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Act IV - Skin In The Game
Chapter 14: Morty
Surprisingly perhaps, things didn't degrade down to open chaos after Albus Dumbledore left Harry Potter in the Flamel Mansion.
Despite the poisonous aura that Perenelle Flamel gave off, it soon became clear that she had no intention of hurting him. Perhaps manipulating and using him horribly in all kinds of schemes, but he wasn't in any danger of being quartered like a pig for dinner. Instead, she was genuinely interested in conversing over a wide range of topics β Transfiguration, Charms, symbology, runecraft, Emotive magic and contagion, and so on.
Harry actually realised that the debates had become rather enjoyable. He had no doubt that Perenelle Flamel knew about his position as Warden of the Sunken Vault, and did little to pry into his source of knowledge. That didn't, however, stop her from trying to check exactly how deep his knowledge went in certain areas, and Harry chose to safely stay within acceptable limits. Enough to tease the possibility of something further, but not enough to suggest anything strong.
But dear Merlin! Perenelle Flamel knew a lot!
Even with the sheer variety of topics he now knew about thanks to the Vault, Harry was barely able to hold his own.
It made him feel like a fool for never having done this in the past. He had Albus Dumbledore as Headmaster, one of the most learned wizards in recent history, and someone that he could reasonably trust to protect his back. Yet, despite his status as the Defence professor, he had done little to harness that resource and truly engage the brilliant Headmaster in conversation over magical theory.
Still, he was no fool, and while he might have guessed some of the Flamels' motivations, Perenelle Flamel was hardly an open book. His instincts were telling him that there was more than one significant reason why the Flamels and Apolline Delacour wanted him here in France for this meeting. The same instincts told him that the timing was hardly chosen at random, though whether it was because of his impending engagement with Daphne or something else was anybody's guess.
"And finally, this is our vaunted Library," said Perenelle, after a most appetising lunch. "Rumour has it that it contains copies of tomes from the fabled Library of Alexandria before it burned down."
"Rumour?" asked Harry, arching an eyebrow.
"Me and my husband have been walking this earth for the last six hundred years, Harry," said the woman with an eerie, knowing smile. "You will find that having one's enemies suspect you of having something is often far greater an armour than them knowing it as a fact. The rumours surrounding the Flamel Library and my husband's greatest creation have lured many inquisitive minds across the world to our doorstep over the centuries, and several of them have brought senseless violence with them."
The extreme despair emanating from the wards the moment he had stepped in flickered across his mind.
So that's why it felt so familiar.
"I imagine a trip to the Chamber of Secrets with you was Nicholas's idea of a date."
Perenelle's smile widened. "It was lovely, indeed. However, did you guess?"
Because the wards surrounding the Flamel Mansion held an eerie similarity with the one in the Chamber's Mausoleum.
"Lucky guess."
"Must be," said Perenelle, playing along. "Might I offer you some advice, Harry Potter? As young as you might be now, there is no doubt you shall influence and shape the events of the world at large. A formidable reputation is often a far greater weapon than magical strength. You would be wise to remember that."
"Like being a mass murderer that steals your magic?"
As much as he hated to admit it, his notoriety and the trial had paved the way for everything he was now. Had things turned out differently and he had escaped with the knowledge of Voldemort's resurrection, he was sure he'd have been painted as an attention-seeking brat wanting to cash on past glories. Not that he hadn't been painted like that, but at least with the murder charges and his unique and dangerous brand of magic, he was treated less like a delusional brat to be castigated by the press, and more like a dangerous wizard to mess with at one's own peril.
"Yes," said the grinning woman. "See? You already got me. Sheep fear wolves, and it is appropriate that they do so."
She held the gate open, offering him entrance. "I understand that the Warden of the Sunken Vault might find our haven slightly less impressive. Nevertheless, I should warn you that should you attempt to steal a book, the wards will sense it, and you'll be dead before you put a foot out of this gate."
Harry blinked. "What if I just forgot and was in a hurry? Any fines I should be worried about? Maiming perhaps?"
Her lips twisted in amusement.
The Flamel Library, at first look, was smaller, much smaller than the Hogwarts library. It wasn't even worth comparing with the vastness of the contents inside the Sunken Vault. Instead it was very particular, focussed, meticulously arranged and gathered. No doubt the Flamels knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. Some of the titles he had come across in the Sunken Vault, no doubt Nicholas must have transcribed them much like he had done for the books on Blood curses for Daphne.
Really, the more he perused through the titles as he idly loitered past the shelves, the more he drew parallels between this one and the Black Library at Grimmauld Place β a goddamn storehouse of all things dark, accursed and shrouded in mystery and the darkest of magics deciphered and crafted by dark wizards since time immemorial.
The thought made him grimace. He had utterly lacked the intention to explore the Black Library during the entire summer, focussing on developing his spell repertoire and working on his crippled magic. But after spending days and weeks inside the Sunken Vault, he had gained a frightening degree of appreciation for the Abstract.
An appreciation that would make Daphne Greengrass shudder.
There were days when he wondered if Daphne ever suspected anything. To her knowledge, most of his time in the Vault had been with her, researching blood curses and the like. Knowing her, she probably explained his knowledge of the Abstract with his private studies as a DOM joinee.
A small smile formed on his face. Sometimes he felt a little guilty. He had been so close to revealing the Lair's greatest secrets. Hell, he had even spoken it aloud. Too bad his fiance hadn't quite put it together.
When Ananta-Shesha uncoils, time moves forward, and creation takes place. And when it coils back, creation ceases to exist.
Linguistics, combinatorics, logic, cryptology, hieroglyphics, magical and muggle⦠Really, one would almost believe that the Flamels were focussed less on alchemy and more on hiding something. A secret so devastatingly horrible that none of the existing safety nets would work. Cryptology was an ancient and well-established field, and yet from the bizarre collection the library boasted, Harry intuited that the Flamels wanted to defy all existing conventions and instead, use the underlying principles to create something unprecedented.
"Just what are you hiding, Flamel?" He muttered idly in Parseltongue.
"Something far greater than the Philosopher's Stone, no doubt."
The silence that invaded the room was broken into a million pieces by the sound of his staggered footsteps but Harry was sure his own heart was pounding far louder than that. Anxiety ran through his veins faster than light but slower than the pace of his thoughts, for the shock that froze his body was nothing compared to the fear that clouded his mind.
But before his undiluted panic could control his actions, he felt the buzzing inside his pocket, and wanted to confirm the situation he had found himself in. Drawing his magic out, he quickly scrawled out runes in mid-air with the tip of his forefinger, casting the most potent privacy ward he could think of.
Another little half-truth he had said to his fiancee. Andi had taught him a lot of things, but Runecraft, especially one of this degree, was simply beyond her. Hell, Fleur would've thrown a fit if she ever saw her do this.
It was only then that he let himself remember the voice he had just heard. The cold, sleek voice that belonged to one man on Earth, and he wasn't sure if 'man' was a good description for him anymore.
Morty the snitch buzzed into the air, flying out of his pocket, lingering right next to his ear. Harry eerily felt like the twelve-year-old writing an old muggle diary for the first time, only to see it write back.
Dumbledore had claimed that exposure to extreme Dunamancy had erased the horcrux's personality. That while the knowledge was still there, the existing personality should be akin to a baby, innocent and utterly unaware of what kind of effect that knowledge could have on the actual world.
He really should've known that even Albus Dumbledore didn't get every guess right.
"So," said Harry warily. "You respond to Parseltongue."
"Obviously dipshit!" hissed Morty, which was really awesome given it didn't even have a tongue to do that. "I remember much of what I learned, yet not who I am. The lemon drop sucking fossil fucked things up when he bound me to this little ball."
The jab at Albus Dumbledore made him chuckle.
"Technically, you did that to yourself," said Harry.
"Did I, now?" mused Morty distastefully. "Must've been piss-drunk at four in the morning on a Tuesday night. A right sneeze could shatter these enchantments."
Harry stifled a chuckle, and mentally noted to look into the snitch's schematic later when he was back within the confines of the Vault.
"I sense a deep serenity quelling within. I am guessing it's a long-term stasis charm. Obviously my maker wanted me to wait for a long period of time to fulfil a goal. Could you ask the buffoon that bound me to just leave me where I was?"
"What's your problem?"
"You, obviously," drawled Morty. "Do you even know what the word stasis means? It means nothing is happening. You standing there, gawking with your ugly pug face, and making me follow you around buggers that up entirely, the way you novices do. So can I ask you to⦠what was the phrase? Ah, yes. Piss off?"
He blinked. "Uh β"
"Did you hear me? Piss off."
Harry debated taking him literally, just to be a wiseass, but decided that body humour was beneath his dignity. And honestly, he'd rather just destroy it, but the real Voldemort had at least fifty years of advantage over him, and he too had enjoyed his time at the Sunken Vault. And that was ignoring all the other players on the field that wanted a piece of him.
"Look," said Harry. "Like it or not, we're stuck together. So either you can stop being a wiseass, or I can just shatter this snitch and let you free for good."
"It was just a suggestion, you insipid little ball of sphincter puss," growled Morty. "Shattering this device will destroy me, but you already know that."
Harry didn't, in fact, he was expecting the reverse. Not that he was going to tell Morty that.
"Do you know who I am?"
Morty's reply was lazy, as if the question wasn't even worth any thought. "Why, are you worth knowing?"
Well, if a person defeated me, killed me twice, and escaped my resurrection, I'd probably remember their name, thought Harry with a roll of his eye. But much like the Riddle from the Diary, Morty seemed unaware of Harry's existence, which was doubly confounding since he had actually faced Harry and fought him before the Dunamancy got him for good.
Maybe Dumbledore had been partly right after all.
"This form is irregular. My memories from before this binding are damaged. I couldn't give you a real answer to many questions about my own existence, much less yours."
That was both exciting and dangerous. Riddle's Diary was enchanted to enthral the user to write it, and writing leeched off their magic into the diary. That was what Riddle had done to Ginny. But so long as no one was writing in it, or even opened it, it was powerless to do anything. The diadem-horcrux could draw on the Diadem's power and exercise limited Dunamancy. Now without the power and trapped in an otherwise ordinary snitch, Morty lacked any secondary powers to draw upon.
Which admittedly, did little to improve his winning personality.
"How about this?" offered Harry. "You help me with knowledge, and I'll keep you safe."
The snitch grumbled for two entire seconds.
"Blasted wizard!" muttered Morty. "Fine. you've got a deal."
"Also, everything that you come to know stays between you and me."
"Entirely confidential, check," said Morty. "And it would take a whole lot more than one day working for you to get there. I have to actually learn useful things first."
"Less insult, more analysis," growled Harry, and took down the privacy ward.
The snitch buzzed loudly, and began following him around silently. Harry made a note to ask Fleur to build him a snitch-sized version of the Tomb ward with unbreakable and other protective enchantments, just in case.
Sirius often said that a good hit-wizard always knew what weapon to use in the fight. Choose the wrong spell, no matter how powerful, and you'd end up losing a winning battle.
Harry knew that in this upcoming meet with Nicholas Flamel and Apoline Delacour, it wasn't the number of spells he knew or his agility or even his Death powers that would do it.
It would be the presence of a clear, concise, and artfully wielded intellect that would be his best weapon. Dumbledore used his sharp and expansive intelligence in a way that was disarming and inexplicably dangerous. He would be foolish to be caught unaware between the Flamels and Delacour with half-contrived thoughts and beliefs.
It was sometime past afternoon when the Immortal Alchemist turned in. Between everything he had heard about the man, both from Flamel himself, from Dumbledore's warnings, and from his exposure to Perenelle, Harry was quite intrigued about the kind of response he would get from the man this time around. He'd had expected the man to perhaps sit down with him in the Library. Perhaps open the discussion between two Wardens, or two fellow travellers with deep insight in the nature of the Anima. Some part of him had even conjured a cartoonish villainous caricature of Nicholas Flamel straight out of a children's story book.
He had not expected him to invite him directly to his laboratory.
It was an immaculately study β ancient books lined the wall and one or two luxuriously decorated arm chairs accented the room. Folders of recently written parchment sat in age-old bookshelves, their titles too small for Harry to read. Chains of cauldrons of gold, pewter, adamantium and even mithril were on display, connected to alchemical setups vast and complex beyond his comprehension. Heavy wooden rafters loomed over as though spirit guardians, hinting at the solidarity and steadfastness of the place he now sat in.
It was exquisite.
"You must be wondering why I asked you to meet me here, in France," saidNicholas, sitting on a chair, hands steepled and expression amused.
"The thought did cross my mind," said Harry softly.
"People who know me, know that I dislike surprises. It would be better to say that I abhor them. A surprise means that my calculations have some margin of error in them, and I like things to stay precisely like I intend them to be."
"So you're a control freak," said Harry's mouth without consulting with the rest of him.
"I like control over many things in life, yes," said the man. "And you, Harry Potter, have been nothing short of a bag of surprises. The last time we met, I had already heard many things about you. Boy-Who-Lived. Survivor of the killing curse, twice, unless I'm wrong. Killer of Salazar's basilisk. Parselmouth. And most fascinating above all, Peverell Vessel. You were an object of undetermined value and extreme potential. But I certainly did not expect you to turn out the way you have."
"Warden of the Sunken Vault," said Harry.
"That, among others, yes."
For a moment, Harry wondered if Flamel had come to know about his latest expedition into the Prison of Possibilities, but quickly discarded the idea. There were only four people in the world, five including a certain ghost, that knew of what transpired within the Prison, and two of them were hospitalised. Baron Wystan Potter was unlikely to share the information, and Harry's powers of Death would just disintegrate any legilimency. So unless the Alchemist was someone capable of penetrating Albus Dumbledore's mind without the latter knowing about it, chances of that information getting out was impossible.
"To be honest, even I myself was surprised with how quickly you've made global waves," Flamel went on, oblivious to Harry's worries. "Your accomplishments, and your unique brand of thaumaturgy have become quite the talk, even at the ICW stage, as I'm certain you know."
Harry arched an eyebrow. "Really? First time I'm hearing of this."
The smile on the man's face widened. "I suppose Brian has decided to keep you out of the riff raff until things settle down. Ever since the news of Britain's newest Warlock and the return of House Peverell made the news, there has been madness on the loose. There have been countless requests for your unique services, but I suppose the Supreme Mugwump and the British Department of Mysteries are still in the process of listing what is most valuable."
Meaning, any and all form of normalcy was going to vanish faster than it took him to blink.
"Nothing new, then."
Nicholas laughed. "Keep that spirit, dear boy. It will help you survive in the days that follow. As it stands, I believe you already know of Campus Magico taking part in the Inter-School Exchange programme, given how much credit the Spanish Minister is intent on throwing your way. I believe about eight other schools all across Europe and Africa have desired that you host lectures on your unique brand of thaumaturgy, but it's clearly a loosely defined ploy to influence you into joining their school faculty."
Wonderful, thought Harry. Daphne's going to be thrilled.
"The Egyptian Shaman Council has already offered a formal resource-sharing contact to the Department of Mysteries, which means you, if I wasn't clear. The Haitian voodoo practitioners want to invite you for the Iwa Damballa annual rites. I believe you will soon receive an engraved invitation from the Necromancers' Guild for a Mastery programmeβ"
Harry choked at that.
" β And of course, there is that hilarious demonstration from the Malaysian government. The fools of the Malay Bomoh Court have filed a petition to the ICW claiming you to the Incarnate of the End, and demanded your immediate execution."
He winked.
Harry blinked, unsure if the man was making a joke. Still, he could relate to it a little. Being celebrated as a hero one week and vilified the next did wonders for your faith in the fickleness of the population.
"Quite naturally," said Nicholas. "I too wish to offer you a formal contract. As a former Warden of the Vault, I believe both of us share some unique commonalities. I simply wanted to grab you before the others got to you."
His approach sounded almost genuine. If not for the poisonous lady that was his spouse, Harry could've almost believed his interests to be benign and academic.
Almost.
"What do you want, sir?" Harry asked.
"Research for research," said Nicholas. "And it's Nicholas. As I'm sure everyone can attest to, the number of people that have stepped into my laboratory are very, very few. Then again, you are special. But I understand that you have met my wife, and are bound to be sceptical, so⦠consider this a downpayment."
A sealed beaker materialised on the table next to them. Inside it was a thick, gelatinous liquid of an intense jade colour. Harry didn't know if he was merely surprised or if he acted out of sheer instinct, but his eyes morphed into putrid yellowβ¦
β And like a gunshot going off, he jerked back so much that he nearly fell off the chair. Arms whirling, he barely managed to avoid tipping over and regained his balance only to immediately glance at the impossibility sitting inconspicuously on the table next to the damned Alchemist.
Light, so much light filled his eyes that it felt like someone had stolen the sun and put it inside that beaker. For several seconds, all Harry could see was a dark static, his eyes and brain trying their best to cope up from the sudden stimuli influx before he managed to focus again.
Just a fraction of that would have been enough to utterly demolish a freaking house the size of Black Manor. That tiny beaker contained more magical power than Harry himself could pump out in an entire week, and he could pull off some truly spectacular things.
Working with magic was a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You could approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You could get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There was no truly right or wrong way to get there, eitherβthere are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And as new vistas of thought, theory, and application opened up on a pretty regular basis, a magical discipline opened up, and expanded through the participation of multiple brilliant minds.
But that said, once you had a good grounding in it, you got a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you did with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. Magic wasn't something that just made things happen, poof. There were laws to how it behaved, structure, limitsβand the whole reason Standard Magic was created using Arithmancy was so that those limits could be explored, tested, and charted.
It simply wasn't possible to cram that much power in one tiny place, liquid or otherwise, without it affecting Reality around it. And yet, the jade liquid did exactly that.
"Wha β what is that?" Harry gasped.
"The first half of the trick," said a smiling Nicholas Flamel, who stood up, and almost carelessly, dipped a finger into the potent liquid. As if triggered by his skin, or rather, his magic, the liquid churned around his finger, spinning, congealing, becoming thicker until it resembled less liquid and more of a thick, elastic tendril. Even the colour was slowly morphing from the intense jade to a bright yellow and darkening until it was an almost dusky orange and finally, as it settled in the middle of his palm, now shaped into a badly shaped uncut crystal, it was emanating an intense, crimson radiance.
"This, Harry Potter," said Nicholas, offering his palm with the tiny, impossibly powerful object sitting on it, "is a Philosopher's stone."
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