Pre-Chapter A/N: More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Experimenting with two chapters a week, we'll see how long I can keep this up for.
Dumbledore was a fool, I thought as I stared at the newspaper. It was happening even in this world. There was no dead Cedric, just a heavily injured Krum who had returned home the second he was declared stable enough to travel. So there wasn't as much reason to look into the aftermath of the Triwizard Tournament as there must have been in canon. Still, the old man had stood in front of the Wizengamot in full session and declared Voldemort's return to the wizarding world. Maybe it was the right thing to do in the end—warn the public, have them watching for signs, for possibilities. But it was naive of him to think he'd be taken seriously.
The newspapers were already tearing into him—into both of us, in truth. I'd received their request for comments, maybe they thought I would tell them the old man was insane, deny what he said, but why make an enemy of him? Why lie? For fickle public opinion? I said the truth and now they said I was insane, brainwashed by Dumbledore, driven mad by my obsession with the dark arts. So many things they said, and so much they did not say.
With Dumbledore, the problem was his age. With mine, the problem was my sanity. They attacked from every angle they could find—effects of the killing curse as a baby, my use of the killing curse during the first task, my alleged obsession with the dark arts, rituals, everything they could throw at the wall, they did. Little stuck, but what stuck was probably going to stick hard—and for a while.
"You still reading that shite?" Sirius asked, stepping into the foyer.
"Like it or not, papers like this one tell the people what to think. It's useful to know what they're thinking," I retorted. While he trusted the old man, he'd found the smear campaign against him funny. The allegations that Dumbledore engaged in sexual affairs with goats just like his brother, Aberforth, was one that had him laughing for days on end. Of course, that mirth had turned into rage when I was chosen as the next target of their attentions. He was less pleased by that, less willing to see the comedy in their commentary. Comments about my possible instability being caused by my mother's muggle blood had him spitting fire for days. I'd had to convince him it truly wasn't worth it to go give Barnabas Cuffe a piece of his mind to make him more considerate of what he allowed to be posted on his paper. It truly hadn't been worth it. Maybe I could ignore it because I didn't care all that much about Harry's parents and saw insults to them as just another thing to be ignored, rather than confronted. Maybe it was because I thought they were all genuinely stupid and not worth my time. A lion concerns itself not with the mewling of sheep.
And have no doubts, the British people were sheep. When Voldemort's return was confirmed—and it would most assuredly be—they would be back asking for me to save them again. Thinking about it this way made it easier to see why Dumbledore did not seem to care all that much. He probably had over a century of experience with this. The people will revile you until they need you and then they will return like nothing ever happened.
Besides all that, though, we had better things to work on. I'd mentioned the need for an agent for the dueling tournament in Broekzele and Sirius had somehow gotten it into his head that he would be that agent and would handle everything we needed for the trip. Of course, who was I to stop him from plowing on ahead when he was fully ready to spend his own money on it. The money I had set aside would probably end up being spent on some dueling robes and boots, but that was still a worthwhile investment. Speaking of...
"Heading down to Broekzele now?" I asked.
"Yup," he said, popping the P.
"I found an agent that is going to show me some of the better properties they have for rent. Can't have my godson staying anywhere but the best, can I? What about you? What are you going to do today?"
"Working on my new shield spell," I said. I'd taken Dumbledore's advice and gone fully in on runes so most of my training now consisted of retraining myself to use some common spells runically. None of them had worked yet, but I could tell there was something in the shield spell that I was missing and that once it came together, everything would click just like it was supposed to.
"Okay then. There's food in the pantry if you want anything and if you need me, just shout me on the mirror, and I'll be right back," he said.
"Get going, Sirius. I'll be fine. I can take care of myself," I pressed. He just leaned over, and attempted to ruffle my hair. The silent, instinctive stinging jinx I sent at him had him snatching his hand back like a burned toddler, cradling it to his chest even as it began to welt.
"Okay, okay. I'm leaving. You're one mean kid, you know that right, Harry?" he asked even as he backed out of the room. I just watched him leave, making sure not to blink as I watched him leave. It wouldn't be the first time that he'd pretend to leave only to sneak back in and play a prank or two. Only when I was certain he was gone did I fully relax. I turned back to the work. A shield charm was a good test of concept, I thought.
For one, it would be possible to mathematically quantify how much better my runic magic was than regular wand magic—if it was better at all. For another, a shield charm had only a fixed amount of ways it could go wrong. If a shield failed, the worst it could do was not work, yeah? Even if it did decide to blow up in my face then I was still pretty sure that the explosion would be relatively tame.
So I left the drawing room and made my way to the training room. I'd already tried the Yoruba words for protection. They hadn't worked. More likely because they did not fit with the concept of a temporary shield charm. The chant earlier had worked because it was based on a real song, a real battle song beseeching the nature gods themselves to help restrain the enemy. After trying all the Yoruba I knew, I figured that the secret was not in the West African language itself. That would have been random—for Elder Furthark to react to a random African language.
I had a feeling the runic script was drawing on the fundamental concept behind the words I used. So I thought about something else. When you imagined a shield, what did you think of first? Just a shield, to be honest. There was only one shield across all mythology I could think of that had any reasonable level of notoriety.
So I slashed my wand through the air, starting with algiz for protection, layering it with uruz for strength to represent the shield being strong and isa for ice and stasis—nothing shall affect anything protected by this shield. I put these concepts in my mind as much as possible as I drew the runes together and spoke in my best Greek, "Aegis, I call upon thee, protect me from all who would do me harm." I intoned, feeding the rune with my magic. It flashed, before fizzling out. Okay, I had something there. Definitely more than I had before today.
XXXXXX
It turned out mastering the shield was just a matter of cementing my intention and adding it to every step of the drawing process. With the nature spell I'd used to trap the hellhound, it had been unconscious since I'd kept the chant in mind as I drew the runes, and so I could partition my mind to both parts of the spell simultaneously. With this one, with a much shorter incantation and a complicated runic structure, I'd started off focusing on the latter first and then the former at the tail end. It was only when I fixed that little bit that the spell came together.
The shield formed, massive and strong. The runes gleamed a strong silver as the rest of the shield was a glowing gold.
"Are you sure about this?" Sirius asked from his position opposite me.
"Hit this thing with everything you've got Sirius. Or don't tell me you're having performance anxiety? I understand how hard it can be to get up to it. You know it's really common with people your age. Three in five men over forty—"
"I'm not a day over thirty-five," he yelled, sending a bone breaker curse at my shield. The shield took the hit, glowing all the while and came out none the worse for wear. I didn't even feel the impact.
"That the best you can do? Also, I know your date of birth, Sirius. You're many days over—" Once again, he interrupted me, hammering my shield with more and more spells. A cutter, a piercing hex, a retching curse, a jellylegs jinx, and way more. It was only by the fifth spell did I begin to feel the shield straining with the impacts. In the end, the final spell, the straw that shattered my metaphorical camel's back was a slug-vomiting hex. The second the shield winked out of existence, it was all I could do to bend over in time to avoid the hit.
Of course, that didn't stop Sirius from nailing me with another one just as I straightened up. I felt the spell begin to run its course.
"I swear I'll get you back for this—" I didn't get to finish the sentence, doubling over as my throat ejected the slugs in their numbers. It was a Marauder special—this version of the slug vomiting hex. In truth, it was more like a curse than a hex but it wasn't like I could tell that to the poster boys of the light side. They had modified the intention, the arithmantic structure, and the makeup of the spell so that instead of the regular slug vomiting hex that could be canceled out with a simple finite, their spell took root at the bowels and basically did not stop until it had run its course. In their 'genius,' they hadn't even bothered making a countercurse.
I tried to avoid thinking about the continuous flood of green slugs that flowed from my mouth as I knelt on the floor to allow the spell to run its course. Oh, I was so going to get Sirius back for this one. It was with thoughts of replacing his shampoo with hair removal potion, adding a laxative to his night cap and then cursing all the toilets shut, and dying all his clothes hot pink, that I passed the two minutes or so it took for the spell to finish wreaking havoc with my body.
"I promise I'll get you back," I said, when I finally stopped retching. A mouth refreshing charm got rid of what remained of the taste, and I only looked at the accumulated slugs for long enough to vanish them with a flick of my wand.
"All I hear is talk, more doing less talking if you want to adopt the way of the Marauder, my young apprentice." I just scowled at him.
"Now I need you to help me test something else," I said.
"Oh? Another spell? Someone's been mighty productive."
"I wish. I just had an idea while I was working on this and hated to see how it would pan out," I said, before slashing my wand through the air to draw the runes while I murmured the chant: "Aegis, I call upon thee, protect me from all who would do me harm." The shield snapped into place. I did not use that word lightly. While most spells kind of built themselves into existence, the shield snapped into place. One second, it was not there, and the next it was. There were no halfsies with this spell.
"I just need you to hit this with a shield breaker. The strongest one you've got," I said.
"Your funeral, kid," he replied with a lazy shrug that belied the speed at which he carried out the instructions, snapping both spells at me with a twist of his wrist and a flick at the end—the first a shield breaker, the second another lime green slug vomiting hex. Trust Sirius Black to try. I prepared myself to dodge out of the way in case my theory ended up being wrong, but the shield repelled the shield breaker, taking it with no effect just as it did most other spells before it rebuffed the slug vomiting hex as well.
"That's insane," Sirius said with a whistle.
"How many more of those do you know?" I asked, and he answered with a purple spell that moved through the air like it was in slow motion. It was so much slower than a regular spell that you could just tell it was designed to face against immobile targets—like someone hunkered behind a shield, for example. It hit with an explosion of force but the shield remained stable and active.
"That one was from the Black Library. The fellow who came up with it called it the Siege-ender."
"How ambitious," I drawled. That spell had been powerful, but not so powerful that it would have ended a siege on powerful wards on its lonesome.
"Protection wards weren't anywhere near as complex when he came up with it. So it probably did actually end a siege or two back in his day."
"Not going to ask me how it works?" I offered, itching to explain my story.
"Do I have to? Not really in the mood for a lecture right now." I pinned him with a glare that promised even worse revenge if he did not behave himself.
"Fine, fine. How does your spell repel shield breakers?"
"Thank you for asking, Sirius. So shield breakers, on an arithmantic level, work by dismantling the protective intention integrated in shield spells. That's why they don't need to be so powerful that they break the shield. They simply 'nope' them out of existence. They don't target the shields, just the intention to protect," I said, leading him to the next question with my explanation. Teaching was fun. I wondered why I didn't go out of my way to do it more in my past life.
"But doesn't your shield spell have the same intention to protect?"
"Yes, but it's much harder to expunge because it's grounded by the rune, you see. Runes work because they are basically stamped on the fabric of reality. Guaranteed to work by magic itself. The intention, when grounded by a rune, becomes much harder to nullify. A powerful enough shield breaker cast by someone who puts a lot of power into it would probably work, but no one is going to do that," I said.
"A shame that the spell takes so long to cast. It seems almost perfect," he said.
"Indeed."
XXXXXX
Sirius' words set me down a different path for weeks on end as I focused on trying to cast the shield as quickly as possible. I'd managed to cut down the incantation to just the word, "Aegis," focusing on the intention in my mind's eye was enough to let the spell snap into place. The only bottleneck then became drawing the runes. I had tried cutting out one or two of the runes, but every change I made to that bit seemed to make the spell weaker by a significant degree. So I was essentially stuck with a great spell but not one that I could use in a duel or fast-paced combat because it just took too damn long to cast.
That setback sent me back to the drawing board. This whole form of magic would not work without modifications. But even beyond that, there was another issue—making more spells. A shield was good and all, but it was not going to deliver a dead Dark Lord to me anytime soon. With the next group of spells, I tried using as few runes as possible but I quickly found out that I needed at least two runes. One to provide the base intention, and the other to shape and narrow it down enough to become useful in a spell. KENNAZ symbolized a torch, but did nothing when I tried the concept of needing a light through it. Only when I met it with DAGAZ, which primarily symbolized dawn but also meant illumination with a bit of stitching, did the spell to create a glowing torch that lit up my surroundings work.
The more specific the effect, the more runes I needed to stack up. In a lot of ways, creating the spells felt like solving a puzzle. I had the tools. I just had to bring them together in a way that produced the image I saw in my mind's eye. Of course, not every spell was possible with this method. The more runes I stacked, the more likely it was that the spell failed for irreconcilable differences between the concepts being played with. ISA and KENNAZ did not tend to work well together, one symbolizing ice, and the other symbolizing creativity, vitality, progress, and a torch. It was interesting—playing around with the concepts like I did. Eventually, I would figure it out more thoroughly, I had a feeling in my belly that this was it. It would work.
A/N: Yeah, Harry is going to have to spend a lot of time ironing out the kinks in this one. I also am going to spend a lot of time looking at runes and trying to put things together in a way that makes sense. How fun. Next four up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.