It's time to give the kids a little Hylian exposition (as a treat) and drop some foreshadowing for the readers. I've made another illustration of Hogwarts that I'm pretty proud of, too! I got to show off some of the Phantom sprites I made :)
The eyes watched him as he floated aimlessly through the endless void. Their golden borders glinted with an oily light and the rustling of their small, fleshy wings echoed off of unseen walls.
"I've found the perfect place—my own Sacred Realm. No maidens, no sages, no Hero, no Hyrule. The Goddesses are nothing but forgotten failures in this perfect world. There's even a castle, just for me," a gleeful voice cooed in his ears. It sounded like multiple people speaking at once—a child, an adult, and something strikingly inhuman. "You wield a borrowed sword with no power to its name, little pretender. With my new magic, even the real Hero would have no choice but to bow before me or perish."
Laughter filled the empty darkness.
"No one can stop me! I will be a—!"
"Hey, Green! Guess what?"
Harry jerked awake and scrambled to sit up. In his disorientation, he nearly flung himself from his bed. "Huh? Green? Whassit?"
"I have news!" the jubilant voice declared. A blurry hand came toward Harry's face and pushed his glasses onto his nose. With the sight aids in place, Yellow snapped into focus.
"Oh, it's you. What time is it?" Harry asked with a yawn. He stretched his shoulders, which protested by aching even worse.
"Noon-ish. Lunch will be soon," Yellow replied.
Harry halted mid-stretch and dropped his arms to his sides. "Noon? I slept in that late?" Thanks to Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon waking him to make breakfast every morning, he'd been an early riser for as long as he could remember. Usually, his body woke him up at sunrise and refused to let him go back to sleep.
"Yes, but that's not important because I have news," Yellow huffed. He perched on the edge of Harry's bed. "You know how there was a shield around the castle?" he asked. When Harry nodded, the boy continued, "Well, it moved. Now, instead of stopping at the edge of the grounds, it goes aaall the way to Hogsmeade. You know what that means?"
Harry frowned. "Er, Hogsmeade trips that we can't go on 'cause we blew up our aunt? The Dursleys didn't give us permission to go, remember?"
"Yeah," Yellow sighed. His shoulders slumped dejectedly. "Ron and Hermione can get us stuff, though." The boy perked back up. "Maybe if I grovel to Malfoy, I can get him to buy us things, too. He'd like to see Harry Potter kneel and I'm willing to do it if it gets us treats."
Harry winced at the thought of himself begging in front of Malfoy. Maybe the blond was slightly less of an arse than he'd been a week before, but he was still a pompous, bigoted git. "Urgh, don't do that. He'll start lording over us like we're his servants."
"Oh, right. He has a long way to go before he's all fixed," Yellow said with a sage nod.
"'All fixed'? What do you—?"
"Anyway, lunch is down in the common room again. Do you want me to bring you something? Blue's having me fetch him a plate, since he's too sore to move," Yellow said. He nodded toward a bed on the other side of the room, which contained an undersized thirteen-year-old curled around an oversized book.
"I'll be down in just a bit. Let me get dressed." Harry slid out of bed, gritting his teeth when pain lit up in his thighs and calves, and gingerly knelt down by his trunk.
Yellow hopped to his feet with no apparent difficulty. "I'll make you a plate, just in case," he chirped as he skipped out of the room.
"If he weren't so cute, I'd like to snatch the smile off his face," Blue growled from across the room. "How dare he bounce around like nothing hurts?"
A wry grin twisted Harry's lips. "Hufflepuff is the House of the hardworking and the indestructible, I guess." He shrugged, and then regretted it as his shoulder muscles burned. "If it makes you feel any better, I bet Malfoy's feeling twice as sore as we are. Even if he wasn't swinging a sword, someone as old-money rich as him has to be a total layabout."
"Yeah, I bet." An unsettling satisfied smirk crossed the boy's face.
Harry shivered at the eerie expression Blue wore and busied himself with pulling out a set of worn, comfortable clothes for the day. "So, er, what book is that?" he asked. The tome his clone was currently occupied with was thick and square, and about half a meter across. Its gold-edged pages contrasted against a cover of emerald-green leather. Though Harry wasn't one to spend time in the library, he didn't recall seeing a book like that during any of the times Hermione had dragged him there.
"It's a book of legends and a bestiary," Blue replied. "Professor Dumbledore conveniently found it somewhere and decided to send a copy of it to each House for students to reference." He turned the book around and stood it up to show Harry the illustration he'd been looking at.
"That's a pig-man!" Harry exclaimed.
"It's a 'Moblin', according to the rather patchy translation spell," Blue corrected. "Whatever language this was written in, only about half the characters have any matches in English and only basic words got translated. The text in here is a mishmash of glyphs, Romanized words that make no sense, and some English phrases here and there."
Harry abandoned his quest to get dressed and went over to Blue's bed. He sat down cross-legged beside his counterpart and peered down at the large book with interest. "This must be the language of Hyrule," he said thoughtfully, running his fingers across a line of symbols. The writing was narrow and vertical, composed of straight lines. It rang in his mind as oddly familiar. He thought he might have recognized a few words…but no, that was silly. Harry couldn't read a language invented long before English!
"Hyrule? Where's that?"
"Hmm?" Harry drew his attention from the book to notice Blue giving him a curious look. "It's the kingdom this book is from. Since I found the sword under Hogwarts castle, this place might have been part of Hyrule a long time ago," he said. "Haven't you heard the eyes talking about it in your dreams?"
"They've mentioned how I'm only an empty shell with no element to my name—whatever that means—but nothing about a place called 'Hyrule'," Blue told him. He seemed intrigued. "Do you think being the original Harry grants you a closer connection to all this?" He gestured toward the book.
"You're just as real as I am, Blue," Harry said . "Even if the sword made you, you're a person, too."
"Yes, yes, I know that." Blue flapped a hand dismissively. "It doesn't hurt my feelings at all to call you the original because I can feel you were meant to lead us." He paused, then added, "And you'd better not let that go to your head, because I'm still quite willing to thump you with a book."
Harry rolled his eyes fondly. "Of course."
"What I mean is that you seem to have more of an intuition about these things than we do, possibly because you're the one who pulled out the sword in the first place," Blue said. He flipped to a page in the book that showed four blond, blue-eyed boys in different-colored tunics and pointed caps. One wore green, another wore red, the third wore blue, and the last in line wore violet. Each boy held a golden-hilted sword identical to those of the Harrys, as well as a small shield with a vaguely birdlike crest on it. "Can you read any of this?" Blue asked, pointing to the solid block of untranslated text on the page opposite the image. "Obviously, these boys are related to us in some way, but Harry Potter was never designed for linguistics and I can't even start to translate this gibberish."
Harry made a face. "It's weird enough to refer to ourselves in the plural, mate. Don't bring the third-person into it."
Rolling his eyes, Blue cuffed the back of Harry's head. "Look at the text, you ditz. Can you read it?"
"It's probably a couple millennia old, if not older, Blue. Of course I can't read Hylian."
"I don't care. Look at it." Blue eyes sparkled with mad intensity. "Stare at it."
Harry would rather have faced down one of Snape's sneers than the frightening expression on Blue's face. "Okay, fine!" He obediently hunched over the book and focused on the faded brown lines of Hylian glyphs. The boy knew he couldn't read this lost language any better than his more intelligent counterpart could. Thanks to the Dursleys and the limitations of a magical education, the only tongue he had truly learned was English. As Blue had said, Harry Potter had never been destined to be a linguist, and—
Wait a minute, when had the text popped into English? "I think that faulty translator spell finally did its job," he reported to Blue. "All the words are in English, so you don't need me to read them for you anymore."
Surprised squawking noises in a language he didn't know met his ears. Confused, Harry looked over at Blue.
The sapphire-eyed boy looked like he'd just caught a slap to the face. He spoke in rapid…something-or-other and fluttered his hands in excited gestures. When he noticed Harry paying attention, he spouted gibberish that sounded like a question.
"Are you alright? You're speaking nonsense," Harry said with a concerned frown. Maybe the book was cursed to make its readers start talking in tongues. If so, Harry would soon be next. He hoped the curse wore off before the next day; he didn't fancy sitting through Transfiguration while unable to answer Professor McGonagall in anything resembling English.
Blue said something else, cocking his head to one side.
"I can't understand you," Harry said loudly and slowly. "You aren't speaking—ow!" He yelped when Blue unexpectedly whipped out a small paperback and smacked him on the nose with it. "Why did you hit me this time?" he demanded.
"Because you got stuck on the wrong language setting and I was putting you right," the other boy sniffed. "You looked at the text, and when you looked up, you started speaking in what I assume was Hylian. Either that, or the book put a Babbling Curse on you."
"That was Hylian? But it sounded like English to me," Harry said in surprise. "I thought you were the one who got cursed." He glanced at the book and was unnerved to see the text flicker between glyphs and English. "Ooh, this is sword-magic again, isn't it? I'm not sure if I like this." The thought of a magical artifact affecting his thinking still brought up painful memories of Riddle's diary. He imagined it would take a long time before those recollections lost their potency.
"If you start strangling roosters and painting messages on the walls in chicken blood, I promise to have Red knock you unconscious and drag you to Professor Dumbledore," Blue said with mocking solemnity.
Harry grinned, despite his lingering unease, and bumped the boy's shoulder with his own. "Glad to know you care."
"If you were gone, I'd have one less person to tease," Blue said with an amused smirk. "Now, why don't we put your curse-knowledge to good use and do some research? I'm sure you can manage a few hours' worth of brainpower."
"It's Sunday, though," Harry whined. Hermione was the one who did research on weekends!
Blue raised an eyebrow. "Unless you intend to go out and fight monsters while your arms feel ready to fall off, I doubt you have much planned."
The boy had a point. Harry's body hurt too much to do anything other than sit, lounge, and do a little walking. At some point, he would definitely have to put together an exercise regimen for him and the other Harrys to follow—and maybe Ron and Hermione, as well.
"Fine, I'll help you," Harry sighed in defeat. "Ravenclaw."
"You could stand to indulge your inner Raven once in a while, and this is the perfect opportunity. Let's start with the first line…"
"…he was originally a what, now?" Malfoy pinched the bridge of his nose.
"A Picori. This little, er, fairy thing? The book didn't say much about them. Anyway, he was a Picori—or a Minish?—and he used a wishing hat and a 'golden power' to become a god. That's how he turned into an eyeball. He got sealed away, and then he escaped a while later and kidnapped a bunch of girls for some reason. After the girls used their powers to seal him back in, he broke out a while later and kidnapped the princess of Hyrule. Then he was stopped by the Hero for the third time and banished by the Princess. Vaati escaped again when I accidentally yanked out the sword. It's actually a good thing I pulled out the sword, though, because he would have broken it anyway and it's probably needed to seal him back up again," Harry concluded. "That's my report. Did you get all that?"
"To be honest, no." Malfoy rubbed his temples. "I just had History of Magic, Madam Pomfrey refuses to treat me for muscle pains, and I have a pounding headache after Pansy had me help her pick out a scent this morning. She only ever wears musk, so it feels like a whole garden crawled up my nose. Ugh."
The boy's blunt honesty caught Harry by surprise. Malfoy never seemed like a normal human being with normal human problems. Harry was accustomed to the aristocrat acting like a spoiled prince whose worries could all be solved by a letter to his all-powerful father, not like an actual thirteen-year-old boy. This new behavior was as bizarre as Dudley offering to help with the dishes.
"The short of it is that the creepy, flying eyeball has a long history, just like my sword and all the beasties around Hogwarts," Harry said, deciding to take pity on Malfoy. Monday mornings were always the worst, and they were doubly terrible when one was still suffering from the aches and pains of an adventure. "His name is Vaati the Wind Mage, he wants to be all-powerful, and he's learned a new kind of magic that's apparently super strong. If he takes over the world, that would be bad."
"I'm tired, not a simpleton, Potter," Malfoy snapped. "Just tell me what needs to be done to stop the bloody windbag."
"Usually, the Chosen Hero would have to gather up Princess Zelda and six other Sacred Maidens to seal Vaati away…" Harry began. He bounced anxiously on the balls of his feet and bit his lower lip. "…but, um, I don't think there are any of those people around anymore. They're supposed to reincarnate, but if there were a real Hero of Hyrule around, I wouldn't have been the one to pick up the sword. Vaati said—he, er, talks to me in my dreams sometimes—that they're all dead, and I'm kind of just assuming he's right because it's not like I know what a Sacred Maiden is." He shrugged. "If he's telling the truth, either something happened to break the cycle or the process skips a few generations. I'm technically a Hero because I've got the magic sword, but not the Hero because I'm not blond and named Link, there probably aren't any sacred maidens or a Hylian princess, and there's a mad eyeball bent on achieving godhood roosting somewhere in Great Britain. Assuming he hasn't flown to another part of the world, anyway."
Malfoy looked like he wanted to throw something through a window—possibly Harry. "Wonderful," the boy said through gritted teeth. "Any ideas on how to stop this nonsense without a gaggle of random girls or the princess of a nonexistent country being involved?"
"Er, we go through caves like the one we just escaped, find all the House-colored crystals, and break all the electrified eyes?"
The blond stared at him flatly before turning toward the door. "It's too early in the bloody week for this," he grumbled. "Stupid windbag eyeball. Why didn't anyone just kill the damn thing? Bloody idiots…" Malfoy's irritated muttering faded as the boy stalked out of the room and down the hall.
"That went well," Harry sighed. He hadn't expected Malfoy to be pleased, though he was glad the boy hadn't had a tantrum after hearing how impossible the situation was. Harry himself was tempted to throw a fit, but years of Dursley conditioning kept him as behaved and mild-mannered as usual.
"He'll be with us on our next adventure; I'm positive." Yellow appeared in the corner, stuffing his Invisibility Cloak into his schoolbag.
"What makes you so sure?" Harry asked. "He's almost as scrawny as we are. Hardly the adventuring sort."
"He got tangled up in our last quest, didn't he?" Yellow grinned cheekily. "As rich as he is, Malfoy's luck isn't much better than ours. He'll be there when we need him, whether he wants to be or not."
Across the castle, an inter-House group of second-years was using the break between classes to explore one of the new areas that had appeared within the castle. Four young students crept along a fourth-floor corridor that hadn't existed before the previous Saturday, their eyes peeled for any patrolling monsters. The last thing they wanted was for a Phantom or a Floormaster to pop out of nowhere and teleport them all the way back to the Entrance Hall.
A five-note chime caught the ears of the group's leader, a tall and powerfully-built Slytherin. "Wizzrobes!" she barked in warning. "Get ready to dodge!" As she said this, a human-sized, toucan-like creature clad in a yellow robe appeared in front of her. "No summoning for you! Incendio! Incendio!" she shouted, firing off a two rapid spells. They hit the Wizzrobe in the middle of its spellcasting, causing it to warp away with a pained yelp.
There was a "whoosh" and a giggle as another Wizzrobe managed to complete its spell, then a piercing scream from the Hufflepuff who'd caught an ice-boomerang to the gut.
"Davy!" his Ravenclaw sister cried in dismay.
"Don't get distracted, Cindy!" the Slytherin ordered. She turned her head constantly, spinning in slow circles until the next five-note chime sounded. The yellow-clad Wizzrobe she'd hit appeared a few meters off, and she shot two fire spells as quickly as her reflexes would allow. The birds would summon swarms of Keese—sometimes flaming Keese—if left to their own devices.
Whoosh!
The Slytherin fell into a roll at the sound. When she glanced over, she saw three fireballs hit where she'd been standing. "Lovegood, stop sitting there and start shooting!" she yelled in frustration at the blonde who'd crouched next to the downed Hufflepuff.
"Okay," the girl said with a shrug. When the teal-robed fire Wizzrobe next appeared, she sent an obscure transfiguration spell at it that caused its wand to become a large, limp pasta noodle. The creature stared at the noodle uncomprehendingly and then vanished with a wail of defeat.
The Slytherin cackled. "Nice work, Lovegood!" She ducked an ice boomerang and then fired another set of Incendios at the yellow Wizzrobe she could see readying its next spell. The bird disappeared with a haunting cry of its own, leaving one Wizzrobe left.
Cindy was the closest to it this time, and she was ready to get revenge for her poor twin. "Expelliarmus! Incendio! Incendio! Flipendo!" she rattled off. The Wizzrobe's wand went flipping out of its hand just before the turquoise-robed toucan was slammed into the wall under the force of her spells. It quickly shook them off, but upon noticing its wand gone, the creature caterwauled and vanished in a puff of dark smoke. A red, triangular crystal appeared in its wake and clattered to the ground.
With the Wizzrobes defeated, a treasure chest faded into existence in the middle of the corridor. The students gaped at it, having never before seen one in real life. They hadn't expected such a reward; no one else who'd gotten mobbed by monsters had received anything but a Hospital Wing visit from it.
"Oh! The game gave us a prize," Luna Lovegood said with a soft smile on her face. She walked over to the treasure chest and opened it. "Knowledge!" she said delightedly as she pulled out the scroll within. "What a lovely gift." When she pulled it open, everyone went still.
"Draco, you need to wake up."
The boy blinked blearily. "Floormasters in the dorm again?" he asked.
"Not right now. No, it's something else."
Draco groaned and sat up. "What is it?" He rubbed his eyes and squinted at…Millicent Bulstrode? "Since when did you come into the boys' dorms? I thought your parents forbade it."
"It's about my sister, Draco," Millicent said with deadly seriousness. "Something weird happened to her."
"'Weird' how?" Draco's interest had now been piqued. He drew himself up straight, as if he hadn't been shaken out of a dead sleep seconds before, and regarded the girl with curiosity. "Was she cursed?"
"According to her, she and her 'adventure team' found a scroll after beating a trio of those magic toucans—"
"Wizzrobes."
"Stupid name, but yes, those things. They defeated them, and then a treasure chest appeared in the corridor. It had a scroll inside it, and when they opened that…well, she said it 'shoved knowledge' into their heads, and then they could all cast a new spell."
"A scroll did that, you say?" Draco had to fight to keep an expression of excited recognition off his face. So there were more of these instant-learning scrolls! Sure, a new spell wasn't quite as big as being able to conjure up a magical object with a wave of one's hand, but it could still be useful. "What spell did they learn?"
"You know how the some of those Wizzrobe things spin their wands around and then send fireballs at you? That's the one they learned." She shuddered. "It's positively spooky to see Amanda cast it. She does it just like they do, with a wand-twirl and no incantation."
"Brilliant," Draco breathed. His mind whirled, calling up all sorts of scenarios. He wasn't one for adventures, but any Slytherin could appreciate power, and that was what these scrolls were for. If he came home over Yule break with the ability to conjure powerful artifacts on a whim and cast ancient, wordless spells, his father would be absolutely chuffed!
"Brilliant? My sister got cursed by a scroll and now has monster-magic!" Millicent cried. "This isn't a thing to be happy about!"
Draco smirked slyly and called up his fire-lamp. He had to suppress a laugh at the bug-eyed look on Millicent's face. "I think you'll find that it is, Millie." He held up the lantern to show her the flames dancing within. "Now, how do you feel about going on an adventure?"
Um, I hate to beg for engagement, but please review? It could be something as little as "yup, I read this" or "you desperately need a Britpicker." I'm new to posting fic and hearing from the people I'm posting to would let me know whether I'm doing this right.