Harry was sour. All the elves treated him no differently. They were as friendly as ever. But Harry could not forget that Majaia, Oromis, Islanzadi, they had become prison wardens.
He was not to leave Ellesmera.
Now that he knew of Oromis's existence, Islanzadi had decreed that Harry would stay in Ellesmera so as not to risk information of Oromis's existence reaching Galbatorix. She could do that, apparently, because she was the Queen, and Arya was secretly the princess of the elves.
Oromis had invited him down to where he lived, the Crags of Tel'naer. Harry had not wanted anything to do with the elf. It was Oromis's fault that he was stuck here. Oromis had shown his face to Harry on the assumption that he'd have no idea who he was, and thus pose no risk of the information getting out. Oromis was the one who'd screwed everything up, and Oromis was the one coming away from the whole thing smelling like roses.
Arya had given him the last dose of Wiggenweld. Apparently the old Rider had some kind of neurological condition that caused seizures. One sip bloody well cleared that up. Harry was not so petty as to deny healing to someone he disliked, and he was not sure he'd be allowed to. Arya made it clear Oromis was why she'd flirted with death to avoid using that last dose.
Harry's restless anger had few places to go but Islanzadi and Oromis, but Arya had suggested moving to the Crags would be for the best. If he trusted her, she'd said, he ought to trust Oromis. With everything. His unusual magic, his extradimensional origin, his ability to apparate, the hatching of the blue dragon egg to a new Rider, and whatever else Harry might divulge that could help topple Galbatorix.
Oromis himself was the guardian of many world-shaking secrets himself, and he lived in isolation waiting for that new Rider to come to him. He was perhaps the most invested person in seeing Galbatorix's downfall, having been among the leaders of the old Order the black king tore down.
Arya's pitch was this: Oromis was a brilliant scholar, she thought he could be trusted with Harry's secrets, thus Harry could work openly with his magic around him, he would likely feel obligated to help Harry with his projects after he was the one to cause the whole disaster, and he had nothing better to do with his time.
If Harry were willing to move to the Crags of Tel'naer, he could do whatever he wanted. Harry was not petty or spiteful enough to shoot down such an attractive offer over simple dislike of Oromis for circumstances out of his control, so he had packed up and relocated.
Oromis was clearly a Rider, which at least nominally put him on the side of 'good,' at least according to Brom, Arya, Eragon, and everyone else he might trust the opinion of on the matter. Harry knowing of his existence when it was a closely held secret meant he had some leverage to keep Oromis quiet about whatever he figured out. And Arya vouched for him. So reluctantly, irritably, Harry was willing to trust Oromis.
The Crags of Tel'naer were an hour's ride on horseback from Tialdari Hall. True to the elves' word, the horses he and Arya stole from the convoy guards what felt like ages ago were treated well. Majaia had shown him to a field where the pair of horses were grazing with a larger herd. There were no fences or leashes, apparently the elves were unconcerned that they'd run off.
A couple of elves tended to the horses, putting out food and brushing others, maintaining saddles under the awning of a little open hut near the edge of the field. They had offered to saddle his horses, but Harry declined.
Horses were not cars or broomsticks. They were not vehicles; they were animals. Harry did not intend to do much more than turn his mount loose at the Crags and pray it didn't run too far away or get itself killed. If he needed it again and it strayed too far, Harry would use the point me charm and walk after it.
Oromis rode with him on the chestnut horse, leading the way down twisting paths through groves of treehouses, fields, ponds, and marshes. Ellesmera really was amazing. The elves' efforts served only to enhance the nature that already existed. They might build a bridge over a lake with little passages through for wildlife, or round off an edge of a marsh to put up a rice paddy. A rock formation formed the foundation of a house propped up on stilts. Harry spotted more than one hobbit hole built into a grassy hillside.
It was very different from Vroengard.
"It is," Oromis agreed.
Harry hadn't realized he'd said that aloud.
"We were very full of ourselves, us old Riders," Oromis reminisced. "How amazing we were! How grand Vroengard was, the perfect edifice to represent our grandeur. Vast buildings of beautiful quarried stone, the most beautiful artwork, the greatest libraries full of knowledge we had discovered. The only place where dragons and elves could live in perfect unity."
Oromis lapsed into silence for a moment.
"We were prideful and vain," he said. "Today it looks very different. I have not been in a long time, but I do scry it sometimes. I wonder, what was I doing in this dream of yours?"
"Denying Galbatorix his second egg," Harry said, looking ahead.
"Ah." Oromis sounded sorrowful. "I sometimes wonder if, had I made a different choice that day, all that followed might be averted. But I cannot bring myself to believe I made the wrong choice then."
"Dragons are not pets or tools," Harry remembered. "They're partners. You don't just get a new one."
Oromis scrutinized him. "Exactly. And you dreamed this?"
He nodded. Oromis gave him a long look, then rode on in silence.
They came to the ledge of a cliff. Oromis dismounted with easy familiarity. Harry clambered down with him and walked to the edge. The view was breathtaking.
Far below, a field of long rippling grass swayed in the wind. Rock formations jutted into the air across the wide open field, trees dotting the earthy bits surrounding the crags. Running just before the rocks, a stream flowed down towards the south, bordering a grove of trees.
Far below, standing up against the edge of the field near the stream, a small wooden hut stood next to a little vegetable garden.
It looked like somewhere a hermit would live, Harry thought.
Oromis led him down a winding path to the bottom of the cliff. The path seemed disused, half reclaimed by nature.
They crossed the field to Oromis's hut. The Rider dismounted.
"We do not have stables in Ellesmera," he said. "We use our minds and the Ancient Language to communicate with our horses. When we have need of them, we call and they may come. Else we let them roam."
Harry shrugged and hopped off the dappled white horse. He patted her on the head and let her wander.
"They don't poop on your lawn or get eaten by wolves?" Harry wondered.
Oromis shook his head with twitching lips. "Elvish horses know what is expected of them, and the rest of the forest knows to leave them be." he turned to his hut. Harry gave it an assessing gaze and came to the conclusion it was unlikely to have guest rooms. It was barely big enough for one person.
"I am the only one who lives here," Oromis seemed to read Harry's mind. "When Riders trained here, they flew on dragonback every morning from Ellesmera. There are no guest rooms. There is room inside if you are willing to sleep on the floor. You seemed to have traveled light–"
Harry smothered a grin. Not exactly.
"I brought a tent," he assured Oromis. "Show me where I can set it up and I'll be fine."
He put it up about a hundred yards from the hut, up against the river by the crags. Oromis's eyebrow crept up when the tent unfolded from a box blatantly too small to hold it. Harry chucked his bag inside and went back to redoing everything he'd managed to accomplish while waiting for Arya to wake up.
It was the work of an hour to redo with magic what had taken a week to do while he was trying to be circumspect around Majaia. Harry did not much care that Oromis watched with naked fascination as Harry cast silently, or with strange incantations obviously not of the Ancient Language. He made no effort to explain himself. Arya could fill him in.
The foundry went down next to his tent. Oromis was probably more irritated than he let on about the imposition on his utterly immaculate field, but held his complaints to himself.
He seemed moderately suspicious when Harry far exceeded what any human could manage in pure labor.
The pressure vessel was finished in another half hour, and only used half the steel Eadara had apparently donated.
While he worked silently, Harry noted how empty the Crags of Tel'naer felt. That it was a training place for dragons made sense of the huge open spaces. Even with Oromis there, he felt isolated. He wondered how Oromis tolerated being all alone for a century. The conspicuous absence of a massive golden dragon told Harry quite a bit.
Harry didn't think he'd ever have wanted to go back to the owlery after Hedwig took a killing curse for him in the flight from Privet Drive. It would constantly remind him of her, and he was sure this place must have done the same for Oromis.
Oromis hardly ever spoke without Harry addressing him first. After the first day, the old Rider seemed content to sit outside during the day and practice calligraphy on his scrolls or sit with a bowl of water scrying or do strange elvish yoga by the river, or simply sit and enjoy the day.
He tended his vegetable garden and made his meals largely from what he himself grew. Oromis offered for Harry to eat with him. Sometimes he took Oromis up on the offer, other times he ate from his own supplies, or wolfed the food down and returned to working on his projects.
Harry wanted to call his spirits to help him work, but Oromis was always awake when he woke up, and showed no signs of tiring far later than when Harry was too exhausted to keep going.
The finished foundry was a brick building about the size of a three car garage. It looked jarringly out of place among the picturesque fields and swaying trees. Harry did not care. The elves wanted him here. They could put up with what he had to work on.
Harry enchanted the pressure vessel with the flame-freezing charm and the unbreakability charm to strengthen the steel far beyond what should have been possible. He had his crushed bauxite and his pressure chamber. He needed to consult Paul before continuing. He remembered what Morgan had said.
At worst, they'll think you're mad.
Sighing, Harry brought out the resurrection stone and turned it thrice.
"You weel need caustic soda," Paul Héroult crossed his arms. "Eet breaks down ze bauxite into alumina solution. Eet is not a matter of convenience. Eet is a chemical process. Al2O3 2H2O NaOH 2NaAlO2 3H2O. Aluminum oxide with sodium hydroxide and water produces sodium aluminate. Zen eet is merely a mixture and eef you wish, you may use whatever magic you must to separate out the red mud residue. I recommend keeping ze by products; vanadium, gallium, titanium, useful metals, no?"
"What exactly is caustic soda, and where will I get it?" Harry asked under his breath, glancing under the doorway. All the privacy charms in the world did not 100% reassure him Oromis could not possibly hear. Elvish hearing was inhumanly good.
"Sodium hydroxide," Héroult reminded him. "NaOH. Eet is used in everysing zese days. Soap, detergent, bleach, name a cleaning product. Eet is produced by electrolyzing brine – extremely salty water."
Harry rubbed his forehead. More electrolysis. He needed to set up a way to make electricity. That meant another expert. "Can you find someone who can teach me how to make a generator?" he asked. Paul nodded.
"I can. Een ze meantime, build your electrolysis vat. Ideally two or three. You weel need one for sodium hydroxide, and you weel want two for the Héroult process. You weel not get perfectly pure aluminum from ze first cycle. Een industrial processes, zey have many electrolysis vats, end to end. Alumina goes in ze first one, more pure aluminum comes out, goes into the next vat. Over and over, until pure. Two, at least you can cycle around and around." Héroult twirled his moustache.
"You understand what is required for ze vat?"
"Graphite electrodes, graphite lining, box that can withstand a thousand degrees Celsius, valve at the bottom into a collection pan for molten aluminum, fume hood for carbon dioxide and monoxide."
Paul Héroult nodded. "You weel not need a huge amount of sodium hydroxide. Eet is reused. Once ze alumina crystals precipitate out, you can recycle the caustic soda and water."
Of course, Harry did not have any graphite laying around. He had to get some, and that meant he needed a coke oven. He counted his blessings that in this specific case, an airtight oven was something already on his to-do list.
The coke oven was a simple brick assembly Harry put together with magically fired clay bricks and a few spells to seal airtight. He did not want to deal with finding and mining coal, so he used wood instead. And because he thought Oromis would judge him for cutting down a tree in the beautiful Crags of Tel'naer, Harry grew a tree from a scavenged acorn with the herbivicus charm and baked that.
Harry chose not to use wood fire for heating. He wanted a more permanent solution, so he developed pucks the size of a dinner plate full of gubraithian fire he could move around and slot beneath his ovens and pressure chambers and electrolysis vats as he needed.
He had his electrodes in the form of coke. He still needed a conductive metal to make the basin and inside of the electrodes out of. Ironically, the metal he had in greatest supply was one of the best conductors of electricity. He built the vats out of pure gold and clay bricks.
The fume hoods ran ducts to an enchanted box that vanished whatever entered it. Harry had managed to get the enchantment not to trigger on normal air, only on fumes. Hopefully.
From start to finish, the process went like this: first finely crushed bauxite went into a pressure vessel with sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda, and was heated to 270 degrees C. The hot, dirty alumina slurry came out and into a settling tray where Harry had enchanted a bucket wheel to summon out the impurities with the evello charm and dump them onto a tray to cool, which in turn dumped the cooled and dried red mud into an expanded bag for long term storage.
Second, the pure alumina in its sodium hydroxide solution went into a tall settling tank. The interior was expanded only up and down, and remained thin all the way across.
The first batch would slowly, very slowly precipitate into alumina crystals. Every subsequent batch, Harry would sprinkle in seed crystals to speed up the formation by dropping them in from the top and letting them drift all the way down the six storey length of the tube.
At the bottom of the tank, the sodium hydroxide was piped back to the first pressure chamber. The crystals were scraped off the bottom and sent to the next half of the process.
The residual water on the intact crystals would be baked off in the coke oven before they went through a hopper that Harry had enchanted with the reductor charm. That would turn the anhydrous alumina crystals into powder, which would be heated to a thousand degrees and melted, mixed with cryolite flux and poured into the electrolysis vats, where a powerful, extremely high amperage DC current would run through the alumina-cryolite mixture, drawing pure elemental aluminum to the negative cathode, the coke lining at the bottom of the vat. The reaction of the carbon in the coke with the alumina was exothermic, meaning the reaction heated itself after startup.
The pure aluminum was wicked off from the bottom of the vat and cast into billets and voila: aluminum ingots. The reaction's byproduct was CO2 and CO, both of which were caught (hopefully) by the fume hoods and vanished.
The foundry had begun to look like a mad scientist's lair. Tubes and enchanted conveyor belts, pipes, ovens, steel vessels and open-topped vats with giant electrodes and huge fume hoods all lent a certain maniacal steampunk aesthetic to the brick building.
At the end of it all, a steel ingot mold waited for the first bit of molten aluminum to pour in.
Harry called up Héroult to check his work.
"What do you think?"
The Frenchman stroked his trimmed beard, circling the foundry and inspecting each step, asking an occasional question.
"Crude, but it will work," he admitted. "Ze vats I developed were not beds so much as pots, wiz vertical trays of anode, cathode, anode, cathode. Like a thick comb. Increased surface area of electrodes, faster conversion. Easier to service, too. Ze coke layer will be eaten away by ze process. You will 'ave to replace eet eventually. Easiest to have removable plates. Take one out, replace it with a fresh one. Repair ze used one while ze process is still going."
Harry took out his wand and tweaked the design until Héroult was happy with it. It was an easy fix.
"Now where do I get cryolite?" Harry asked.
Héroult laughed. "Zat is a good question. Ze Germans struggled with ze very same. Ivittuut was ze only place it came from, a mine in Greenland. A tiny place in ze middle of nowhere, far off in ze Atlantic. Ze Americans protected ze mine during WWII – no aluminum for ze Nazis."
Harry sat dejectedly. "Ideas, solutions?"
Héroult rubbed his moustache. "If only you had a billiards table. Ze best ideas come to me like zat. Zat, or good drinks, music, and ze company of beautiful women." He grinned. "In your world, zey use synthetic cryolite, made from fluorite. Zat will not help you much wizzout a source of fluorite."
Harry sat with the idea. This promised to be another quest. Aluminum was extremely common on Earth – the most common metal in its crust, to be exact. It was not unbelievable that he'd found a source very close by in Ellesmera. He could not rely on being so lucky again, especially now that Islanzadi had decreed him chained to this one city.
Bitterly, he kicked at a bit of dirt on the stone floor.
"'Ave you not made things from nothing?" Héroult asked. "Wiz your magic. A castle, Eef I remember right."
Harry sighed. "Yeah, but conjured stuff doesn't work right. I mean, it works fine for a muggle. I want to enchant this plane. Enchantments are much stronger, much better on real stuff. I dunno why, I just know that's how it is."
Héroult hmm'd. "You really need a billiards table," the Frenchman confided.
The idea came to him in a flash of insight. Harry sat up. "The cryolite is not consumed, right? No part of it is incorporated in the final aluminum."
Héroult gave him a look like perhaps Harry was rather dull. "It is pure aluminum. Zere is nothing else in it. Zat is ze raison d'être."
"So if I just conjured the cryolite," he reasoned slowly, "it wouldn't matter since the end result is real metal."
Héroult shrugged. "You tell me. You are ze wizard. I am ze chemist."
Harry jumped out of his chair, excited. "Why do I need real sodium hydroxide, either? I can conjure it since no part of it is incorporated in the pure aluminum."
Héroult grinned. "It sounds like you 'ave figured zis out."
Harry frowned at the electrodes to the electrolysis vat, unconnected to any source of power. "Could I do the same with the electricity?"
Paul raised a brow. "Now zat would be impressive. Zis was one of ze hardest parts in my day. We did not have mighty power grids. Getting high enough amperage to drive electrolysis of a molten metal was not easy."
"There are spells that shoot lightning bolts," Harry deadpanned.
The chemist shook his head. "Lightning is about thirty thousand amperes. You will need three hundred thousand amperes. Can your spell shoot ten lightning bolts at once?"
Harry looked down at the Elder Wand in his hand. "Or I just need to cast the spell really hard."
Harry made a generator. He probably could shoot a massive lightning bolt and get the job done, but it would require him to sit there constantly for hours, firing into the anode while the aluminum took its sweet time to drift towards the cathodes.
Generators were bloody complicated. He enlisted Jack Kilby's help in building one, an American scientist who'd died as recently as 2005, only 15 years before Harry had left Earth.
Bloody complicated was a massive understatement. Jack Kilby explained phases and currents and waveforms, amplitudes and frequencies and voltage and resistance until Harry's head spun. He had always considered himself reasonably smart, but this felt like about a thousand steps beyond rocket science.
He could tell Kilby wanted a whiteboard or something to draw illustrations. Harry had never felt so stupid as when trying to grasp what he was trying to teach him. It occurred to Harry then that perhaps being the most brilliant scientist did not mean being the best teacher.
Nevertheless, Kilby was able to eventually coax Harry through the process of building a three phase rectifier (even the name made his head hurt) with copious amounts of fine gold wire and a healthy dose of conjuration for everything else required. Once he knew how to make one, Harry was able to create dozens and dozens of them to wire in parallel to reach the absurdly high amperage needed to electrolyze aluminum.
The source of power was Harry's idea. Just about every source of electricity came from rotation. Coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, even nuclear power came from something turning a crankshaft hooked up to a generator. Fuel heated water, turned the water into steam, and that steam ran through a turbine to turn a shaft that ran the generator.
The execution was an unholy mess of wiring that gradually got simplified and refined down to a pair of chassis. One was about the size of a microwave and had a little gearbox inside, the other was the size of a couch with a switch and a couple of dials.
Inside both the small box and the large one were wheels Harry had enchanted to spin with a rotary charm. They were both hooked up to a crankshaft. In the small one, there was a neodymium magnet running a small rectifier that turned the alternating AC current into direct current, which ran through a cable to the large generator and powered the electromagnet that powered the much larger alternator.
The little one was like a starter engine. Once the coils on both were engaged, Harry could slowly ramp up the power output of the big generator by feeding rectified DC current back into the electromagnetic coil. That was what the first dial was for. The second dial controlled how much of that DC current went to the electrolysis vats.
Harry was faintly astonished that it worked when he spun up the whole thing and saw arcs of electricity jumping across the electrodes in the vats on the other side of the room. It felt too complicated to actually work.
All that together meant Harry was in business. He conjured his cryolite and sodium hydroxide, fed the first batch of finely crushed bauxite into the starting hopper, and sat back to watch as the magic took over.
It would be a while before the tower of sodium hydroxide-aluminate solution precipitated the first batch of crystals, especially the first time when he didn't have seed crystals. In the meantime, Harry went outside to enjoy some outdoor time for the first time in several days.
"Do you resent me or are you merely frustrated?" Oromis asked over lunch. He had made a bowl of cream of wheat with fresh raspberries.
"A bit of both," Harry admitted. He could be honest about his feelings. "I am being punished for your mistake. Why would you even show your face to me if you're such a big secret?"
"If you didn't know me, my face would be unremarkable," Oromis pointed out. "It is an unbelievable fluke that you are familiar with a century old Rider. You are a human, and the only humans who would have known me from that time were once Riders."
"Seems a bit stupid to risk such a big secret no matter the justification." Harry conveniently ignored that he had done just that with Durza. The Shade shouldn't have been able to identify him. He had never smelled or seen or heard Harry, except for two words.
Oromis inclined his head, popping a cherry in his mouth. "Arya tells me she has filled you in on her duty. You understand this makes you a very consequential person. And I'm sure you know your story does not add up."
Harry shrugged. "I guess."
It was always bizarre to have it brought up like that. Having people deem him 'special.' Harry just lived his life. He did good when the chance to do so confronted him, and perhaps surviving all that he had made him remarkable, but Harry was still the same person who once had not even believed in magic.
"You spend more energy with your magic than a human should be capable of," Oromis observed.
"Yeah. I do."
"And you do not use the Ancient Language."
Harry shrugged. "Sometimes. The unbreakable oath thing makes me nervous."
"Magicians do well to choose their words carefully," Oromis agreed. "I am sorry. Arya lent me the impression you might be willing to trust me. If that is not the case–"
"I'm a bit annoyed with her too," Harry interrupted. It was like Oromis couldn't understand the idea of not being trusted. If he was the 'good guys' ultimate secret, anyone in a position to know of him would probably implicitly trust a Rider who survived Galbatorix's purge.
"Understandable. This situation is not ideal for any of us, much less you, who should be an honored guest. I cannot help that, though, and you will have to live here for some time. Is this to be how we treat each other? A frosty standoff?" Oromis seemed utterly unperturbed by the idea.
Harry hated Oromis for turning the situation around on him. Oromis managed to make his own massive fuck up seem like Harry's problem, and like Harry was the immature one.
"As long as I am being held here for your mistake, it seems reasonable, doesn't it?"
Oromis's face turned sympathetic and apologetic. "Of course."
Despite their silent standoff, Oromis seemed in unusually good spirits. Whatever the Wiggenweld had cured him of, it had to be serious. He practiced his own magic and did his extreme yoga every day. Evidently Oromis was not entirely alone; other elves occasionally came down to the Crags to visit him and bring supplies or messages from the other elves.
Gradually, Harry began opening up to Oromis. The loneliness got to him a bit, and it was something the dead were not well suited to help him with. He wondered if that was part of the magic of the resurrection stone. The tale of the second brother was never far from his mind when he used it.
He invited Oromis into the foundry and showed him the first couple aluminium bars. The Rider was beyond fascinated by the line of heavy machinery that produced them, especially the generator, which Harry warned him 'would hit him with ten lightning bolts if he touched it wrong.'
His plans for his first airplane were spread on conjured graph paper in his studio, a collaboration that mostly consisted of Neil telling him what to do and Harry solving with magic the problems that seemed too complicated to tackle without it. He worked in a corner of the foundry he'd kept clear for working on other projects. Oromis was fascinated with those, too.
His first plane was not too ambitious. He just wanted a proof of concept, so it was a simple propeller two-seater. The propeller was run by a gearbox connected to an enchanted flywheel, just like the generator. Harry had enough leftover steel from the pressure chamber to make the first airframe. It took some stretching and some of the beams probably wouldn't hold up without unbreakability charms, but it would do the job.
Paul Héroult had solutions for that. In addition to inventing the process for extracting aluminum from alumina, he had also invented the electric arc furnace, and had kept up with its development in modernity. Harry already had the hardest part of it finished – the power source. The rest of the machine was fairly simple. Harry still needed iron ore to smelt into steel, but there had to be a source somewhere in Ellesmera if the elves were making things from steel.
In return for showing Oromis what Harry was working on, Oromis reciprocated in some ways. He invited Harry to join him for yoga (the Rimgar, he called it, or the dance of snake and crane) and told him some things about his daily routine. Harry managed well enough with the exercise. He wasn't in the same league as Oromis, but there were baby versions of the Rimgar for him, and those worked well enough.
"I used to watch the four of you," Oromis told Harry, sitting over his scrying bowl. "When you were first building your castle before your wards went up, when Saphira first hatched in Eragon's home, and when you and Brom went with them on your journey. As of late he has protected himself against scrying. All of you."
"You knew about them? I thought you had to have seen someone before you could scry them." Harry was somehow unsurprised to find that Oromis had been watching Eragon. His one and only prospective future student was probably a very important subject to him.
Oromis nodded. "Aye. But I knew Brom and there are variations of the spell that allow you to hear what you see. And I had seen Saphira's egg, and that too let me get close enough to listen in and observe your progress."
"You knew Brom?" Harry was again unsurprised. Brom was a man of many secrets. "He told me the story of the Menoa tree. I guess he saw it in person."
Oromis's eyes crinkled. "Know him? He was my student."
Harry choked. "Brom's a Rider!?"
"His dragon is no longer with us," Oromis said sadly. "But yes. Once a Rider, always a Rider."
"Does that mean the first time you saw my face was when you saw me in person?" Harry asked. The astonishment of the revelation was already fading; Brom was a mysterious old man. A prime candidate for revelations of remarkable history.
"Indeed. Else you appear as a white silhouette."
"Well, what did you think?" Harry asked. It was mildly unsettling to hear he'd been being watched.
Oromis stirred his tea. "The person before me is different from the one I watched in the Spine, but he shares a great similarity. He seeks purpose."
"Your unbiased opinion," Harry said acerbically. He knew he'd be valuable to their cause.
Oromis inclined his head. "Just so. Why did you build a castle? Some place to live? Nothing so grand would have sufficed."
"I want to teach magic," Harry said. "My kind of magic. Eragon was my first student, I guess. Brom kept insisting it was a terrible and dangerous idea. The Ra'zac proved him right."
It was hard not to feel annoyed. No permanent harm had been done, but they had been ousted from Carvahall and now Eragon was on track to be sucked into the Varden's war. Harry still didn't know how committed he was to it. He didn't think he could leave Eragon to fight by himself. But Durza had proven that Harry's magic just wasn't up to the task of fighting Alagaesia's magicians.
"Did it work?" Oromis was curious.
Harry shook his head. "All I managed to teach was for Eragon to use Alagaesia's magic without the Ancient Language."
"Still commendable," Oromis commented. "You unlocked his latent talent, before he was a Dragon Rider. Magic is extremely rare in Alagaesia not just for how rare the ability itself is, but for the impossibility of screening for such a talent when the conditions for first using it are unintuitive. I am certain there are as many magicians who learned to use their power as there are magicians who lived and died without ever knowing they had the ability.
Harry waved it off. "Not even that worked as well as I'd hoped. A lot of my magic interpolates. I can summon something with just an idea of what I'm targeting, even if I've got no clue where it is or how far away it is. Eragon could use the incantations I learned, but they still required him to provide all the mental details to his spells. As restrictive as his limited vocabulary is, the Ancient Language let him build out spells that could 'think' for him in a way."
Oromis nodded. "The Ancient Language has enormous advantages. Most magicians are completely unaware that they can use magic without it at all. This is good, since with no barrier between mental whims and magical outcome, those unspoken spells can be incredibly dangerous, more so for the ignorant who may do something terribly foolish and destructive while having neither the restraint nor the education to know why it was a bad idea. The Ancient Language provides a sort of check on amateur magicians. Their vocabulary limits the damage they can do. As they learn more words of power, hopefully they grow wiser, too. Do you ever have problems with your own spells going awry?"
Harry thought about it. "You can screw up spells, but the worst disasters I've ever seen were all fixable. Some pillock vanished all the bones in my arm, Seamus Finnegan had a habit of blowing stuff up – not like a bomb, just a puff of ash and cinder. Some spells just sorta fizzle if you do them wrong. Brom was clear with Eragon and with me; fucking up your spells in Alagaesia means death. End of story."
Oromis was intrigued. "Why do you think that is?"
Harry remembered what Morgan had said. "My brand of magic is about telling a story, or at least that's what I've been told. It's all about ideas, but not just the ones in your own head. One of the first spells I learned was the levitation charm, wingardium leviosa. It's a stupid name with no sense behind it, but the first years have been learning that way for ages, and the adults still use the same incantation, too. Everybody believes that incantation makes things fly. When kids are taught the incantation, Professor Flitwick tells them what the incantation is going to do. Thus, I could be thinking other things when I say the incantation, but everybody who knows what it's meant to do will keep me in line."
"And if a student doesn't know what the incantation is meant to do?" Oromis wondered.
Harry realized he knew the answer to that, too. "It still works. I found a book that had incantations written in the margins. It didn't say what the spells did, just the incantations. I was an idiot and I started using them without knowing what they did. One said 'for enemies,' so when a guy attacked me, I just shouted the incantation and waved my wand at him."
He remembered the mincemeat he'd made out of Draco's chest and winced. "It turned out to be some kind of slashing spell that resisted magic healing. Obviously if I used the same incantation again, now that I knew what it did, it would do the same thing. I dunno what would have happened if I said the incantation the first time while firmly trying to turn Draco Malfoy into a ferret. Would it have worked? Maybe. But even when I had almost no idea what the incantation did, it still produced the proper effect."
"You weren't worried Draco Malfoy would retaliate?" Oromis checked.
Harry huffed. "He was already trying to cast the Unforgivable torture curse on me. Mine was more retaliation than provocation."
"Trying?" Oromis raised a brow. "How was he failing? Were his spells too weak?"
"I dunno," Harry said. "I never got hit. He missed."
That was important to Oromis. The Rider nodded to himself. "How else can spells not work as intended?"
Harry considered. "You can obviously dodge them. Most spells can be shielded, except the Unforgivables. Crucio, the one Draco was trying to use, that's one of them so it goes through all shields. I guess the caster can fail to cast the spell right. The Unforgivables are a good example: you've got to mean it."
Faintly, the corner of his lip twitched. He wondered if anyone had killed Bellatrix Lestrange after he left. He certainly hoped so.
"You've got to really want to see someone screaming and writhing in agony to properly cast the torture curse," Harry told Oromis. "Same with the killing curse. You've got to really want someone dead. That helps with accidental casting. Moody – well, Barty Crouch Jr. thought a bunch of students saying Avada Kedavra and pointing their wands at him would just give him a nosebleed."
"I dunno. It's different. Durza cast a sleep spell at me that took effect the instant the word left his lips," Harry remembered. "There was no way to put up a shield in time, and there was no jet of light to shield from or dodge. The effect just…happened. And Brom is big on being careful with Alagaesia's magic. One misworded spell sucks you dry. That just wouldn't happen." Harry tried to imagine the most difficult magic he'd ever wrought.
It had to be duelling Voldemort in the graveyard after the Triwizard Tournament. Pushing that bead of light into Voldemort's wand took every iota of his willpower and strength.
"I feel like to kill yourself using magic, if it's even possible, you'd have to push and push and push, and even then you'd probably just fall unconscious," Harry reckoned. "If a spell was too much, it'd be like trying to lift a gigantic boulder. You just wouldn't be able to muster the effort."
Oromis was attentive to his ramblings, and treated each word with genuine care. When he saw that Harry was done, he asked, "do you still want to teach magic?"
Harry examined his feelings and found them unchanged. "I do," he said honestly. "I taught a bit of self defense magic for a year and it was loads of fun. Even though Eragon couldn't do the same magic I could, it was still fun to push him and watch him grow. I wouldn't have done it if I realized how horrifically dangerous it was, and I don't think I could do it again in good conscience, but I did enjoy it. What I'd really love is to find out if there are any more people with magic like mine. People I can teach transfiguration to without worrying that conjuring anything larger than a grain of sand will kill them. And I want to build a community of magic users, something like the wizarding world back home."
The nostalgia took Harry by surprise. For as screwed up as the darker underside of the wizarding world could be, Harry was still a sucker for the bright colors and blatant magic of Diagon Alley, the history and whimsy of Hogwarts castle, the faint oddity and ridiculousness of the wizardborn, and the escape it provided him from the mundanity of the Dursleys.
He still remembered sitting outside Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor in the summer before third year, eating ice cream and doing his homework on Diagon Alley, getting up and going to bed when he liked in his room at the Leaky Cauldron, wandering up and down Diagon Alley visiting the shops and getting a real taste of freedom.
Maybe it was impossible to get that innocence back. But that didn't mean he couldn't try.
Oromis folded his fingers together. "Tell me if it's unwelcome, but I want to tell you that you are not the only one in Du Weldenvarden who feels stuck here."
Harry gestured for him to proceed.
"Elves generally live according to their passions," Oromis said. Arya had said as much a few times. "We used to be afforded much more flexibility in that. Explorers, diplomats, mountaineers, divers, they all forwent their lives to shelter here from Galbatorix."
Great. Oromis was invalidating Harry's feelings by pointing out that other elves felt the same way.
"They have come up with other ways to do what they enjoy while cooped up here." Oromis got to his point. "There are groups of spellcasters who collaborate and share their efforts to accomplish novel things with magic. If metallurgy or craftsmanship are your passions, there are elves who would enjoy speaking with, collaborating with, and teaching or learning from you."
Harry was not particularly enthused by the idea of 'learning metallurgy' from a thousand year old legendary expert. For whatever reason, the nerves of speaking to a legendary spirit were not the same as a living expert. Neil Armstrong's deeds were already etched in stone. His resume was fixed. Even if his legend reached to the Moon, Harry imagined that with enough time (of which he had plenty) he could make it there too.
Maybe it was an antisocial anxiety to feel like whatever trade he learned, he had to at least be potentially capable of being the best at it. A living master seemed unapproachably beyond him in skill and understanding, and they would outpace him at learning more, or so Harry worried.
It would be horribly awkward to join a group of spellcasting nerds when he literally couldn't even use their kind of magic, and he'd only had a couple months' crash course over Eragon's shoulder from Brom.
Harry felt like his education was lacking, and he decided he was not going to supplement it with the elves. He clasped his hand and felt for the ring with its stone set in the band. He had different experts to speak to.
"Maybe later," Harry prevaricated. "Arya suggested I keep the secret of my unusual magic even from elves. I wouldn't have told you except that she insisted you were the most trustworthy."
Oromis hummed. "Of course."
"I'm going to offer you some advice on your situation. You don't have to take it, but I hope you'll listen."
Harry blinked. Somehow he had assumed Neil Armstrong had hopped onto the Saturn V rocket in the middle of a blank career, and after it was done he'd just retired. Even if he knew better, the enormity of his achievement made everything else seem necessarily insignificant.
The astronaut put on the air of telling a story. "Anyone in the military will tell you it's 90% boredom, 2% terror. A lot of our time is spent sitting on our thumbs. On those boring days, the sarge will find useful things to make us do. Nobody is going to do that for you."
Harry marked off the proper length and cut the steel beam with his finger and a thought. Where had the other 8% gone?
"Isn't that what I'm doing?" Harry asked.
Neil bobbed his head. "It's more than just working on a hobby. We keep our skills sharp. We run laps and do physical conditioning, we do firearm drills, we fly practice fights. Think about what skills you found lacking in your last mission. Hone those."
Harry added the beam to the frame. He checked the schematics and marked a notch with a protractor on the end of the beam, then cut it with a spell. He propped the beam up and slid it against the frame before a reparo fused the metal seamlessly together.
"It looks like my magic is just about incapable of winning a fight against theirs," Harry began ticking off a list. "I'm out of Wiggenweld, but I haven't got any dragon blood to make more. Transportation was an issue, but–" he gestured at the half assembled frame of the airplane.
"That's in the works. We ran low on food leaving Gil'ead, but I restocked before we crossed the Bay of Fundor. I dunno what I need to work on."
Neil crossed his arms. "You've already given up on healing and fighting? I seriously doubt you've exhausted all angles of approach for both issues."
Chastised, Harry gave it a bit more thought. The Cloak was perhaps the only thing keeping him competitive in magician's duels, if his encounter with Durza was anything to go by. His enchanted boots helped him escape Gil'ead. Maybe he just had to come at it from a different angle. Enchanted items were carrying him in his confrontations. He could lean into that.
And the healing issue. Potions were not the only way to heal. Harry's repertoire of healing spells was pathetic. He knew three, and one of them he'd only ever seen Gilderoy Lockhart use.
Harry resolved to work on that, and let Neil know.
"Good," the astronaut smiled. "Self-discipline is not easy. Your situation is not as dire as it appears. That Arya has not mentioned your Cloak or apparition means she is defending your ability to disobey the Queen and leave anyways. If I may offer my armchair psychologist's examination, I think Oromis hit the nail on the head; while you're stuck here, you don't know what to fill your time with, how to be useful, what to do with yourself. You're treading water. I think you need more information. Are you really going to be stuck here for months, years? Or is this temporary? If you spend each day hoping you'll only need to be here a couple more, that will make for a very long year."
Neil glanced over his shoulder at the door to the workshop. "I think you should also take this time to hone your skills. You struggled to get Arya back here safe. You're working on better transportation. What else went wrong? Examine the mission, determine what you can improve, and work on it."
"Finally, you need to decide what you'd do if you were free to leave. Would you rejoin Eragon? Run more philanthropist missions in the Empire? Head back to your castle? Like it or not, Alagaesia has few job openings for a magician. Fight for the Varden, fight for the Empire, or run from the war. Pick one and commit, Harry. As long as you sit on the fence, you will feel restless."
AN: This chapter came out scattershot. I'm pretending it's just a reflection of Harry feeling restless rather than my own writing failure.
I really want your feedback on the aluminum part of this chapter. In HEFMA, I did stuff like this a lot. Explaining the basics of some technical thing IRL and then exploring some magical augmentations that worked alongside it. I recognize that chemistry is very dense for fanfic and this might be too much, but I want to know if most of you are more interested in swashbuckling adventure and gallivanting across Alagaesia, or the sort of magical inventions I explored in the previous iteration of this fic. I got a bunch of reviews from HEFMA readers suggesting people liked reading this stuff: mixing engineering with magic. Tell me if more of this interests you. Maybe not this technical, but in the same spirit.
If you're interested in this style and want to read more, burnable on FFN wrote some amazing stories that work just like it.
PS: Is JK's way of writing accents racist?