Published at 10th of June 2024 7:56 am

Chapter 267: Wands and Roses

8 November 1994, Beauxbatons, France

Harry woke up feeling a mixture of tiredness and comfort. He had barely slept the previous night, considering the bomb of knowledge that he'd ended up getting. It all just fit so well, even if it felt more like a bedtime story than an actual history text. Knowledge of the creation of the Light and Dark must have been sparse, to say the least.

Perenelle Flamel was probably the source of most of this story considering her skills in divination. She could have potentially tried to scry the past, but considering just how chaotic things must have been during the Convergence of Realms, seeing anything from that era must have been like trying to see through a storm...

Nevertheless, the story just made too much sense. The way Champions of Light and Dark tended to have similar motives to their predecessors. The Dark always tried to oppress the world and mould it the way it wanted to while the Light always tried to cleanse what it considered to be imperfections in the world.

It just fit too perfectly for Harry to try questioning it, even if he wanted to do so.

Speaking of Perenelle, that woman was fucking terrifying. Even when she was dead, she could have already put things in motion which could cause an untold amount of damage. Seriously, no wonder ministries tended to keep close eyes on seers. Sure, Harry had never heard of anyone being able to predict things with the woman's accuracy, but he would not look at another seer the same way again.

Harry imagined being able to do this… Somehow making years or even decades of plans in advance. Unfortunately, he had no way of really training his divination abilities. Seers weren't exactly popular and tended to be considered as covert national resources. No country publicly revealed their seers' locations in fear of them being abducted or killed off.

It seemed like Harry would have to settle with the random visions and dreams. For now…

A shame. It was probably going to be very useful in the coming apocalypse.

Yeah, that was also a thing. Ragnarök.

The word itself made him shiver. He had heard of the word previously from Norse mythology. It was the prophesized apocalypse of the Norse Pantheon, with most of the gods dying, and the world being destroyed. You know, normal apocalypse stuff…

The poem that Flamel wrote down, even if it was probably incomplete, didn't paint a proper picture. The part about the world serpent dying did make him feel guilty.

That was him. He had done that, killing Jörmungandr to defeat Tom Riddle. But, had he truly caused this? The events needed to accomplish this, to essentially kill a god, were absurd. First, he had to have created the perfect weapon, the Colt, unknowing of what was to come.

He had to come to the Chamber of Secrets, and not defeat Tom Riddle beforehand. The Basilisk had to have been slain, which Neville Longbottom did with a sword of all things… Riddle had to show off and Harry had to shoot the World Serpent with the Colt. Considering that Grindelwald had survived the shots with some preparation, Jörmungandr could have probably done the same somehow. He had to be surprised, to not realize what the weapon was before dying…

The series of events needed to accomplish this were beyond ridiculous, and Harry could almost see the hand of fate moving things around like pieces on a chessboard.

Was it truly his fault, or was this always going to happen regardless of any decisions he could have made?

It was needless to really wonder. After all, he could not change the past…

But now he had to deal with a fucking Apocalypse…

Things were never going to be easy for him, were they?

With a sigh, Harry decided to just face the music and go down to eat his breakfast. He was looking forward to hanging out with Daphne properly, especially after their small fight the week before.

However, as he walked out of the metallic dragon, he saw Lily Potter in her Unspeakable guise, obviously waiting for him. She stiffened when she saw him and spoke up, "Hey, Harry. I think we need to talk."

The last Potter really wasn't in the mood, especially with the fucking bomb left in his lap thanks to Flamel. Still, he decided to just get through with this, "Fine. Do you mind doing it on the way to Breakfast? I'm famished."

The fake Unspeakable nodded, and they both walked side by side to the palace. Harry decided to let the woman speak up first, "I'm sorry."

Well, wasn't that a surprise? He never expected the woman to apologize, "What are you sorry for?"

"I shouldn't have put a bounty on your head…"

Harry let out a deep sigh, "It's not about the bounty, Lily. It's about the fact that I specifically asked you to give me some space, and you went out of your way to do something like this."

"It was more efficient, though!" the masked redhead protested.

"I don't care about efficiency. If you hadn't noticed, I was more than fast enough. And it wasn't even more effective. I had personally gone out of my way to hunt down the other champions during the task. All you did was essentially force me to fight that Chimera and ten other champions at the same time since they wanted to personally take me out. It was faster, but if they hadn't done that, it would have taken me an extra hour to track them down. It wouldn't have even been an issue considering that the task is still going on right now. The only reason anyone has finished is because I gave the medallions to the other Hogwarts Champions and the Beauxbatons champions followed them back."

The redhead flinched at that. He could understand why. It wasn't nice to realize that your plan actively hindered another person's. Now, normally, her plan would have probably worked. As far as anyone knew, Harry was smart and good at duelling, but that didn't exactly translate well to winning a scavenger hunt… Lily had tried to stack the odds in his favour, turning the task into a martial contest, which he should have won easily enough.

The woman protested, "I didn't know what the task was in detail, only that it had riddles, and that fighting was allowed. I tried infiltrating the organizers, but only Maxime and the ICW delegates knew the specifics of the task. Apparently, there was a secrecy contract involved. I could have done more if I had more time, but you only decided to involve yourself when the Diary was revealed."

Now, looking back, if she hadn't even known about the task, it would have been logical to do that… She ensured, in a way, that any sort of task would turn into a fight, which Harry was more likely to win and get the Diary that she knew he wanted.

Considering the frankly confused tone, Lily hadn't really even considered why putting a bounty on her fucking son's head was a bad idea… After all, when you made the proper calculations, the results were the same, with Harry as the victor. In fact, logically, it was even an advantageous move to essentially secure the win since the Champions would actively try to hunt him down instead of winning the task.

It was also very close to the logic of killing her husband, a man that she had confessed to liking well enough to consider him a friend, without any hesitation, to save him. The pure pragmatism was correct, but it just wasn't right. Even if she had done this to save him, or even if she just wanted to escape the ambush on Godric's Hollows, maybe even if she thought it was a good opportunity to connect herself to another dimension, it didn't explain away the fact that her first reaction was to kill her husband.

That just wasn't how the thought process of normal human beings worked. Humans are a race heavily defined by their emotions, magical or not. Seeing someone so detached from sentiment, and obviously ruled by cold logic, just felt wrong…

What the fuck had the Department of Mysteries done to her to turn her into this?

Harry was honestly uncomfortable with the woman's personality and obvious obsession with him, but the cold truth was that he needed allies. Arcturus was trying to use the tournament to ready himself, but there was no one that could really stop Dumbledore or Grindelwald. Lily Potter could actually do some damage and she came with an army of enhanced werewolves and the Department of Mysteries' support.

Considering the whole mess with Ragnarök and the possible end of the world, he could see himself needing the help. Flamel's last message really shook him…

He would keep a close eye on her, but he had to at least give her an inch. And so, he put a fake amused expression on his face, "Well, please don't do this again. Out of curiosity, do you even have fifty thousand Galleons in case someone managed to take me out?"

"Of course not. I had complete trust in your abilities. After all, you're my son."

"All it takes is one spell for even the greatest of mages to lose. Anything can happen in a fight."

The masked woman nodded, "Yes, I know. Now, I know you don't feel comfortable with this, but my first blood magic lesson with the Greengrass girl is right after breakfast. Are you sure you don't want me to postpone?"

Harry simply shook his head. There was nothing he could do on that front without alienating both Daphne and Lily. It was probably the redhead's plan to include herself even further in Harry's life. He still didn't know if that was a good or a bad thing yet, but he hoped it was the former.

He had been outmanoeuvred with this, which he would admit readily, and he couldn't really refuse either of them. Was Lily trying to gloat or was she really trying to warn him so that he wouldn't be surprised? Fucking hell, that woman was confusing all the time, and her motive was unknown.

They kept walking in silence until they arrived at the Great Hall for their breakfast. He ignored the stares the other students were giving him and just sat next to Daphne who was talking animatedly about how excited she was for her lesson.

After breakfast, he decided not to join the spectators again and watch the task. It was just so boring to watch students try to figure out a puzzle for hours. Instead, he decided to go back to his room and try out the Alchemy experiments that Flamel had put in his book.

Flamel's viewpoint on Alchemy was very different from how the rest of the world expressed it. Alchemy was known as permanent magic. An artefact with a permanent enchantment just couldn't be made without using Alchemy.

However, the way Flamel explained it, permanence was a side-effect of Alchemy, not its intended use. The core of Alchemy was in the property of equivalent exchange, but the question was, of what?

Well, the truth was that it was an equivalent exchange in the levels of magic. Normal magic just used the energy processed by the body to mess with the way the world worked. The world keeps trying to go back to normal, which weakens the spell until it dissipates into nothing. That is why spells do not work permanently, it was a very well-known law of magical entropy.

Technically, in a closed system without any connection to the rest of the world, a spell could be permanent, but such a separation was almost impossible. Mages have tried to do so for centuries, but they weren't able to achieve much to create such an effect.

Alchemy was different. Instead of shaping the world, it convinced it that its new state was always the one it should have been in, that the spell was its default state. To do so, it manipulated the very veil of magic, cast a spell, and sacrificed something in exchange for stabilizing the system.

If the world was satisfied with the balance, the exchange was complete, and the spell became permanent. The more complex the spell, the harder it was to fool the world, hence the high degree of danger that came with the field.

Harry followed the instructions in Flamel's book and made a very stable array, that he quickly activated after checking everything. Suddenly, he felt a piece of timber be consumed into nothing, and another one start burning, and Harry could tell that the fire was not the product of magic, but genuine natural fire.

However, while this was a rather useless piece of magic considering just how stable it was, there was a reason Perenelle Flamel had asked her husband to include these kinds of instructions. Harry grabbed another piece of timber and recreated the magic thanks to his Arcane Hearing. Immediately, it was consumed, and a ball of fire appeared in his hand, which he threw at the enchanted wall. The wall was destroyed by the impact, and Harry quickly extinguished the fire with a wave of his hand and repaired the wall.

Well, for all her terrifying nature, Perenelle Flamel knew what she was doing.

Yeah, this was going to be fun…

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