Harry bolted upright.
His racing heart slowly calmed. Harry checked the time. It was too early to get up. But his sheets and pillow were drenched in sweat. He rubbed his eyes and tried to get the image of limbs strewn across the ground out of his mind.
Harry flipped over the pillow, dried his sheets with a wandless spell, and laid back down. But he was no longer tired. He dragged himself out of bed and showered, then padded to the kitchen to make himself hot chocolate.
Arya was already up. Harry brought her a drink too and sat by the hearth. She'd also gotten clean. "Do you ever sleep?"
"Elves do not need much, and can go longer between." Arya accepted the mug. "What woke you? I thought you'd be exhausted."
"Nightmares," Harry said shortly.
He palmed his glasses onto his face. Arya did not look good. "We can't afford to run and climb and jump anymore. You're going to need another dose soon and we have, what–" Harry cast his mind back to his memories of the map of Alagaesia. "Twice as long to go? More? How far in is the place you want to get to?"
"Far." Arya rubbed her forehead. "You're right. But you can hardly carry me, and we must take the rougher paths out of necessity, so that we are not discovered. You cannot simply magic up a carriage for the horses to pull."
Harry rubbed his eyes. If only he had a plane. And knew how to fly it. And that Alagaesia had runways all over the place. Maybe a helicopter? Flying carpets didn't seem very secure for going much faster than an automobile, if that. Even 60mph wind was uncomfortable and pushed him around on his broomstick, where he had hand and footholds to brace himself.
Could he hitch some kind of swing to his broom and fly? Harry discarded the idea. The weight would be unstable when hooked to such a small area, like simply dangling a rope. And it would swing every time he adjusted speed or direction, magnifying the inertia and drag he had to overcome to maneuver. And of course, there was no guarantee nobody was watching the sky. Only one of them could wear the Cloak, and the disillusionment charm was clearly not enough to fool Durza's senses, nor from enemy magicians' minds.
"How far in do we have to go before the Empire's rangers are gone and it's just elves?"
"We've already passed that point," Arya said.
He frowned. "Then why not just ask them for an escort?"
Arya hesitated. "Trust that it would be better if nobody knew until we reached Ellesmera. It is…complicated."
Harry accepted that. "How long will you last before you need another dose?"
Arya's gaze unfocused for a moment. "Not longer than five to seven days," she decided. "Without any additional exertion."
It really would help if Arya could just stay inside the tent while it was collapsed. But until he was sure it was safe, Harry did not want to risk horrible complications he had nowhere near the healing expertise to fix. It would also be nice to know how Hermione had managed to apparate them both to Godric's Hollow when to the best of Harry's knowledge, neither of them had ever been there. Maybe it only worked because he'd been there as a baby?
He wanted answers of a magical nature which meant he should be asking Morgan, but that was a secret he had no intention of revealing to anyone.
The other problem was that Harry had no idea where he was going. If he didn't have magic to guide him, he had no doubt he'd be lost the instant Arya stopped guiding him. Last night she'd literally guided him step-by-step.
Harry fished for more information as ideas percolated in his mind, considering the tools in his magical arsenal and the requirements of any solution.
"Are the horses too big for this?"
"Not by themselves. They would be awkward to get past some places, though they may be necessary. Wagons will not work; wheels necessitate paths which are all watched."
"What's the forest like further in? Lots of undergrowth and low branches?"
Arya shook her head. "Not at all. The oldest and greatest of our trees are so large their canopies capture all the sunlight that falls upon them. There is some undergrowth, but towards the center of Du Weldenvarden, you might imagine a leafy cathedral. Enormous wooden pillars supporting a leafy roof."
"So we wander through the wilderness?"
"Carefully. There are plenty of elves who live in the solitude of the deep wilds. Du Weldenvarden is vast, but elves are perceptive."
Ideas coalesced. A cartoon he'd half seen over Dudley's shoulder amidst disdainful sniffs about 'magic potions' and 'talking llamas.' Maybe a way to use his longstride boots instead of having to enchant the horseshoes.
Harry regretted not having this discussion while they had time to kill on the boat. Wasted time always gets its revenge.
"I have an idea," Harry announced. Arya listened to him explain it with a very doubtful expression. When he was done laying out his plan, Arya nodded.
Harry was taken aback. "Just like that?"
She looked at him. "Magic with no price makes for many odd inventions." Harry grinned; she had no idea how right she was. "It costs us an hour or two for you to try, and I do think it may work. I have no business telling you what your magic can and can't do."
It wasn't long before Harry had his contraption built and enchanted. Really, it was more of a kite than a box. He'd made it not just weightless but a bit buoyant, so he could drag it along with a rope and sprint unimpeded beneath it.
Arya climbed into the chair in the box. Harry tested it out cautiously at first, pulling it along slowly and verifying that the charms would hold her weight. Then faster, he jogged with the tether. A problem quickly arose; the box did not stay facing forwards when he ran with it. It started to turn in the air, spinning Arya around and forcing her to grip the chair to keep from being flung out.
The solution to that problem was something already on Harry's mind. Arya examined his modifications to the box.
"Like arrow fletching?" a pair of wooden wings jutted out just a bit from each side, as well as a rudder on the top. It looked a little wonky, but it didn't have to be perfect.
"Like a plane," Harry agreed. He didn't know any of the reasons behind why wings were shaped the way they were, nor was he sure he'd done his wings right. And when he tested the box again, the open front threw off the way it should have flown.
"The wind is getting caught inside the box," Arya observed.
Harry tweaked the shape again, adding a sort of windshield out of plastic shaped to a point, and switching the entrance to a hatch in the back Arya could clamber over the chair to get in through.
The problem then was that the plane was too stout from tip to tail even with the wings and nose cone, so Harry added a bit of length to the midsection and shaped the wings to be swept back along the whole length like a fighter jet.
The end product Harry arrived with was in all but name, an airplane. And it worked.
Experimentally, Harry sprinted with the tether and dragged the tube along. His enchanted boots boosted each stride as if he were running along trampolines, pushing him along while sapping very little effort from his legs. It was an odd sensation, almost as if he were wearing pants that ran for him, and his legs were just passengers.
The final piece of the puzzle slotted into place right after. There was nowhere to fix the tether to the craft that didn't end up dragging it down towards the ground. As long as he was below it, he could not fix it to the nose or it would drag the craft's nose down and then the wings would drive it into the ground. And there wasn't a great height for it either. The canopies were too low for him to pull it any higher than directly behind him, and if he had the tether played out far enough for Arya to fly over the treetops, then the cable would get caught in all the branches.
There was surely some sort of spell to make the tether ethereal and pass through the stuff in its way, but Harry did not know that spell, he wasn't willing to call Morgan to ask about it in front of Arya, and he had a better solution in mind.
"Where did you get the idea for this?" Arya asked, while Harry tied the tether to the last part of the equation. She walked around the glider, intrigued by the shape of the swept wings. "Do rockets look like this?"
Harry yanked the last knot tight. "Rockets look like big towers with pointy roofs. They don't have wings – well, the space shuttles did, but those were retired. Imagine a gigantic arrow the size of a castle tower, with a hollow metal skin. Their wings are more like the tail fins of an arrow or dart. Almost the entire inside of these gigantic towers are full of fuel. I think the space shuttles had a sort of putty inside them for fuel, but the new ones are full of liquid fuel."
He struggled to grasp an analogy Arya would have the frame of reference to understand. "Do you guys have oil lamps?" Harry asked. "Like that. Except the oil is a fuel that burns extremely fast and hot. They light it up and shoot it out the bottom of the rocket, like riding a giant, drawn out explosion into space. The term 'blast off' is commonly used to describe rocket launches."
Seeing launches on the telly came to mind, a giant metal scaffold tower supporting the familiar shape of a rocket. Then the cameras would cut in close enough to get some sense of the awesome scale of the vehicle. And when it blasted off, even that giant tower would be dwarfed by the plumes of fire and smoke jetting from the rocket.
For someone without a frame of reference, it must seem apocalyptic.
Arya's gaze was unfocused, seemingly trying to turn what Harry described into a mental image, with none of the context.
"You said it was like a plane," she remembered. "Describe planes."
Harry gazed at the glider. "Planes don't go into space. They just fly in the air. Like birds. Except planes can be about as small as that," he pointed, "or big enough to fly hundreds of people and their baggage at once. They're made of metal almost always. The really old ones were cloth and wood, and the really new tiny ones are made of stuff like styrofoam, carbon fiber, fiberglass, or plastic."
He could imagine the image Arya was building in her head, of a giant bird made of glass or steel. "The ones that carry passengers usually have great big wings that are really wide. Maybe a hundred or feet or more? I've never been on one in person. The ones that have the wings like this, close to the body and swept back, those are usually the fighter jets."
And there, there was a perfect analogy for him already. "Imagine dragons. Except they are tiny. Just big enough for maybe a couple of pilots, the engine underneath the pilot, and the missiles and landing gear under them. Maybe two or three times as big as this." he gestured to the glider.
"Small dragons," Arya commented.
Harry's smile was darkly amused. "They would destroy any dragon in a fight. They have guns in them that shoot bullets the size of your forearm, dozens of them per second. Faster than any arrow, several times faster than sound itself, and made specially to pierce thick steel plates or explode near their targets and fragment into bits of shrapnel."
"They have missiles that they can deploy, smart missiles that have minds of their own and can track their target. They are like javelins with rocket engines on the back and computers that can track their target in all sorts of ways, tracking the heat of their target or their radar signature. These missiles will fly themselves right up to their target and explode. They fly several times faster than the speed of sound, thousands of miles per hour, so that they can catch up to fighter jets that can also fly over a thousand miles per hour."
He stretched. "The only chance any dragon has got to survive is magic. Maybe they take over the pilot's mind or cast a spell to rupture the fuel tank. But they've been making planes that don't even need a pilot. The pilot flies the fighter jet from a computer on the ground, miles and miles away. They call those drones."
Over the course of his explanation, Arya had paled, looking vaguely horrified. "What dreadful wars would spur such desperate, terrifying creations?"
Even then, Harry reflected, Arya still did not know the ultimate engine of war, the weapon so terrible everybody refused to use it, yet still kept stockpiled and pointed at each other, like an apocalyptic Mexican Standoff. "World Wars one and two and the Cold War, mostly. After that, people had just sort of gotten in the habit of constantly trying to build the best weapons, planes, helicopters, tanks, guns, whatever."
"And your humans – muggles – did this. Without magic."
Harry nodded. "They don't constantly run around blowing shit up. And these planes are unbelievably expensive. One of those missiles costs as much as it would to feed hundreds of people for a year. One of those planes, tens of thousands. So usually countries just threaten each other, fly their jets menacingly close, and solve things diplomatically, since nobody wants to get killed, and nobody wants to risk their jets being shot down."
"Planes and arrows of steel and death," Arya murmured. She regarded the glider with a bit more wariness. "Just like this."
Harry tilted his hand and mounted his broomstick. "We're kinda at the Wright Brothers stage. Fighter jets are decades, thousands of brilliant people, and billions of pounds away."
"But you know how they work." Arya stood next to the glider. "You do not need to go through the trial and error of discovery. You know what a fighter jet looks like."
"I know what it can do, and I have a vague recollection of what it looks like. Fighter jets are unbelievably complicated. They've got computers and flight control systems and scanners that are all so complicated, there's stuff as basic as what kind of metal the plane is made of or what they use for the turbine blades, and that alone is so complicated I've got no idea where I'd start." Harry rubbed his head at the thought. "I, er, dropped out of muggle school when I was eleven so I could go to magic school. Everything I know about muggles beyond that, I learned over the shoulders of my aunt and uncle and cousin for the three months out of the year I'm actually there."
Arya seemed to need time to process. She got back into her seat in the glider. Harry was mindful to be slow and careful as he took off, the nose of the glider tied around the footrests of his broomstick.
He could see the worry on Arya's face as he ascended, dragging the craft up. The nose tipped back almost vertically. Inside, Arya was now laying on her back in the seat. Carefully, Harry navigated through the branches and leaves and out into the open air over the forest.
Slowly, he began to accelerate in a shallow arcing climb, gaining altitude and speed.
Arya gripped the arms of her seat with white knuckles as he sped up and gained height. The clear nose cone gave her a direct view of the dizzying height below.
As he sped up past twenty, thirty, fifty miles an hour, the glider began to struggle. Harry was no aerodynamic expert. His understanding of wings was as basic as the fletching on an arrow. Past sixty miles an hour, the glider was unstable in the air. It jittered as if caught in turbulence, the nose pointing drifting away from level and tugging at the back of his broom in random directions.
Harry had to fly below sixty miles an hour to keep the arrangement even a little bit stable, even slower to keep Arya comfortable. Once he'd settled into a cruising speed and altitude, things calmed down enough to fly mindlessly as Arya directed him.
It was not long before Harry was wishing he could sit in the glider with her. The wind was not unbearable at forty miles an hour, but it was fast enough to be uncomfortable, and there was no relief from it. It made blinking uncomfortable and the weight of the wind on his eyelashes and his bangs made the urge to do so constant. His eyes dried out quickly as well. A bubblehead helped modestly, but it was uncomfortable in a different way. The bubble was, for lack of a better term, pushed against his face by the wind, so the magical film was sitting directly against his skin like a glove stretched over his face.
Mentally, he added some sort of ward against the wind to his list of questions for Morgan the next time he had the privacy to call her. Or to simply investigate how hard it would be to build a straight up plane. With transfiguration and magic, it couldn't be that hard, right?
Perhaps the most annoying bit of the flight was how slow it felt. He was moving slower than a car. It was heaps faster than walking, but that was slim consolation when potential days of flying were ahead of him. There was nothing there to excite him, nothing thrilling about the dullness of flying well slower than he knew he could, lower as well, in a straight line, towing an unstable glider over an unbroken lumpy carpet of treetops.
For her part, Arya gawked at everything they passed. He supposed it was an amazing perspective for someone who had never left the ground. He'd been spoiled by years of flying. Seeing the childlike awe on her face at the marvel of flight brought some of his own awe back.
After some time, the unending swath of trees began yielding to other terrain features. Arya guided him to stay away from the lakes, streams, clearings, and hilltops where the ground was visible from the open sky. He skirted around those clearings low to the treetops so no elves who might be below could look up and see the two of them plainly in the air.
He found himself craning his neck, edging closer to the gaps in the trees, hoping to catch glances of those parts of Du Weldenvarden that were not uniformly gigantic trees. The forest was gorgeous, and different from what he'd seen in Britain.
Scotland had much more amplified terrain, the ravines and plateaus and highlands soared and fell off in dramatic cliffs and steep slopes. Down in the Forest of Dean, the trees were reedy things, tall and thin with branches not so thick as to blot out all the sunlight.
Du Weldenvarden was all hills, lakes, trees, rivers, and marshes. The carpet of trees rose and fell with the lumpy terrain. Especially low points were marked by an absence of those gigantic trees, either a bed of reeds and cattails or a lake or algae-covered pond.
River banks were visible from above as the trees on the banks were much shorter or swept away entirely, as if the stream of water had cut through not just the soil and stone but the forest canopy overhead.
When they glided near to a pond or marsh, Harry could hear the sounds of cicadas buzzing beneath them. Ducks and geese and herons perched atop the surface of a pond, picking frogs and little fish out of the water. Deer stooped warily to drink from the tributary streams at the edge of the ponds.
Life was abundant in Du Weldenvarden, to a nearly unbelievable extent. The animals were everywhere, in greater numbers than it seemed possible for the forest ecosystem to support.
Evening fell and the crickets began to wake, filling the evening air with their song. Harry was glad then for his mosquito repellent ring; he was sure he'd be swarmed without it.
Landing was a bit tricky to negotiate with the glider in tow, but some awkward use of levitation charms saw them both on the ground safely after a day of flying.
Arya climbed out the back of the glider on unsteady legs. "That was…" she paused to grasp for words. "-breathtaking."
Harry threw out the tent and cast Hermione's wards around their campsite; a little clearing at the edge of a marsh. The sound of crickets was very loud next to them. Hovering over the marsh reeds and cattails, fireflies flitted about, flashing their yellow-green lights in patterns like a constellation only a few feet over their heads.
He dragged out a couple of lawn chairs in front of the tent and filled a jar with bluebell flames. Arya fell into her seat gratefully. Harry could not tell how much was the blue light and how much was the poison, but he knew she was looking paler than her healthy skin tone.
"Wizards do this always?" she asked, nodding at Harry's broom. Harry peeled back the lid on a stasis meal and passed out dishes.
"We travel with apparition," Harry said. "Or Floo powder. Imagine apparating but it only connects fireplaces." After the day of sightseeing, that seemed like a greater shame than he'd ever really considered. "It's faster, more convenient. Not everybody is comfortable flying on a broomstick. I suppose people want to get where they're going as fast as they can. And nothing beats apparition."
"Do you fly for leisure, then?" Arya began eating her meal. Harry shrugged.
"Some, I reckon. I flew for sports, never really exploration or sightseeing. You've got to remember the Statute; it's really risky to fly when any old muggle could look up and start spreading stories about witches and wizards on flying broomsticks."
Arya gazed into the blue fire. "How awful, to have such freedom and yet be so trapped."
Harry scratched his hair and adjusted his seat. "Maybe. But we never have to deal with fighter jets, so it's got its upsides."
By some unspoken agreement, they both sat outside after they finished eating. Harry slouched in his chair until he was looking vertically enough to see the night sky. It was amazing how clear it was, and now many stars were visible.
"The night sky is something else," he murmured. "Back home, especially in muggle areas, the cities and street lamp and such are all so bright, they blot out the stars. It's all just a glowing navy dome. Only the brightest stars, planets, and the Moon show up."
"That sounds terrible," Arya said softly.
He stretched and cracked his neck. "I think the muggles would say it's worth it. Headlights mean a safe drive home, people can do work late in the night without burning candles, they can have more time at home and awake after work. I guess it's just a necessary tragedy. You couldn't argue the tradeoff isn't worth it, but nor can anyone argue we didn't lose something precious."
"The light of the homes of eight billion people," Arya mused. "It must be a sight to behold."
Harry closed his eyes and drew up those images he had seen online, photographs taken from space of the night side of Earth. The leaves and reeds rustled over the marsh as a warm breeze whispered past.
"They have taken photos of the world from space, so high up that you can see the whole night side of the sphere at once." Harry struggled to find the words to convey the remarkable photo in his mind. "I've seen pictures online. The Earth is fully in the frame and you can see the dim line where night meets day as the planet turns. On the night side, every city and town and county, every road and neighborhood, you can see their light. Like golden spiderwebs laid over the biggest cities, they shine brightest in cities and towns."
"Imagine that; a picture taken from so far away that you can see the whole entire planet at once, yet the light of civilization is still so bright that it shines clearly in that photograph, thousands of miles up in the sky."
All Harry heard from Arya was breathing. Harry sat back and let his eyes unfocus, watching the blurry spots of light dance over the marsh. The breeze was pleasant and the mosquitoes did not bother them. Harry was content to sit and enjoy the warmth of the bluebell fire and wait for Arya to process what he'd said, to try to put an image to Harry's words.
"The more I hear of your world, the less I know whether to weep for all that you've lost, or marvel at the wonders you describe." Arya finally spoke.
Harry yawned. "Why not both? It is what it is. And what it is is different."
"Very."
Harry stretched. "Let's get some sleep. I'm sure we've got a ways to go."
"Aye," Arya murmured. "Good night."
"'Night," he yawned, then headed to bed.
Harry revisited an old haunting ground that night. He was bound to Tom Riddle Senior's gravestone, the cords digging tightly into his clammy skin. Only this night, it was not Voldemort who stood over him, nor Wormtail. Durza's crimson hair blood red cloak stood out against a legion of faceless suits of armor hidden behind dark visors, each with the Empire's golden fist etched on their chests.
Durza's hand glowed with red light from within, shadowing his veins beneath papery pale skin. "Crucio," he uttered. Suddenly he was no longer in his own body but staring at the scene from Durza's side. The old bowyer had taken his place, screaming and writhing against the tombstone and the ropes that bound him.
Harry wanted to attack Durza, to stop the curse and free the man, but he was rooted in place, unable to open his mouth.
Frustration mounted in his frozen body, building until it seemed as though it would burst.
With a wordless scream, an explosion rocked the graveyard of Little Hangleton. When the shockwave cleared, Durza was gone and Harry stood amidst a circle of bodies, blasted into pieces and scattered across the graveyard. The bowyer had gone limp, his eyes glassy and blood spreading under his shirt.
Harry saw that the visors covering the soldiers' faces were gone. Dozens of faces, all staring with emotionless, dead eyes, some missing limbs, some missing bodies. They stared with the same emptiness he'd seen in Cedric Diggory's eyes.
He held up his hands. They were pale and thin with long, spidery fingers.
Harry's eyes snapped open. He groped for the Elder Wand and cast tempus.
It wasn't yet five in the morning. Yawning, he dragged himself out of bed. Arya was up already, sitting by the fire with one of the books Harry had duplicated off of Jeod back in Teirm.
"Is it good?"
Arya tilted the book up to show Harry the spine. Domina Abr Wyrda. The book Jeod had gifted Eragon. "Parts. Heslant the Monk was very knowledgeable about the dwarves and humans, but knew little of elves. Thus what is in here is mostly from his imagination." Her lips twisted in distaste.
She set the book down. "Do you intend to run off your nightmares? I am ready to leave."
He yawned again and transfigured his pajamas into flying clothes. "Yeah. Let's go."
Harry set out the glider and pulled out his broom. "Where are we headed?" he asked while he tied the tether to the broom. Arya did not immediately answer.
"Before we go further I must ask you to swear never to reveal the elven cities to anyone."
He blinked. "Of course."
She stared. "In the Ancient Language."
Harry sucked in a breath. "What? I'm not about to swear an inviolable oath to do anything."
The elf's expression was immovable. "Nor will I reveal one of the few things standing between my people and annihilation at Galbatorix's hand."
He searched for an argument that would stand up to that. "You're asking me to permanently give up a-" he grasped, "-a part of my own free will. I can't."
"Do you intend to reveal this information?" she challenged.
"No," he protested. "That's not what I mean. Can't you think of any reason why I might need to be able to break that oath? An unconscious, poisoned elf maybe?"
"It is not your decision to make who you reveal our hidden cities to," Arya said, casting him a dark gaze. "I have every right to demand this of you. And trust is only one factor. The oath will prevent you from slipping up or in the event that you are…pressed…for this information, it will aid you in holding your tongue. They will have to forcibly take the information from your mind."
Harry shook his head. "Wizards have something similar; the Unbreakable Vow. But even that, you can still break. It just kills you as soon as you do. This is different. Being totally incapable of breaking a promise…that's scary."
Arya's demeanor softened. "I have no other way to ensure this secret is kept. Even telling you with the oath is a great deal of trust. A single enemy agent in Ellesmera could cause untold damage when we have no internal safeguards on the assumption there are no enemies whatsoever in Du Weldenvarden. These are some of the secrets I kept from Durza for months. Is your Fidelius charm not like this? You gave up the ability to bring new people to your castle entirely, and chose to trust Garrow with virtual ownership of your home."
Harry understood what she was getting at. "But the spell can still be taken down," he pointed out. "And there is a theoretical way to get the secret back. If Garrow dies, everybody who knows the secret becomes secret keepers themselves. We have no way to end this oath. It's totally permanent."
Arya gave him a lingering look. "Not necessarily. You will simply swear to me that you will keep your oath until I release you from it."
"Or if you die," Harry pointed out. "You could be killed by the poison and then I would be permanently stuck."
"And you could simply kill me while I am weakened by the poison and take the secret straight back to Galbatorix," Arya shot back.
"Then make the oath releasable by somebody else you trust who isn't at risk of death."
Arya thought for a moment. "My mother," she decided. She outlined the words for him, then gave him the translation. "I will not reveal the locations of any elven city in Du Weldenvarden to anyone without permission from Arya or her mother, nor will I allow the information to be taken from me. I swear this oath until Arya or her mother release me from it."
Harry memorized the words and the lengthy sentence. He hesitated. There was no going back from this. It was thrilling, in a dark sort of way. He was about to bind himself more permanently than any witch or wizard had ever discovered in his world. He was about to entrust a tiny portion of his free will to an elf he'd met only weeks ago.
Each word fell from his lips with a great and terrible weight. He heard and felt the unnatural resonance the syllables had in the air of the predawn clearing. Forming the last word of the oath, Harry breathed out. It felt like he had just given away part of his soul.
Arya watched with an inscrutable expression. When Harry was finished, her gaze lingered.
"Thank you," she said genuinely.
He shifted uncomfortably and mounted his broom. "Right. Let's get into the air."
The elf climbed into the back of the glider. "Head east-northeast. We still have a long way to go."
He kicked off and towed them up through the trees, casting an obliteration charm over his shoulder to erase any signs of their campsite.
Arya was quiet for the whole morning. After they'd gotten underway, they were treated to the breathtaking vista of the sunrise over the forest from the sky. Harry watched the predawn grey horizon brighten by shades and hues, casting pink and orange light across the underside of the scattered clouds overhead.
The fiery orange disc breaking over the edge of the world felt like a kind of divine revelation, rays of warm sunlight spilling over the leafy horizon. Harry gazed ahead at the sun until it became too bright to look at.
He conjured sunglasses for himself and awkwardly levitated Arya a pair around the back of the glider. After that spectacular sunrise, Harry felt no need to break the silence. He glided on at the torpid pace the glider worked best at.
Late in the morning, Harry's stomach began to growl. He navigated the difficult task of extracting snacks from his backpack while flying.
"Hungry?" he held a bag of chocolate covered nuts in front of the glider. Arya shook her head.
By noon, Harry's introspective mood had faded and the hours of silence were dragging on.
"What's on your mind?" he asked Arya curiously. She had not uttered a word since thanking him for swearing her vow.
She took a moment to respond, as if the part of her brain that controlled speaking and language had to warm up from half a day out of commission.
"Your world."
They lapsed back into silence.
"It's a big place," Harry remarked.
"I know." Arya sat meditatively in the glider's seat. "I am trying to put images to the words you have given me."
Sullenly, Harry wished he had a pensieve. It would be so much easier to just show her. He would ask Morgan how they were made. Maybe he could make one. "I wish I had brought photos," he murmured. No normal human would be able to hear something said so quietly through plastic and over forty mile an hour winds, but Arya was not human.
"What are photos?" she asked.
Harry felt a twinge of guilt at the idea that he was piling another amazing invention onto the list of things Arya had to imagine with no frame of reference. "Imagine a perfect painting made by a machine in an instant. You point a camera at something and press a button. It captures and records all the light that hits it, just like an eye does. That's why they're called photographs. Photo: light, graph: er, graph."
"I think the old cameras work with film, which is a special sort of paper that's sensitive to light. The camera has a shutter that lets in light for less than a second. Then you've got to develop the paper with the right chemicals, only wizards have got potions that make the pictures move. The new ones are digital, they must have some kind of sensor in them that gets sent to a storage card."
Surprisingly, Arya seemed to understand. "We do not have your cameras – machines that take perfect photographs – but magic lets us do something similar. They are called fairths. There is a spell to command pigments to arrange themselves according to the image in your mind's eye. It is like an instant painting, yet not as perfect as you describe. Fairths are still as flawed as the mind of the caster."
Harry cottoned on to the implication. He nearly got excited before realizing the crucial flaw in the idea Arya had inspired. It was basically a still-frame pensieve. Fairths would let him move a memory perfectly into an image. Of course, Harry was incapable of actually using the sort of magic that did that.
But then again, that had rarely actually stopped him from using his own magic in some way that approximated the effect of the spells Brom had taught him.
"I am going to try to make one when we land tonight," Harry announced.
"It is not as simple as saying the words," Arya warned. "The mental component is the most difficult part. Your focus must be perfectly broad, and your feelings will influence the image as well. But it is a valuable talent to have."
The conversation stalled from there. Harry went back to admiring the forest vista. It really was remarkable, the vast size of if not untouched, then lightly touched wilderness. Some part of him kept expecting to run over a hamlet or village or paved road or something. It did not seem possible that they could fly in a straight line for nearly two days now and still have never seen a single sign of another human– elf. Whatever.
Harry had to marvel at that. He was used to the idea that just about everywhere on Earth was known. There were hidden caves in remote places, super deep ocean trenches, and maybe some magical places, but nothing like this. Nothing like the idea that there were unknown landmasses, or the notion that the world ended at the ocean coastline. Forget that, the idea that there was a swath of land so big nobody knew what was on the other side, that was ludicrous.
In the twenty-first century, the Endless Plains would have railroads and highways running straight through and planes flying overhead. Teirm would see gigantic steel cargo ships docking and casting off every few days with thousands of containers full of cargo, guided by satellites and weather data, and an airport with nonstop flights over the ocean.
In Alagaesia, going from one city to the next took as long as an entire vacation on a different continent. Earth was just…smaller. Harry was fairly sure there were roads that went through even the Sahara desert.
Harry realized that with nothing but the supplies he had on him, he could fly somewhere and discover some place nobody in Alagaesia had ever seen. If he rested well beforehand and flew as fast as he could straight through, Harry bet he could make it. And if he couldn't, well, he'd just apparate back to the start. Or conjure a raft and sleep on the water and finish the crossing the next day.
He could build a ship with magic and sail the high seas, discovering things nobody had seen before. The thought had a certain allure to it.
Memories of the Empire's justice resurfaced. Boys getting their hands chopped off for petty theft. Even Carvahall had proudly displayed their gallows. The Empire was bad, but clearly even Carvahall, nominally independent, practiced the grim, retributive justice that was apparently the simple norm of the time.
Distancing himself from all that did not sound too awful. As long as he had friends with him.
He fantasized for a while, his imagination developing ever more fanciful notions of being a globetrotting explorer with a crew of great friends. A sailing ship– no, a flying ship. A gigantic airplane fueled by magic that never had to land. Subject to no laws or tyrannical despots, exploring now in a time where there were no border agents or passports or air traffic control to worry about, free to explore.
Behind him, Arya had fallen asleep in the glider. Harry scrutinized her as best he could through the windshield. She looked pale and there were dark circles under her eyes, but her veins did not yet stand out black against her skin. She would need another dose soon.
He was not overly worried. At their pace and with no obstacles to consider, they might make it without needing even one more dose.
Below, the forest had begun to show supernatural influence. While there was nothing overtly magical, the trees had started to grow monstrously huge. It was hard to tell against the unbroken canopy, just how colossal they were. It was easy enough to see acres of leafy branches all connected to the same trunk, but only when a river or clearing or crevice provided a cutaway into the forest itself could Harry see the gargantuan tree trunks stretching hundreds of feet to the ground, dozens of feet across.
Those times when windows into the forest below opened, Harry noted how Du Weldenvarden seemed to teem with wildlife. Rarer than seeing a herd of grazing deer or a couple of wolves or a flock of birds, Harry did not often spot an empty clearing.
Harry had a vague understanding of how ecosystems worked. Plants were fueled by sunlight through photosynthesis, which formed the base of the food chain. Du Weldenvarden's gigantic trees should have hogged all the sunlight and probably most of the water, too, leaving little to filter through for undergrowth to forage on, which would mean no deer and thus no wolves.
He glanced back. Arya was still dozing. It had been a while since he'd gotten updated directions, but as long as the trees kept getting taller, he supposed he had to be headed in the right direction.
Adjusting his grip on his broom, Harry coasted over a massive treetop when abruptly, he began to fall.
Harry's heart rose into his throat as weightlessness stole over him. He wrenched the handle of his broom up, but it did not respond. It was as if it was nothing more than a regular old muggle broomstick.
Falling forwards, the glider's tether tugged on the stirrups of his broom, upending him and pointing the broomstick straight down.
"Diffindo!" Harry cried, pointing the Elder Wand at the tether. Nothing happened. A chill stole over him.
In the glider, Arya woke up when Harry's dangling weight wrenched the nose of the craft down, dragging her into a dive. The treetops rushed up towards them, seconds away from impact.
"Letta!" Arya barked, but nothing happened.
"Arresto Momentum," Harry tried. It was as if the Elder Wand were merely a stick in his hand. Harry clamped his knees around the broom and hooked his feet over the underside of the stirrups, desperately clutching the handle.
Arya kicked the plastic windshield out of the glider and hauled the tether in, pulling Harry in towards the glider.
"Audr," she tried to no avail.
Harry put away the wand and dug deep within himself for just one scrap of elusive magic. "Capuzares!"
It felt like shoving against a mountain. Harry threw himself into the spell, forcing every iota of willpower and magic into brute-forcing the spell to work. The anti-capsizing spell sluggishly pushed the nose of the glider back to perpendicular. The wings caught the air and halted their descent. Harry clung to the outside of the body as the g-forces of their brutal turn slammed him into the roof of the glider.
They were still going way too fast and way too low. For a moment it looked like they would skim over the tops of the gigantic trees, but then the nose began to droop again. The wind howled across the absent nose cone like a shrieking flute. Harry screwed his eyes shut and braced himself.
Harry felt the first branches hit him like whips before the plane slammed into a branch and jarred him off the roof with broken fingers. For a heartstopping moment, Harry flew through open space.
Something struck him in the back like the sky had fallen on him, and he passed out.
AN: Sorry for the wait. I've been working on those other projects. Hopefully more to come soon.
Poor Arya's not 100% in it right now, and forgot to mention something rather important.