"I, er, hope you get well soon," Harry muttered awkwardly to Arya's prone form. Her mother was looking down at a scroll she was reading, covered in symbols Harry did not recognize. The symbols looked more complex than English letters, but they were a totally different style that seemed more about shapes than lines. He wondered if that made handwriting a pain in the arse.
It was awkward to speak to Arya around Islanzadi. The elf had a regal air about her that made her presence intimidating. It was like Narcissa Malfoy but with twice the stature and none of the disdain. Harry second-guessed himself around her.
Islanzadi set down the scroll and looked across the bed at him. Cin strode by, organizing a shelf of scrolls near his office. He looked more in his element here than when he'd seen him earlier, waiting for Harry and Arya to arrive. "Has Ellesmera been as you expected?" she asked.
"Er, yeah," Harry said. He disliked small talk.
Islanzadi raised a brow. "Really? Did Arya tell you what to expect?"
His cheeks warmed. "Not really. She told me some stuff and I filled in the rest with my imagination. About all I got from her was that you guys used magic to live easy lives." Harry winced. That came out wrong, and more insulting than he'd meant. "I mean, you didn't have to work all day to survive."
Islanzadi inclined her head. "What conclusions did you draw from that?"
Harry rubbed his forehead. "I thought she meant elves were all magicians. I only learned when Majaia mentioned it that you are all immortal."
"A startling revelation, I'm sure," Islanzadi said dryly. "How old did you think my daughter was?"
Harry glanced down at her with a gauging look. "Twenties or early thirties," he decided. "Though with magic and good healthcare, maybe forty." Curiosity now nagged at him. How old was she?
"And the city itself?"
"Very different," Harry readily admitted. "She gave me directions before going into her coma, but I was still terrified that I'd gone off course. I was looking for farms, roads, buildings, chimneys, y'know? Everything here's very…natural."
"Many elves take pride in living in unity with the forest," Islanzadi agreed. "It makes for better living than to beat back the wild constantly for a toehold of civilization."
Harry felt a frisson of irritation at the poke. Arya had warned him about that, too. Elves did think highly of themselves. Their village was very nice, but Harry had the luxury of knowing what humans could really do. When elves measured themselves up against preindustrial, pre-renaissance humans, they came off very well. When Harry compared them to the world he left, they were rather quaint. Perhaps they were neck-and-neck with the Wizarding World. But muggles had them beat.
Islanzadi rose to leave. "I must thank you again for bringing Arya back to me. I had thought her dead for months. Until you rode into Tialdarí Hall, I still did. My gratitude is…indescribable. So long as you keep the peace in Ellesmera, you may always find a home here."
Harry's hunch that Islanzadi was someone important deepened at the pronunciation. He imagined it was not within the average elf's authority to give that sort of permission. He nodded. "It was the right thing to do."
The elf swept out of the room. Harry waited a few minutes before departing himself. Majaia was not there waiting for him. Cin told Harry she'd been drawn away by other responsibilities, and that she apologized that Harry would be on his own for the rest of the day.
It was exactly the opportunity Harry needed.
He set off towards the northeast of Ellesmera. Morgan and Neil had scouted for him after he'd spoken with them last night. He'd gotten familiar with the route out of the city proper and the terrain around Ellesmera was easy enough to navigate. Easier than the Forbidden Forest for sure. He brought out the stone and turned it over. "Morgan. Neil," he whispered.
The two ghostly figures emerged from the ether.
"The walk is about two miles," Neil told him. "From here, north northeast. There is a dwelling nearby; you'll want to be quiet."
Harry followed the American man. He still hadn't gotten over the awe of speaking to the legendary figure. In the faded light through the trees, the sunrays poked stripes in their ghostly silhouettes. Morgan seemed much more substantial than Neil, and better at ease with the practice of being incorporeal. She glided along under her own willpower, while Neil still walked on the ground next to Harry.
Soon enough they were at the site in question. "It's below us, forty feet," Neil whispered, indicating a patch of soil between three large trees. "The dwelling is three trees due east."
"You needn't whisper," Morgan told Neil idly.
"Force of habit. Years in the Navy."
Harry shrugged the cloak over himself and cast Hermione's campsite wards, along with the muffliato charm.
"Ripping the ore straight up will wreck the roots of the surrounding trees," Morgan warned.
Carefully, Harry began excavating the topsoil over the site, firming it up with conjured braces and beams as he worked down lower and lower with defodio, diffindo, and percutio charms. Neil floated down to the bottom of the hole and directed Harry's efforts.
The pile of excavated dirt grew as the mineshaft deepened. It was not long before standing at the edge of the hole and looking down made Harry uneasy. The drop was beginning to look sobering.
Du Weldenvarden's soil layer was absurdly, impossibly deep. Dozens and dozens of feet below, Harry was still excavating dirt. When water started to seep in, Neil had Harry conjure plastic tarps and anchor them to the walls with pilings driven into the surrounding dirt.
Where the dirt ended, porous rock began, all flooded with water. Harry had to use the reductor charm to turn the stone to gravel and summon that up out of the mineshaft, then drain the water.
They had reached nearly a hundred and fifty feet in depth when Neil reported back.
"You're deep enough," Neil called up. He climbed out of the hole by jabbing his ghostly fingers through the dirt as handholds. "It's on the east wall just peeking out the side."
Harry tinkered a bit with conjuration and put together a platform and pulley over the mineshaft. Once Neil signed off on its safety, Harry magicked the winch to lower him into the mineshaft, wandlessly producing a tongue of blue flame to light the hole. Descending so far made him uneasy. So deep into the ground, little daylight penetrated to the bottom. The bluebell flame was his sole source of illumination.
They'd dug beneath the water table and sealed off the shaft with tarps and anchors. The porous stone was visible through the transparent plastic tarps, water pooling in pockets and ballooning against the pilings holding it out.
Sure enough, brownish orange ore poked through the corner of the wall. Harry began to cut out more space to work with, using the reductor charm and replacing the stone with conjured scaffolding. He took the winch up to the top and summoned out all the loose dirt, then went back down and repeated the process. He put up proper lighting and cast a bubblehead over himself to keep dust and dirt out of his lungs.
Before long he had bared an appreciable seam of the ore as it sat dug into the bedrock.
Harry conjured a chair and caught his breath, gazing at the orange-brown rock. All this to avoid ripping the ore straight through the ground with a summoning charm. And muggles did this without magic.
He glanced up at the yawning mineshaft overhead. The groundwater pooling against the plastic and the conjured support beams made him nervous.
It would be, he reflected, an awful way to die. Stuck at the bottom of a mine, drowning as it flooded, suffocating, or simply being crushed to death by a cave in. He sent some unbreakability enchantments flying back up at the mineshaft. Though he was down here for the very purpose of avoiding having to enchant conjured materials, it was a whole lot better than nothing.
"The vein is huge," Morgan told Harry. "You can cut out only the best parts."
"The safest parts," Neil objected. "Do not risk a cave in when there is no need."
Harry nodded and pushed himself back to his feet. He got out one of the bags he'd bought from Teirm he'd brought along, enchanted with the strongest undetectable extension charm he could cast. He got the sense he could have done better if the Elder Wand obeyed him better, but it was plenty big for his purposes.
"How much will I need?" He asked Neil.
"I came up with two cubic meters of aluminium for a modest sized one," the American told Harry. "If this ore is about 30% purity, which is an understatement, you'll need a bit more than six cubic meters of ore. I have to remind you that you'll need more than aluminium. Steel is necessary for the frames, you'll want glass windows – the right kind of glass – and plenty of other materials."
"I'll ask the elves," Harry gestured with his wand at the ore. "I don't need it to be intact, right?"
"This is out of my field of expertise," Neil said, "but I asked around and the first step of the Bayer process is crushing it into sand."
Harry took that to heart and began using surgical reductor charms to turn segments of the bauxite seam into ore sands, then summoning the sand into his bag. He was careful to add scaffolding as he went and to avoid digging beneath the bases of the pillars supporting the roof. Where water began to intrude, he put up more plastic tarp. It was not long before he reached the eight cubic meters he set himself as a goal. After that, he gathered another set of bauxite.
He kept track of the time. With the walk back factored in, Harry wanted to be back before dinner. By the time he had to leave, he had still not reached the end of the bauxite vein. He had no idea how much further it went. He simply took what was easy and safe to extract from the tunnel and sent it into his bag.
He jogged back down the tunnel to the lift with a sack filled many times over with aluminium. Enough that he did not expect he'd need to return for a long time.
In the mornings, Harry still visited Arya. Islanzadi was always there when he got there, and usually stayed past when he left. Now though, Harry had begun work on setting up a place to refine the bauxite. It was not a project he could hide, nor could he get away with having several days to himself, and something felt wrong about hiding bits of the elves' own forest from them with magic.
Leaving the mineshaft open (though warded and with the hole sealed and fenced off) felt like enough of a transgression that Harry did not want to build a foundry on some other parcel of land stolen from Du Weldenvarden. He felt a moment of discomfort at the realization that this was probably what all wizards back home had to do once the Statute of Secrecy went into effect.
It was a tradeoff. Harry could have worked faster if he didn't have to hide, but Majaia helped him with his projects. Finding a flat parcel of land near the edge of the field and away from any dwellings, shaving off the topsoil for a foundation, it made Harry self conscious. He was aware that he was putting something rather permanent down in a place where elves lived in almost perfect unity with nature.
Every brick he laid was an affront to the way elves had grown their houses into living trees and allowed the forest to live around them, and every brick was an acknowledgement that the foundry was not a temporary installation. Harry winced at every brick laid and mortared, but neither Majaia nor anyone else stopped him. At least the mineshaft was a narrow tube well hidden and out of the way of any elves.
"I'll help you clear this away when I'm done," Harry promised Majaia.
"Why do you say that?" she asked.
"I thought you'd dislike a human rooting something permanent and artificial in the heart of your forest," Harry said. "I haven't seen anything else like this."
"Come with me," Majaia decided. "You need to see something."
She brought Harry to a two level house grown out of a massive tree. There was an open air workshop attached to its side. An elf woman worked at a bench with a breastplate, filing down its rough edges. Harry scourgified his glasses to be sure he was seeing right. The elf woman actually looked old.
He supposed that was generous; she simply didn't look like a young adult. She looked in her forties, still stunningly beautiful and with smooth skin, but she was not the immaculate vision of youth and vitality every other elf embodied.
"Who's that?"
"Rhunön," Majaia told him quietly. "Among the oldest elves, and perhaps the greatest metalworker to ever wield a forge hammer. But that is not why I brought you here. Look."
She pointed past the elf at a squat brick building. Not much had been done to make it look pretty. A smallish opening in the construction glowed a fierce orange.
"Our houses, the style of our building, and the way we embrace nature, those are personal choices," Majaia said. "Tialdarí Hall necessitated a good deal of land be cleared away. We did that anyway. Some houses are wrought largely from stone. What is important is not that everything you do fits in perfectly with the style most elves prefer. It is that you respect Du Weldenvarden and disturb it as little as possible to achieve your goals. No one will fault you for requiring a foundry. You picked a place that is not likely to be needed, and if it truly must be moved, elves will rebuild it elsewhere."
That helped some of Harry's unease. Majaia brought him back to the site and they worked through the rest of the day.
In many ways, putting the foundry together meant being careful with his magic. Every spell, Harry considered carefully. He made sure to follow every law of physics as he knew it and never used inexplicable spells or transfiguration. He was conscientious of how much energy he would be spending if his magic worked like Eragon's, and limited himself to keep Majaia from thinking anything was up.
And as best he could, Harry tried to use the Ancient Language for his spells.
He knew Majaia was watching him. She was always curious as to how he went about using magic to make his burdens easier. It was another mental exercise to come up with a method of accomplishing a task that minimized theoretical energy cost. Though it was stressful to be constantly looking over his shoulder after each spell, it was fun to challenge himself in that way, stretch his imagination and ingenuity to devise efficient spells.
Majaia did not press him on where he'd gotten the bauxite; she accepted his explanation that he found enough of it on his walk when she was gone without challenge.
The process of turning bauxite into aluminium was not a simple one. Neil had brought a third spirit with him to explain, a metallurgist named Paul Héroult.
There were two major steps to it, the Bayer process and the Hall-Héroult process. The Bayer process processed raw bauxite into alumina and required caustic soda and a pressure vessel, along with seed crystals of alumina to precipitate the molten slurry after it had been filtered and purified. Harry had no seed crystals, so the first batch had to be made the long way.
He could achieve near perfect purity alumina with the extraction charm evello. Reducing the process to tasks that he could achieve with magic – and without arousing suspicion from the elves – and tasks that had to be done with equipment. Like the pressure vessel. Harry did not see a way around the need for a pressure vessel, and that meant he needed steel now instead of later.
After the Bayer process, the Hall-Héroult process involved pouring alumina into a bed with cryolite flux, heating it to a thousand degrees, and sending a powerful electric current through the mixture to electrolyze the alumina. The pure aluminium would be drawn to the negative cathode and could be wicked away and cast into billets.
That was another process that magic could not do by itself. The prospect of generating electricity was another task to tackle. Harry was beginning to understand why aluminium had never been used prior to the industrial revolution.
As much as he did not want to give Snape any credit, he had to grant that without six years of Potions, Harry would never have understood the whole process. The chemistry behind it all was a bit beyond him. Potions never dealt in covalent or ionic bonds, mols, or the like. But it did deal with distillation, mixture ratios, reductions, managing heat and melting points, and other such basic principles that served him well in understanding Paul Héroult, a brilliant French scientist with a thick accent and a large sense of humor. For a dead spirit, Paul felt very much alive, moreso than Neil, and looked nearly as tangible as Morgan.
He was in the process of negotiating for a bit of steel to make the pressure chamber when an elf came jogging up to the elves' foundry, a much prettier building deeper in the forest.
"Harry?" the elf asked. He had dark skin and shining golden irises, wearing linen clothes that had evergreen boughs embroidered across them so that he looked almost camouflaged.
"Yeah?"
"Cin sent me to give you this message: Arya has awoken."
Harry virtually dropped everything, apologizing to the elf smith lady he was talking with. Majaia got up from leaning against a counter and followed him at a jog towards Tialdarí Hall.
The elf runner departed in a different direction. Majaia jogged alongside Harry. By the time he was huffing and puffing, she seemed completely unbothered by the exertion. Not being able to apparate was extremely frustrating.
He rushed through Tialdarí Hall around turns that were now familiar. The doors to the Halls of Healing were shut. Harry knocked urgently.
There was a pregnant pause before the doors were opened. Cin beckoned Harry in. Past him, Islanzadi was staring tearfully at her daughter, holding her hand. Arya was still very weak, but her skin was no longer paper white. She was sat up against the headboard. She smiled a bit when she saw Harry.
Islanzadi dried her tears with her sleeve and stood. "I shall give you some time," she said, more to Arya than Harry. "He wants to speak with you, daughter," the elf told Arya. Arya nodded. Islanzadi strode out. To Harry's eyes, she looked almost fragile, hidden under a layer of imperious bearing.
"How do you feel?" Harry asked, for lack of a better opening.
"Weak. Sick. Exhausted." Arya slid back to lay down. Harry was not blind to the frostiness between her and her mother. Who called their kid 'daughter?' "Optimistic." She nodded to the green vial on the bedside table. "We saved the last dose. I know I will only feel better now. We are safe. How are you finding Ellesmera?"
Harry pulled back Islanzadi's chair and sat down. "It's not at all like I'm used to." He drew the Elder Wand and cast a brace of privacy spells.
"The Halls of Healing are warded with their own spells to protect privacy," Arya told him.
He glanced back towards the front. Cin was sitting behind a glass window in his office. He glanced back at Arya questioningly.
"He cannot hear us from in there," she assured him.
Harry took that to mean he didn't have to worry about eavesdropping. "Cities back home are big areas of glass and steel and concrete and asphalt, a bunch of towers in the middle surrounded by miles of houses and neighborhoods. You can see the tops of the skyscrapers for miles, and the evidence of a city ahead is obvious for many miles more. There are neighborhoods and surrounding cities and towns and roads with signs that direct you towards the city. It's a lot more like Teirm than Ellesmera. I was expecting way more elves."
Arya closed her eyes. "Elves cannot reproduce as quickly as humans. Nowhere near it. In all of Ellesmera, there are only two children currently. It is part of why elves have not left the forest since the Fall. If one of us dies in the fight, it is not likely their replacement will be born until after this conflict with Galbatorix is decided, one way or another. When the time comes to end this war, our whole, undiluted force will join the effort to topple Galbatorix."
Harry considered the notion of an existential war lurking in the uncertain future, one where every able-bodied person, male or female, would be expected to fight. It sounded very stressful.
"Further," Arya said, "many, many of us died in the Fall. My father was one of them. There are many empty houses in Ellesmera, if you know where to look. It is more obvious in our other cities. I suppose you might call them villages by your perspective on size."
"Your mum's nice," Harry said awkwardly. "She reminds me a bit of this lady I knew, Narcissa Malfoy. Very formal, loved her son more than anything."
Arya's lips twitched. "Did my mother not tell you who she was?"
Harry frowned. "She said her name was Islanzadi." He wasn't sure what he was missing. "Why, is she important?"
"Never mind," Arya said, amused. "If she has not told you, neither will I."
She opened her eyes again, watching Harry sit at her bedside. "First time?" she grinned.
"What, sitting with an injured friend in the hospital wing?" Harry asked, also smiling. "Never. Done this loads of times. Usually I'm in the bed though."
"I would love to hear those stories."
Harry sighed.
"If you are willing," Arya added quickly.
He waved it off. "It's fine. It's loads of great memories, but a few pretty bad ones. You can teach me how to make fairths so I can put pictures to the stories." He glanced back at Cin. "Did they bring you food?" He searched the room and found a tray of breakfast waiting.
"Aye," Arya said.
The conversation lapsed.
"What do we do next?" Harry asked. Arya was safe, they'd made it, she was in capable hands. Harry wasn't needed anymore.
Arya gave him the look of someone who was piecing things together. "We have both respected each other's secrets, but I think the time to deal clearly is now. You mentioned when we were crossing the Bay of Fundor that you had been traveling with a man named Brom."
Harry was suddenly quite nervous. That was not the only thing he'd let slip on the boat–
"And you told me these potions were brewed with dragon blood." Arya picked up the last dose of Wiggenweld. Harry kept his expression and body language still.
"I have not told you what I was doing when Durza captured me. Shall I? I do not know if Brom told you this bit of history. After the fall, only three known dragon eggs remained in Alagaesia. Some time ago and at great effort, the Varden managed to steal one. A blue dragon egg. It was my job to ferry the egg between the elven cities and the Varden in hopes of finding a candidate the egg would hatch for." Arya's gaze fixated on Harry. He tried his best to give nothing away, inwardly reeling at the revelation.
"I told you your apparition was not wholly impossible with Alagaesia's magic. There is an enormously complicated and difficult spell with an energy price so high it would kill a human to send much more than a pebble. I used the transport spell to send that egg to a human named Brom so that Durza would not retrieve it for Galbatorix."
She held his gaze. "I think that egg hatched not long after I sent it away. I think you were traveling with Brom and whoever the egg hatched for, and I think at some point you took some of her blood to brew your potions."
Harry's mind raced madly. How should he respond? Almost nothing besides a wholehearted rejection of such an absurdity had any chance of selling the idea that he did not know exactly what Arya was talking about. But that was already out of the question with his forced impassivity while listening to her explain her theory.
"What do you think?" Arya asked.
"Suppose I were to know anything about all that," Harry settled on his tactic. "What would you do with that information?"
"I would want to know the disposition of this Rider towards the Empire and the Varden, how much danger they're in, and where they're headed, so that I might go travel with them and see that our only hope of salvation is not killed or captured by Galbatorix." Arya pushed herself upright.
"And I would think perhaps you'd like to come with me, if you were traveling with Brom and the Rider already before."
In his mind, Harry cursed. Was this how Quirrel felt all the way back in first year? A flash of insight laying a year of plans to waste in an instant. In this situation, there was little left to do but capitulate. Harry would proceed with caution. He needn't give away any more than he had to. He at least had the sense not to lay out his evil plan in front of his biggest enemy.
"If all this were true," Harry selected his words with care. "It would be a breach of trust for me to confirm or deny anything, and I would hope that a good friend of mine would keep any information she deduced to herself, out of respect for both me and Brom and any other hypothetical parties involved. If she were to accompany me on my way back to traveling with Brom, I wouldn't see any issue with that. If a hypothetical situation like this were true, the fact that nobody had heard anything would mean that the secret was presently very well kept from the Empire as well as the elves and the Varden, and it would seem like the best way to ensure such a secret continued to stay secret if nobody else knew anything. Wouldn't it?"
Arya looked uncomfortable. "I have obligations to my people. I will not say anything yet, but you must understand the implications of this. Nobody knows what happened to the dragon egg. I am sure the Empire and the Varden both are doing their best to find out what happened without letting on that they have no idea to the other. That the egg was nearly lost at all may not have spread to everyone. Many people have died over this secret. To say nothing is to let whatever desperate efforts my people and the Varden make to recover it continue."
Harry was torn. "If this egg were really so important, wouldn't it be worth it to protect them in the heart of the Empire? Suppose you told someone who recalled some spies, and maybe that got noticed and betrayed the secret to the Empire that you had recovered the egg?"
Arya looked bemused. "The humans have a saying, you may have heard it. You don't need to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. The elves and Varden are quite adept at spycraft. They may even prove a boon to you. Suppose they continue the ruse of ferrying the egg far from the Empire, to utterly shut down any suspicion of searching for a live dragon."
"Galbatorix probably has spies of his own," Harry objected. Constant vigilance echoed in his mind. "It only takes one slip to screw it all up."
"Not everybody needs to know the whole truth." Arya tapped the sheets of her bed. "It is called compartmentalization. You and I know the whole truth. Nobody else needs to. Perhaps I tell the queen you know where the egg is and that it's safe, but in the midst of the Empire. She might direct the efforts of our spies by telling some that they should keep their ears out for happenings in Teirm and be prepared to lend aid, some can be directed to search towards Ceunon and then have their efforts noticed so that Galbatorix thinks we think the egg is there and diverts his efforts, others that they ought to continue 'searching' for the egg but not to take any risks, and others still that the egg is safe and they can use the pretext of searching for it to cover for spying on other things."
"You and I can leave here when I am recovered to 'retrieve the egg,' and simply join Brom whenever we reach him."
Harry thought that perhaps he was finally understanding a tiny bit of how Dumbledore felt running the Order of the Phoenix. As entitled as he felt (and probably still was) to knowledge of a prophecy about himself, he could admit as a more mature person that he would not be eager to trust a pivotal piece of information to a sixteen year old mentally linked to Voldemort, when that piece of information was currently the only thing keeping Voldemort from openly announcing his return and returning to form from fifteen years ago, killing whoever he pleased.
He thought about how Amelia Bones had been murdered the very summer of Voldemort's open return. She had been the only one in the Wizengamot to speak in his favor at his hearing before fifth year. If the prophecy had gotten out, she might have been dead a week after the Triwizard Tournament.
The problem was, Harry did not know any elves well enough to trust them with Eragon's secret. Only Arya. The question then was, did he trust her enough to trust whoever she trusted?
"Fine," Harry bit out. "Just the queen."
"There is one other who must know," Arya said.
Harry scowled.
"Who?"
"I cannot say," Arya said. Harry opened his mouth to object when she held up a hand to forestall him. "Just as you still have your own secrets, so do the elves. This is a secret I endured months of torture to keep from Durza."
He wanted to object, but realized he could not without seeming petulant. It was true; he thought of the resurrection stone first, then the details of his life, the true way he'd gotten to Alagaesia, and his objections subsided.
"That's fair I guess."
Arya's eyes began to droop. "What have you been doing in Ellesmera?"
Harry described how Majaia had shown him around the previous day, the little foundry he was setting up at the edge of the clearing under the Menoa tree, and the plans he had to refine the bauxite ore he'd found into aluminium in hopes to build a plane.
He outlined some of the frustrations he'd run into; he was keeping his brand of magic secret and so could not make as much progress as he'd like. He could not explain where his knowledge of this complicated process came from (Harry let Arya assume he learned it from living people back home, rather than dead ones last night), and he still wasn't sure what he'd do about making electricity for the electrolysis in the final process.
A spark of relief flashed in Arya's eyes when he told her he was keeping his secrets from the elves.
Before long she was fast asleep, looking exhausted but far better than the last few days. She laid in bed like a person who was actually asleep, rather than a limp doll arranged that way by a healer.
Harry murmured goodbye before heading back out.
Majaia was not waiting for him at the door to the Hall of Healing. He found her at the foundry sitting next to a cart full of steel ingots.
"How did it go?"
"Good," Harry said. "She didn't seem in pain or anything, and said she thought she'd be better before long. Were you two friends?"
Majaia combed back her hair. "Of a sort. We are not so far apart in age–"
Harry choked. "She's a hundred and twenty years old?"
"No," Majaia said, a bit annoyed. "She was younger, but she has always been very motivated to push herself. I am not ashamed to admit in many ways, she has far surpassed me. She was precocious and Ellesmera was poorer for her absence."
"Who do I have to thank for this?" Harry nodded at the steel ingots.
"Eadara," Majaia said. "She is curious what all this will reveal. I know she is not the only one interested in the prospect of a new metal."
Harry rubbed his forehead. Brilliant. Now he had an audience. "They shouldn't get their hopes up," he muttered. It was bloody complicated, and there were a few parts to this he'd have no hope of managing without magic.
He thought chiefly of electrolysis. It was the part of the process that everything hinged on, and it wasn't as if he could just plug into a wall socket.
The rest of that day, he worked on the pressure chamber. He had no education whatsoever in metalworking, and he was sure he was making a fool of himself in front of Majaia. It annoyed him that he could have been done with this in an instant if she wasn't watching. It almost made him wonder if all the secrecy was worth it; magic was so unbelievably convenient Harry actually toyed with the idea of preferring physical danger over inconvenience.
It was slow, slow going, shaping the steel. He could never be sure how much he could do before the jig was up. In some ways, he wished he had Eragon's magic. There, at least, he'd get direct feedback on his methods. Eragon would know if it was better to try to forcefully shape cold steel or if the investment in heating the metal was worth the ease of reshaping it, just by how tired he got. He could say for certain if it was worth the cost to use the asphyxiation curse to keep air from touching the hot metal and cooling it off, or if it was better to just try and get everything done in one heating.
It wound up being an exercise in patience and overcoming frustration. Harry worked at it for a while, then took a break. Majaia's reaction wasn't much help in gauging how he was doing, she didn't give away much beyond basic interest.
When dinnertime came around, Harry had fused a few bars with vacuum welding via the asphyxiation curse (cast mentally, while he muttered vindr aloud), and a roughly round shape was beginning to form. It was tedious going. All Harry could think was that it had better actually work.
"Hit."
13 on a 16
"Hit again."
Harry dealt. Arya got an eight and collected the pot. They were using piles of the gold coins Harry had minted back before leaving the castle.
"I have always struggled to grasp the allure of gambling," Arya said. Her bed in the Hall of Healing had begun to fill out with books and games to stave off the boredom. Harry had contributed some copies of Jeod's books and some more exotic foods from his dwindling stash.
"Why pin your fortunes on something you have no control over?" Arya handed the cards back for Harry to shuffle.
"I dunno. The thrill?" Harry set out the game again. "I'm not into it either."
"Then why play?"
Harry shrugged. "I don't know any other card games for two players." He dealt his face down card and peeked. The skull in the middle of the ace of spades winked at him, leering as he set it back down.
Arya stood on a hard sixteen. Harry revealed the hidden ace. The skull cackled, rushing towards the surface of the card as if to escape. The whole surface turned a smoky black. Arya watched with interest. Her own jack of diamonds groaned silently, making a show of falling on his sword, red diamonds splattering out of his chest.
Harry had not done more than a basic animation charm on the cards. Sometimes magic was truly magical. He scooped back a portion of the gold coins.
"You do not like killing," Arya said. It came out of the blue.
He blinked. "Does anyone?"
"Monsters, perhaps." Arya took the deck from him and shuffled. She had mastered the skill after only two tries. The first had seen Harry summon scattered cards from across the floor back to his hand. She drew a card and held it up. The king of hearts folded his hands over his sword, looking out from the card at Arya regally, his golden crown twinkling.
"You needn't fight to oppose Galbatorix," Arya said. "Your magic is different. It could make a difference."
Harry lounged bonelessly in his chair. Arya examined the animated playing cards, tapping the moving pictures like a curious child, wonderment on her face as the face cards reacted to her.
He felt like he wasn't invested enough yet to take that step. He was enjoying his time experimenting with magic, interviewing dead experts, figuring things out. He enjoyed traveling with Arya, exploring Alagaesia, feeling like he was discovering new things, new places.
The Varden promised responsibility, obligations. To Harry, it sounded like being tied down to some boring chores, listening to important people tell him what to do, fighting for a cause he hadn't yet decided was worth his life. Second life.
On a whim, Harry cast his patronus. A radiant dragonfly materialized, darting around the room in search of a threat to quell. The uplift of mood in the room was palpable. Arya's grip on the playing cards loosened as she gazed in awe at the luminous entity.
The dragonfly finished circling the room and came flitting down to alight on her finger. Arya's eyes were alight with amazement, an open smile on her face.
"Did you tell anyone yet about…your theories?" Harry slouched. He had to sit up to keep a hold on the frame of mind required to keep his patronus around.
Harry heard footsteps approaching the door. He waved his wand and dismissed the patronus. Arya gathered up the deck of cards. They went right back to playing as if nothing had happened.
"I was waiting for someone to speak with me. Him, actually. I did not expect him to speak with you." Arya made the hand twisting gesture and greeted the figure behind Harry. "Atra esterní ono thelduin."
"Atra du evarínya ono varda."
Harry frowned. He recognized that voice. He turned around and could not help but blurt out. "Oromis?"
AN: Next chapter is back to Eragon and Brom. The tone with them will be different, and I'd like some feedback on which you prefer. Someone suggested I summarize with letters from Eragon, but there are important stories to tell with those two that I haven't gotten to yet, stories canon Inheritance Cycle didn't tell.
I spent like an hour trying to figure out why bolds and italics were being lost from my document to the published page. It looks perfectly fine in the doc manager when I copy paste it in, but the moment I submit the document and go back to check, all the formatting is gone. Even though I can SEE a bold section now as I write this directly in the doc manager, which disappears. And no matter what format of export and file upload I use, something is lost (be it the italics/bolds or the line breaks). I finally gave up when the doc manager let me bold a word that was already bolded. It became double bold. I am serious. It just got a bit thiccer. But when I bold a non bold word, it looks exactly the same as the pre-double-bolded word. I am so confused and I think something is very wrong here. For now, you'll have to keep living without italics or bolds. FFN, please fix.