, so they were still making good use of the tent. (The house did have a functional kitchen. It just wasn't safe to be used for cooking meals.)
Afterwards, Harry went looking for Hermione to update her on the things they had and hadn't found. He found her in the room she had taken over for her personal research, surrounded by scrolls and books, muttering to herself as she scribbled numbers into the margins of her unusually messy notes.
Receiving only an absent thanks and a request to mark things on the list she had given him (which he had thankfully forgotten to discard, crumbled as it was now), Harry decided to better leave her to it and look for something to do elsewhere. Maybe learning some German would be a good idea, as it had become increasingly clear they would stay for quite a while. Perhaps Lynea could help him, for she had at least some basic grasp on the language even if she was nowhere fluent in it. Hermione would have been a good choice, but – well, Hermione was clearly busy.
Learning how to properly utilise magic in its rawest form had opened up doors she had never known had been previously closed to her. If it weren't for Sephoneia's regular lessons and the mandatory meal times that Hermione had set for them, herself – somehow, not a single person in their group was very good at remembering to eat regular meals – Harry was fairly sure Hermione would have long lost herself completely in her enthusiasm to learn as much about the Old Arts as she could.
o
When they finally did begin training in earnest together, Sephoneia didn't even start with the combative magic. She had already had them run laps around the property and do some basic stretching exercises during the three months they had been staying with her and now she increased the difficulty of both, adding parkours for agility and strength training, putting them all together to work as a team. Moe often than not, their task was simply to catch Inpu. Which they had not managed a single time so far, even though the Grim remained in a solid form throughout the chase to make it easier for them.
Simply being proficient at magic wasn't good enough. When it came to life-and-death situations, being quick on your feet and able to use the environment to your advantage could be the deciding factor for your survival.
The laps had been easy enough to manage so far. The stretching took some time to get used to. Stretching before and after training was important, Harry learned – no matter how exhausted you were from the warm-ups and the laps alone. Going through them, Harry thought to himself that the exercises would have been beneficial for Quidditch training, too, and wondered why no one had ever thought of that before.
Between the five of them, only Lynea wasn't absolutely miserably unbendable. Quite the opposite – Lynea was actually ridiculously agile and flexible. Something, she assured him, that came with years and years of regular stretching routines and training under her grand-aunt Naenia.
Harry at least had good stamina to show for himself thanks to playing Quidditch for so long and some talent with both offensive and defensive magic, it turned out – once they did, eventually, begin implementing it in their daily training. (He shouldn't have been surprised, Hermione told him at one point – teaching the DA hadn't been a fluke, after all.)
Ron could somewhat keep up, but Theodore and Hermione struggled a lot and as they were always working as a team, this unbalanced most of the exercises Sephoneia had them run through.
It was becoming increasingly clear just how much longer it would take for them to get anywhere close to even being able to survive any battles at all as a team.
But they were being productive. Harry could see their training yielding results – they weren't all stumbling over each other and getting in each other's way anymore, for one. It helped push down the guilt about being absent from the war.
(Ron still used his free time to listen to the radio, to that one secret station the Order desperately kept alive to keep people updated on what was actually going on. Harry's name kept being mentioned.)
The magic, once it was implemented in their training, started with Sephoneia using it against all of them at once. She didn't give them any instructions on how to fight against her – though the main goal was still to catch Inpu – forcing them to figure it out on their own. But seeing her wield magic so freely at her disposal already gave them plenty of ideas – the sheer variety of elemental magic alone was more than Harry had ever seen used in battle.
Jets of fire, lightning bolts, earthen walls and conjured waves of water turning the entire training field into a muddy mess were just the beginning. Shockwaves, disruptive high-pitched sounds that made you clutch your ears in agony, obscuring fog, blinding darkness – Sephoneia's arsenal of ideas seemed inexhaustible. Not to mention the illusions. And she hadn't even gotten started with necromancy, which was arguably her greatest asset.
Between lessons, Hermione and Theodore worked furiously to catalogue every kind of magic they had seen that day and together, the five of them tried to replicate it so they could attempt to use it against Sephoneia.
From what little Harry had seen of Voldemort's fighting style, he could confidently say the man would never stand a chance against Sephoneia. It raised his hopes of becoming good enough to defeat him before his reign of terror had gone on for too long.
Their teamwork took precedence over everything, but every now and then, Sephoneia had them fight against each other. Not in pairs, no, all of them at once in five-way battles.
"Once Rhea joins us," Lynea told them one day after practice, while they were all trying to regain their breaths, "this is going to be on an entirely different level of difficulty."
"Why?" Ron asked at the same time as Harry said, "Rhea is going to join us?"
Lynea gave Harry an odd look. "Rhea was always planning to visit the Totengräbers after Hogwarts and graduation is just around the corner." She turned to Ron. "She will bring her Inferi with her and knowing her, Rhea will be delighted to throw them into battle against us."
Ron groaned.
"I suppose it will at least give us the opportunity to work as a team against multiple opponents," Hermione said.
"Because Sephoneia isn't already too much for us to handle."
"She has an entire century of experience over us," Theodore said. "It is to be expected."
"Wonder what she's been doing to make her this good at combative magic," Harry muttered.
Ron gave him a look. "I don't think we really want to know that."
o
Rhea arrived in early July with a whirlwind of news.
With the knowledge that Harry would most certainly not defeat Voldemort before the school year was over, she had dedicated a lot of time to convince and instruct her siblings to properly and sincerely take over her work at Hogwarts for her – the convincing had taken more time than the instructing, apparently. With Ginny and Luna already being heavily involved in their entire system, Neville and Zabini hadn't had nearly as much trouble. For his part, Neville was planning to focus on keeping the resistance alive both at Hogwarts and in the Ministry and Azkaban, now that they had figured out what Harry and his friends had done there. Zabini was apparently supporting him from the shadows.
"Took longer to find your precious Order of the Phoenix than putting our own people in place," Rhea told them. "I don't know why Neville bothered. We clearly don't need them."
Lynea rolled her eyes. "Because any help is good to have?"
Rhea shrugged. "If you say so."
"How is Neville doing all of that?" Hermione asked. "Where is he getting the necessary money from? I doubt he has any time to work a normal job."
"Blaise's mother and Neville's grandmother are funding him. Augusta is also the one who helped us find capable people to install with the newspapers. It's slow progress, but we want to make the transition as natural as possible, so the Death Eaters won't catch on. The Dark Lord is too busy with whatever he is currently obsessing over to pay the political scene any attention."
"I'm sorry," Harry said. "What are you talking about?"
"Remember fifth year?" Ron asked. "They dropped all subtlety now."
"Yeah," Rhea agreed cheerfully. "They really, really hate you, Harry. The Daily Prophet especially. Your continued absence is playing right into their cards."
A pang of guilt shot through his chest.
"Well, you've certainly kept yourselves busy," Ron said.
Rhea sighed theatrically. "And all of this just because I killed a pair of Death Eaters and Blaise and Neville decided they could work with that." She shook her head. "So. I heard you were training to fight." An unholy grin spread across her lips. "Care to test yourselves against my darling Inferi?"
AN
Did I misremember JKR saying Dumbledore was around 150? Because 1997-1881 is not 150.