[From Samhain to the Solstice]; Dust and Wonders, PG-13, gen, 1/2
Title: Dust and Wonders
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: None, gen
Content Notes: Necromancy, dark magic, massively AU, largely amoral Harry
Wordcount: This part 3900
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry meets a wizard who calls himself Aeron Luthan. Except Aeron isn’t really a wizard, he’s a necromancer, and he alters the course of Harry’s entire life.
Author’s Notes: One of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics, for the following prompt by LoveThyFrenemies: Necromancer Harry. Young Harry runs into this old, homeless wizard who teachers him art of necromancy, so he doesn't go to Hogwarts. He learns how to summon dead people like his parents and grandparents, terrorize his abusive relatives, and learn secrets that no living people know. He later learns to manipulate Horcruxes as well to enslave Voldemort's soul forever. This is the first part, with a second to be posted tomorrow.
Dust and Wonders
“What are you staring at, boy?”
Harry had spent the morning running away from Dudley and Piers, again. He was winded and streets and streets away from Privet Drive. He was hot and sweating and only wanted a drink of water.
That was maybe the reason that he answered as he did. “You.”
The man was sitting against the brick wall of an alley, wrapped in so many scarves and rags and tattered scraps that Harry thought he must be a vampire or something. No one else could be cold on a day like this. All Harry could see of him was long, tangled brown hair with streaks of grey in it and a pair of eyes that glittered haughtily at him when the man spoke.
Not that that was anything new for Harry. People looked at him haughtily all the time, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and the neighbors and the primary school teachers who believed Dudley over him. Harry just glanced at the man again and then kept walking. It didn’t seem likely that someone homeless would be able to give him water or money to buy it.
Except somehow the man was in front of him, and he was bigger and taller than Harry had thought. Harry stepped back, keeping a wary eye on his fists. He had long fingernails smeared with grime. They would hurt if he scratched Harry.
The man cleared his throat with a sound like a tiger spitting, and said, “Name’s Aeron Luthan.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Not you, boy. Me.”
Harry nodded, still keeping a wary eye on the man’s hands. Aeron sighed as though he despaired of him. “And what’s your name, boy? It’s traditional to reply with that.”
“Harry Potter.” With Harry’s luck, the man would have heard of him, and heard what the Dursleys were saying about him, and he wouldn’t want to associate with him any more after that.
“Harry Pot-” Aeron stared at him as if he had heard of him, but to Harry’s confusion, he just looked surprised, not suspicious. Then he said, “Well, boy, let’s see if you have the scar.” And he gestured, and for some reason a cool breeze brushed against Harry’s forehead, and Aeron was staring at the lightning bolt scar that always sat there.
Harry jerked away and flattened down his fringe over the scar again, staring warily at Aeron. Aunt Petunia was always on about how he shouldn’t show it to people, it was ugly and no one wanted to see that.
“Well, well,” Aeron murmured. “And in the Muggle world, too!”
“What’s a Muggle?”
Aeron turned his head back and forth in a way that made him look mental. Harry was already bracing himself to run when Aeron breathed, “Can it be? Harry Potter, utterly ignorant of his heritage, and mine to shape?”
Harry didn’t like that “mine to shape” part, and he didn’t know what Aeron was talking about for the rest of it. He really was going to run, the minute Aeron started muttering or raving to himself the way homeless people did, and looked away. But instead, Aeron took a step forwards and knelt down in front of him. Harry started. Now he could see the man was wearing a collection of dark scraps that all fluttered around something that looked like a dress. Did men wear dresses?
“I can give you power,” whispered Aeron. “I can teach you to use your magic, to summon the dead, to terrify your enemies. You are a wizard. The strange things that you must have noticed you can do on occasion? They are magic. But my branch of magic is much darker and more powerful than the one you might call your own if I left you as you are.”
Harry thought he understood only about half of that, but he was intrigued enough to demand, “Why would you do that, though? No one would do that for me without wanting something in return.”
Aeron smiled, and his eyes glittered again. “You are famous among wizards. Your kind’s world has outlawed my magic. I’d like to raise and train someone who would be loyal to my magic, and someone who could have the power to change wizards’ minds and hearts to favor it.”
“I’m-just Harry. Not famous.”
“I will tell you the truth. I will show you how to manipulate others. Are you interested?”
“But how do you know that you’re not mistaking me for someone who’s really famous?” Harry wanted this to be real, but more than that, he wanted to know if it wasn’t. He couldn’t bear for the offer of teaching and real magic to be given and then taken away again, the way the Dursleys were always taking away the holidays and the gifts they promised him if he just did a little better.
Aeron reached out and laid a hand on his forehead. Harry gasped as a sharp spark traveled down from the scar to his arm, and Aeron stared at him.
“No one else has that scar,” he whispered, “and the name, and the power. There is something of the dead in that scar, Potter. Something that I can teach you how to use for your own benefit, but only I can. Those wizards whose blood you bear would only teach you to be afraid of it.”
Harry swallowed. “I’m tired of being afraid.” And it was true. He didn’t want to run away from Dudley and Piers anymore. He didn’t want to cower in front of Uncle Vernon or watch Aunt Petunia warily because he was waiting for her to scream at him.
“You would learn fear as respect if I taught you.” Aeron was leaning back in a really weird-looking uncomfortable position, but his eyes were shining and so was his face. “You would learn to fear the dead and the power you worked with, true. They might escape your control at any moment if you did not. But you would have that power.”
“Could I-I mean, wizards have to be hiding, right? Since no knows about them? So could I use that power on my family? Would someone come arrest me or something?”
Aeron gave a deep chuckle that made Harry start, but he relaxed a little when he realized the man was beaming at him, not angry. “There are indeed laws against the use of magic on Muggles. But not the power I will teach you. The Ministry can’t sense it. Their magic can’t track it. And it’s already illegal simply to know, so there aren’t separate laws about using it on Muggles.”
Harry hesitated a long moment. In some ways, he didn’t think that he wanted to learn this. He tried to obey the law and be a good person, partially because he didn’t think the Dursleys were. He knew this was going to change everything if he learned it. He would never really be able to go back and obey the law again.
But he wanted them to fear him.
“Okay,” he told Aeron, and endured the man cackling and grabbing onto him like he was one of Dudley’s plushes or something.
*
Harry stepped out of his cupboard, heart pounding, when Aunt Petunia yelled for him to make dinner. He knew that he had to do this. Aeron had been uncompromising. He wasn’t going to keep teaching Harry if Harry didn’t do this.
And it would make him feel better after the day he’d had, when Dudley had chased him and Aunt Petunia had swung another frying pan at his head.
It was still frightening.
“What are you doing, you lazy boy? Get in the kitchen right now-”
Aunt Petunia turned around and gasped when she saw he was already standing there. That made Harry feel stronger. She was afraid of him. He smiled at her and spread his hands out in front of him, the way Aeron had taught him.
“What are you doing? What kind of freakish-”
Harry closed his eyes, and the names were in his thoughts as if they’d always been there, even though he had never heard Aunt Petunia tell him the names of his grandparents. “Richard, Elise,” he whispered. “Come to me. Hear me. Join me and your daughter.”
The air darkened and swirled behind him. Harry knew that even though his eyes weren’t open to see it. And he heard Aunt Petunia scream, and there was no sweeter sound.
He looked up and saw the ghosts standing in front of him. The man was naked, except for clumps of grave dirt where his eyes and mouth should be. The woman was more like a ghost, wrapped in a tattered dress, her mouth open in what looked like a silent scream.
Aeron was right. Harry did fear them, especially their hatred. He could feel that pressing against his skin even more strongly than he felt the cold. They would love to break free of his control and rend him.
But Harry stepped forwards, and Aunt Petunia was the one who cowered and put her hands over her ears as though that would somehow block out the low chant that had begun to emerge from her parents’ mouths. “Petunia. Petunia. Petunia.”
“You have to treat me better,” Harry said, waiting until she looked at him with glazed eyes. Harry knew he’d looked like that, in the past. It was so satisfying not to, now. “Or I’ll give you to them.”
Aeron had told him to keep his threats simple, that those worked best. It really did seem as if that was the case when Aunt Petunia gasped and shrank away, her hands over her eyes. “Yes. Yes. I’ll talk to Vernon. I’ll talk to Dudley. I’ll make sure that you have Dudley’s second bedroom. Just-please make them go away!” Her voice built up into a shriek as Richard reached out to touch her arm with a heavy, cold hand.
Harry turned and focused his will on his grandparents. Aeron had taught him how to feel the cold currents flowing through the world, and how to bend them so that they snatched the dead and brought them or sent them away again. “Go back now.”
A wordless voice howled from Elise’s direction. His grandfather stepped closer. They wanted to eat him.
They are only the dead, Aeron’s voice said in his mind. You are the living. You are the necromancer. You are their master.
Harry took a deep breath. Yes, he was. And he was the one who was going to make them back away.
“Go back!”
The world changed as though Harry was caught in a mighty tide. Then the air cleared, and there was no trace of his grandparents. Aunt Petunia stood up slowly, staring around.
“You never know,” Harry said softly. “They might come back.”
Aunt Petunia immediately went to call Uncle Vernon. Harry leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Aeron had warned him the magic would be draining.
But he’d done it. He’d done it. He was free, and powerful.
No one was ever going to bully him again.
*
Harry stared at the letter in his hands. It had actually been delivered while he was with Aeron, which was something he had wanted to happen, but hadn’t thought actually would. He held it out wordlessly.
Aeron didn’t touch it, though. “It’s crawling with magic,” he said. “The kind of magic that a necromancer can’t touch when you’re as advanced as me.”
They were crouched behind a large, moss-covered tombstone in the center of a huge graveyard near London. Aeron had been teaching Harry how to raise Inferi without making the grave look disturbed, and then the Hogwarts owl had come.
“Right now, I can learn either type of magic?”
“Right. If you go to that place, then your magic will align to follow what they teach. Align with a wand, first off.”
“Why is that bad?”
“A wand’s a pair of shackles, boy!” Aeron roared, hard enough that Harry flinched and nearly fell over on his backside. “Haven’t I told you that and told you that again?”
No, Harry thought, since they’d never talked specifically about wands before. But he kept silent and watched in a little wonder as Aeron ranted, his hands flying open and spittle jumping from his lips.
“The wand aligns with your magic and tames it. It means that you can’t go high or deep anymore! You can’t sense the cold currents anymore! You can only do feats of destruction that have names! Incantations! You might wish for anything to happen while you don’t have a wand, and you might be able to do it, but the wand limits your imagination! It ties you down to only what other people can imagine and create spells for and put in books! Do you want that to happen?”
“No,” Harry said, softly, unhappily. Aeron had told him the story of how his parents had died, and he knew that his parents had gone to Hogwarts. Part of him wanted to walk the corridors they had walked, and talk to other people who knew them.
But he knew he would also miss the cold currents. He would miss the ability to look people in the eye as he passed them and know that he only had to lift a hand to terrify them.
He would go back to being a possible victim. Especially since Aeron had told him that first-years barely learned any spells except the safe ones, and focused a lot on disciplines like Herbology and Astronomy that were just knowledge, not power. Seventh-years and the professors and the people who weren’t part of the House he was Sorted into would try to bully him, just because they saw that as their right.
Harry straightened his back. “No,” he repeated. “I want to stay here and learn with you.”
Aeron grinned. “Good boy. Now, you’ll send back a refusal, but famous as you are, I doubt they’ll accept it. That means you’ll have to hide. I’ll teach you that magic today. Forget about raising Inferi. You’ll learn how to make them think you of less account than grave-dust.”
Harry leaned forwards, intrigued. Dudley still sometimes forgot that he shouldn’t chase Harry, and he did it in public so Harry couldn’t summon the dead. Hiding was useful. “How?”
*
“He was just here the other day!”
Harry, cloaked in the dust of the grave and a cold current, stood right next to the stairway and watched the wizards hunt around the Dursleys’ house for him. Aunt Petunia looked as if she would start sobbing if they didn’t go away soon, and there was a man with them who looked as if he would start stabbing people if he didn’t get answers. A little to Harry’s surprise, that wasn’t Dumbledore. It was a tall man in a black cloak and robes much finer than Aeron’s tattered ones.
“He cannot have gone far, Albus,” said a tall woman with glasses on her nose and a shape of a cat that hung in the air around her when Harry squinted. He supposed she was one of those people who could transform into animals that Aeron had told him about. That was about the only thing Harry regretted not being able to learn since he’d become a necromancer. “Not if he was here this morning.”
“Accidental magic and Apparition-” began a plump woman with a nice smile. Harry would have talked to her if she didn’t work for Hogwarts.
“You think Potter is powerful enough to Apparate any distance?” The tall dark man asked it with a sneer.
Harry blinked. Huh. Aeron had told him that everyone in the wizarding world believed he was incredibly powerful because of his scar. It was kind of nice to run into someone who didn’t believe that.
“Now, Severus,” said the Headmaster. He turned around and went over to talk to Aunt Petunia. Harry followed slowly. Aeron had warned him the disguise wasn’t perfect, but all the problems with it were ones that people normally couldn’t see through unless they could see the dead.
“I want to know why Harry refused to come to Hogwarts.” The Headmaster didn’t sound so kind and pleasant when he was alone with someone. “Did you prejudice him against magic? Did you tell him stories of the war?”
“We never told the freak anything about magic!” Aunt Petunia had her arms folded and her nose up in the air the way Harry had seen her do with Mrs. Elbert who lived across the way and who Aunt Petunia thought didn’t keep her garden right. “We’re good, normal people, and we won’t have it in this house!”
“So he never did accidental magic?” the Headmaster asked.
Aunt Petunia swallowed. But Harry saw the way her eyes went into the corners, and he knew she would never tell anyone about the night Harry had summoned Richard and Elise. She was too afraid.
“He got up on the roof somehow once, when he was six or so,” she said slowly. “And he turned a teacher’s hair blue. And he grew his hair back overnight when-when he had a bad haircut.”
“That proves it, Albus, he can’t be a Squib,” the cat-woman said, although Harry thought she was talking to Severus more for some reason. “There’s no reason he should have refused the letter.”
“Except his bloody arrogance,” Severus said. Harry shook his head a little. Aeron was right. Wizards were so arrogant themselves that they saw it everywhere, in everyone else.
“Severus,” the Headmaster said, but his voice was worried. He glanced at Aunt Petunia. “Why would he have refused us? The truth, this time,” he added, and Harry sucked in a soundless gasp as he felt the magic that settled into the kitchen. It made even the cold currents stop moving.
Aunt Petunia did try to resist him. She clenched her hands together and drummed her arms against her sides. But Harry knew that she would lose even before she said anything. “He-he doesn’t know about magic!” she finally gasped. “He’s always thought he was a freak! He might have thought it was a prank.”
The Headmaster dropped the magic and stared at Aunt Petunia hard enough that Harry liked him a little, even though he still didn’t have any intention of going to Hogwarts. “Are you listening to what you are saying, Petunia? Why would he not know about magic? You certainly did.”
Aunt Petunia flinched some more, but her voice was still spiteful when she said, “And you wouldn’t let me come to Hogwarts. Why should he get to go? Why should he grow up knowing about his parents and magic?”
For some reason, Severus stepped forwards then like he was going to hurt Aunt Petunia, but the cat-woman got in his way. The plump woman wasn’t smiling anymore. “Do you think he ran away, Albus?” she whispered.
“I suppose he might have.” The Headmaster didn’t look happy. “We have to find him. He has magic, and that means he belongs at Hogwarts.”
Harry shook his head. Sure, he had magic, but he was a necromancer, not a wizard. And he thought he’d heard enough. Aeron had made an offer the other day that Harry had been thinking about, for Harry to come and live with him.
It was probably time. Harry hadn’t ever enjoyed being around the Dursleys, and now he thought people would be watching the house just in case he came back. He turned and walked out the door in the middle of his cloud of grave dirt.
There was nothing here that he wanted to keep.
*
“It is time to do something about that scar.”
Harry looked up. He and Aeron were in another abandoned house, one that was mostly nice on the inside. The dead knew all the secrets in the world as they drifted along on the cold currents that passed through iron and stone, and they didn’t mind being asked questions the way they did being summoned. “I know you said it had something of the dead in it. But what exactly is it?”
“A piece of that incompetent bastard’s soul.”
Harry started. He was used to the way that Aeron talked about Voldemort, but he hadn’t expected-he pressed his hand gingerly against the scar. “You think he split his soul to put a piece in me on purpose? But why? Why would he want to lose part of it?”
“Not on purpose. That’s why I said he was an incompetent bastard. He was trying to make something called a Horcrux.” Aeron made an impatient sound when Harry just stared at him. “Come on, boy. It was in that book I gave you to read.”
“Well, I didn’t read it,” Harry muttered. He didn’t learn well from books. He learned by watching and doing. Practicing his summoning necromancy was a lot more fun than reading a boring old book.
“Next time, do.” Aeron stared into his eyes. “He was trying to murder you and then put his piece of soul into an object. Then he could be immortal as long as he wanted. He didn’t want to make the deal with death that we do, oh, not him. He was too afraid of it to seek it out and embrace it. So instead he flubbed up the situation good and proper. Left it to a skilled necromancer to deal with.”
“How can I deal with it?”
“You’re going to get good enough to deal with it, boy. You’re going to spend a lot of time studying soul magic, and being able to find the pieces of his soul that he stuffed into objects.”
“So you think this wasn’t the only piece of soul that he tried to put into a Horcrux?”
“‘Course not. It’s too small. He has others somewhere, and you’re going to find them and learn to control them, and then you can really make the bastard dance to your tune.”
Aeron actually sounded angry. Harry blinked. “Why do you care so much about this? Why not just let me find it out on my own and handle it if I got it wrong?” That was the way that Aeron usually approached teaching Harry.
“Because he dared to do this to a necromancer, boy.” Aeron’s eyes had a bright red shine when he turned his head far enough into the light coming through the broken window. “We’re the best of the best. We don’t suffer from incompetence, and we don’t get turned into Horcruxes. He’s going to pay for what he did to you. What he dared to do to you.”
Harry thought it was kind of rich that Aeron was so upset about this now, when Harry hadn’t been a necromancer when he was actually born and the Horcrux had happened when he was a baby, but he would take it. His relatives hadn’t cared about him. The wizards hadn’t cared about him enough to ever check on him before they sent his Hogwarts letter. Harry would take what he could get.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at https://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/1014196.html. Comment wherever you like.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: None, gen
Content Notes: Necromancy, dark magic, massively AU, largely amoral Harry
Wordcount: This part 3900
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry meets a wizard who calls himself Aeron Luthan. Except Aeron isn’t really a wizard, he’s a necromancer, and he alters the course of Harry’s entire life.
Author’s Notes: One of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics, for the following prompt by LoveThyFrenemies: Necromancer Harry. Young Harry runs into this old, homeless wizard who teachers him art of necromancy, so he doesn't go to Hogwarts. He learns how to summon dead people like his parents and grandparents, terrorize his abusive relatives, and learn secrets that no living people know. He later learns to manipulate Horcruxes as well to enslave Voldemort's soul forever. This is the first part, with a second to be posted tomorrow.
Dust and Wonders
“What are you staring at, boy?”
Harry had spent the morning running away from Dudley and Piers, again. He was winded and streets and streets away from Privet Drive. He was hot and sweating and only wanted a drink of water.
That was maybe the reason that he answered as he did. “You.”
The man was sitting against the brick wall of an alley, wrapped in so many scarves and rags and tattered scraps that Harry thought he must be a vampire or something. No one else could be cold on a day like this. All Harry could see of him was long, tangled brown hair with streaks of grey in it and a pair of eyes that glittered haughtily at him when the man spoke.
Not that that was anything new for Harry. People looked at him haughtily all the time, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and the neighbors and the primary school teachers who believed Dudley over him. Harry just glanced at the man again and then kept walking. It didn’t seem likely that someone homeless would be able to give him water or money to buy it.
Except somehow the man was in front of him, and he was bigger and taller than Harry had thought. Harry stepped back, keeping a wary eye on his fists. He had long fingernails smeared with grime. They would hurt if he scratched Harry.
The man cleared his throat with a sound like a tiger spitting, and said, “Name’s Aeron Luthan.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Not you, boy. Me.”
Harry nodded, still keeping a wary eye on the man’s hands. Aeron sighed as though he despaired of him. “And what’s your name, boy? It’s traditional to reply with that.”
“Harry Potter.” With Harry’s luck, the man would have heard of him, and heard what the Dursleys were saying about him, and he wouldn’t want to associate with him any more after that.
“Harry Pot-” Aeron stared at him as if he had heard of him, but to Harry’s confusion, he just looked surprised, not suspicious. Then he said, “Well, boy, let’s see if you have the scar.” And he gestured, and for some reason a cool breeze brushed against Harry’s forehead, and Aeron was staring at the lightning bolt scar that always sat there.
Harry jerked away and flattened down his fringe over the scar again, staring warily at Aeron. Aunt Petunia was always on about how he shouldn’t show it to people, it was ugly and no one wanted to see that.
“Well, well,” Aeron murmured. “And in the Muggle world, too!”
“What’s a Muggle?”
Aeron turned his head back and forth in a way that made him look mental. Harry was already bracing himself to run when Aeron breathed, “Can it be? Harry Potter, utterly ignorant of his heritage, and mine to shape?”
Harry didn’t like that “mine to shape” part, and he didn’t know what Aeron was talking about for the rest of it. He really was going to run, the minute Aeron started muttering or raving to himself the way homeless people did, and looked away. But instead, Aeron took a step forwards and knelt down in front of him. Harry started. Now he could see the man was wearing a collection of dark scraps that all fluttered around something that looked like a dress. Did men wear dresses?
“I can give you power,” whispered Aeron. “I can teach you to use your magic, to summon the dead, to terrify your enemies. You are a wizard. The strange things that you must have noticed you can do on occasion? They are magic. But my branch of magic is much darker and more powerful than the one you might call your own if I left you as you are.”
Harry thought he understood only about half of that, but he was intrigued enough to demand, “Why would you do that, though? No one would do that for me without wanting something in return.”
Aeron smiled, and his eyes glittered again. “You are famous among wizards. Your kind’s world has outlawed my magic. I’d like to raise and train someone who would be loyal to my magic, and someone who could have the power to change wizards’ minds and hearts to favor it.”
“I’m-just Harry. Not famous.”
“I will tell you the truth. I will show you how to manipulate others. Are you interested?”
“But how do you know that you’re not mistaking me for someone who’s really famous?” Harry wanted this to be real, but more than that, he wanted to know if it wasn’t. He couldn’t bear for the offer of teaching and real magic to be given and then taken away again, the way the Dursleys were always taking away the holidays and the gifts they promised him if he just did a little better.
Aeron reached out and laid a hand on his forehead. Harry gasped as a sharp spark traveled down from the scar to his arm, and Aeron stared at him.
“No one else has that scar,” he whispered, “and the name, and the power. There is something of the dead in that scar, Potter. Something that I can teach you how to use for your own benefit, but only I can. Those wizards whose blood you bear would only teach you to be afraid of it.”
Harry swallowed. “I’m tired of being afraid.” And it was true. He didn’t want to run away from Dudley and Piers anymore. He didn’t want to cower in front of Uncle Vernon or watch Aunt Petunia warily because he was waiting for her to scream at him.
“You would learn fear as respect if I taught you.” Aeron was leaning back in a really weird-looking uncomfortable position, but his eyes were shining and so was his face. “You would learn to fear the dead and the power you worked with, true. They might escape your control at any moment if you did not. But you would have that power.”
“Could I-I mean, wizards have to be hiding, right? Since no knows about them? So could I use that power on my family? Would someone come arrest me or something?”
Aeron gave a deep chuckle that made Harry start, but he relaxed a little when he realized the man was beaming at him, not angry. “There are indeed laws against the use of magic on Muggles. But not the power I will teach you. The Ministry can’t sense it. Their magic can’t track it. And it’s already illegal simply to know, so there aren’t separate laws about using it on Muggles.”
Harry hesitated a long moment. In some ways, he didn’t think that he wanted to learn this. He tried to obey the law and be a good person, partially because he didn’t think the Dursleys were. He knew this was going to change everything if he learned it. He would never really be able to go back and obey the law again.
But he wanted them to fear him.
“Okay,” he told Aeron, and endured the man cackling and grabbing onto him like he was one of Dudley’s plushes or something.
*
Harry stepped out of his cupboard, heart pounding, when Aunt Petunia yelled for him to make dinner. He knew that he had to do this. Aeron had been uncompromising. He wasn’t going to keep teaching Harry if Harry didn’t do this.
And it would make him feel better after the day he’d had, when Dudley had chased him and Aunt Petunia had swung another frying pan at his head.
It was still frightening.
“What are you doing, you lazy boy? Get in the kitchen right now-”
Aunt Petunia turned around and gasped when she saw he was already standing there. That made Harry feel stronger. She was afraid of him. He smiled at her and spread his hands out in front of him, the way Aeron had taught him.
“What are you doing? What kind of freakish-”
Harry closed his eyes, and the names were in his thoughts as if they’d always been there, even though he had never heard Aunt Petunia tell him the names of his grandparents. “Richard, Elise,” he whispered. “Come to me. Hear me. Join me and your daughter.”
The air darkened and swirled behind him. Harry knew that even though his eyes weren’t open to see it. And he heard Aunt Petunia scream, and there was no sweeter sound.
He looked up and saw the ghosts standing in front of him. The man was naked, except for clumps of grave dirt where his eyes and mouth should be. The woman was more like a ghost, wrapped in a tattered dress, her mouth open in what looked like a silent scream.
Aeron was right. Harry did fear them, especially their hatred. He could feel that pressing against his skin even more strongly than he felt the cold. They would love to break free of his control and rend him.
But Harry stepped forwards, and Aunt Petunia was the one who cowered and put her hands over her ears as though that would somehow block out the low chant that had begun to emerge from her parents’ mouths. “Petunia. Petunia. Petunia.”
“You have to treat me better,” Harry said, waiting until she looked at him with glazed eyes. Harry knew he’d looked like that, in the past. It was so satisfying not to, now. “Or I’ll give you to them.”
Aeron had told him to keep his threats simple, that those worked best. It really did seem as if that was the case when Aunt Petunia gasped and shrank away, her hands over her eyes. “Yes. Yes. I’ll talk to Vernon. I’ll talk to Dudley. I’ll make sure that you have Dudley’s second bedroom. Just-please make them go away!” Her voice built up into a shriek as Richard reached out to touch her arm with a heavy, cold hand.
Harry turned and focused his will on his grandparents. Aeron had taught him how to feel the cold currents flowing through the world, and how to bend them so that they snatched the dead and brought them or sent them away again. “Go back now.”
A wordless voice howled from Elise’s direction. His grandfather stepped closer. They wanted to eat him.
They are only the dead, Aeron’s voice said in his mind. You are the living. You are the necromancer. You are their master.
Harry took a deep breath. Yes, he was. And he was the one who was going to make them back away.
“Go back!”
The world changed as though Harry was caught in a mighty tide. Then the air cleared, and there was no trace of his grandparents. Aunt Petunia stood up slowly, staring around.
“You never know,” Harry said softly. “They might come back.”
Aunt Petunia immediately went to call Uncle Vernon. Harry leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Aeron had warned him the magic would be draining.
But he’d done it. He’d done it. He was free, and powerful.
No one was ever going to bully him again.
*
Harry stared at the letter in his hands. It had actually been delivered while he was with Aeron, which was something he had wanted to happen, but hadn’t thought actually would. He held it out wordlessly.
Aeron didn’t touch it, though. “It’s crawling with magic,” he said. “The kind of magic that a necromancer can’t touch when you’re as advanced as me.”
They were crouched behind a large, moss-covered tombstone in the center of a huge graveyard near London. Aeron had been teaching Harry how to raise Inferi without making the grave look disturbed, and then the Hogwarts owl had come.
“Right now, I can learn either type of magic?”
“Right. If you go to that place, then your magic will align to follow what they teach. Align with a wand, first off.”
“Why is that bad?”
“A wand’s a pair of shackles, boy!” Aeron roared, hard enough that Harry flinched and nearly fell over on his backside. “Haven’t I told you that and told you that again?”
No, Harry thought, since they’d never talked specifically about wands before. But he kept silent and watched in a little wonder as Aeron ranted, his hands flying open and spittle jumping from his lips.
“The wand aligns with your magic and tames it. It means that you can’t go high or deep anymore! You can’t sense the cold currents anymore! You can only do feats of destruction that have names! Incantations! You might wish for anything to happen while you don’t have a wand, and you might be able to do it, but the wand limits your imagination! It ties you down to only what other people can imagine and create spells for and put in books! Do you want that to happen?”
“No,” Harry said, softly, unhappily. Aeron had told him the story of how his parents had died, and he knew that his parents had gone to Hogwarts. Part of him wanted to walk the corridors they had walked, and talk to other people who knew them.
But he knew he would also miss the cold currents. He would miss the ability to look people in the eye as he passed them and know that he only had to lift a hand to terrify them.
He would go back to being a possible victim. Especially since Aeron had told him that first-years barely learned any spells except the safe ones, and focused a lot on disciplines like Herbology and Astronomy that were just knowledge, not power. Seventh-years and the professors and the people who weren’t part of the House he was Sorted into would try to bully him, just because they saw that as their right.
Harry straightened his back. “No,” he repeated. “I want to stay here and learn with you.”
Aeron grinned. “Good boy. Now, you’ll send back a refusal, but famous as you are, I doubt they’ll accept it. That means you’ll have to hide. I’ll teach you that magic today. Forget about raising Inferi. You’ll learn how to make them think you of less account than grave-dust.”
Harry leaned forwards, intrigued. Dudley still sometimes forgot that he shouldn’t chase Harry, and he did it in public so Harry couldn’t summon the dead. Hiding was useful. “How?”
*
“He was just here the other day!”
Harry, cloaked in the dust of the grave and a cold current, stood right next to the stairway and watched the wizards hunt around the Dursleys’ house for him. Aunt Petunia looked as if she would start sobbing if they didn’t go away soon, and there was a man with them who looked as if he would start stabbing people if he didn’t get answers. A little to Harry’s surprise, that wasn’t Dumbledore. It was a tall man in a black cloak and robes much finer than Aeron’s tattered ones.
“He cannot have gone far, Albus,” said a tall woman with glasses on her nose and a shape of a cat that hung in the air around her when Harry squinted. He supposed she was one of those people who could transform into animals that Aeron had told him about. That was about the only thing Harry regretted not being able to learn since he’d become a necromancer. “Not if he was here this morning.”
“Accidental magic and Apparition-” began a plump woman with a nice smile. Harry would have talked to her if she didn’t work for Hogwarts.
“You think Potter is powerful enough to Apparate any distance?” The tall dark man asked it with a sneer.
Harry blinked. Huh. Aeron had told him that everyone in the wizarding world believed he was incredibly powerful because of his scar. It was kind of nice to run into someone who didn’t believe that.
“Now, Severus,” said the Headmaster. He turned around and went over to talk to Aunt Petunia. Harry followed slowly. Aeron had warned him the disguise wasn’t perfect, but all the problems with it were ones that people normally couldn’t see through unless they could see the dead.
“I want to know why Harry refused to come to Hogwarts.” The Headmaster didn’t sound so kind and pleasant when he was alone with someone. “Did you prejudice him against magic? Did you tell him stories of the war?”
“We never told the freak anything about magic!” Aunt Petunia had her arms folded and her nose up in the air the way Harry had seen her do with Mrs. Elbert who lived across the way and who Aunt Petunia thought didn’t keep her garden right. “We’re good, normal people, and we won’t have it in this house!”
“So he never did accidental magic?” the Headmaster asked.
Aunt Petunia swallowed. But Harry saw the way her eyes went into the corners, and he knew she would never tell anyone about the night Harry had summoned Richard and Elise. She was too afraid.
“He got up on the roof somehow once, when he was six or so,” she said slowly. “And he turned a teacher’s hair blue. And he grew his hair back overnight when-when he had a bad haircut.”
“That proves it, Albus, he can’t be a Squib,” the cat-woman said, although Harry thought she was talking to Severus more for some reason. “There’s no reason he should have refused the letter.”
“Except his bloody arrogance,” Severus said. Harry shook his head a little. Aeron was right. Wizards were so arrogant themselves that they saw it everywhere, in everyone else.
“Severus,” the Headmaster said, but his voice was worried. He glanced at Aunt Petunia. “Why would he have refused us? The truth, this time,” he added, and Harry sucked in a soundless gasp as he felt the magic that settled into the kitchen. It made even the cold currents stop moving.
Aunt Petunia did try to resist him. She clenched her hands together and drummed her arms against her sides. But Harry knew that she would lose even before she said anything. “He-he doesn’t know about magic!” she finally gasped. “He’s always thought he was a freak! He might have thought it was a prank.”
The Headmaster dropped the magic and stared at Aunt Petunia hard enough that Harry liked him a little, even though he still didn’t have any intention of going to Hogwarts. “Are you listening to what you are saying, Petunia? Why would he not know about magic? You certainly did.”
Aunt Petunia flinched some more, but her voice was still spiteful when she said, “And you wouldn’t let me come to Hogwarts. Why should he get to go? Why should he grow up knowing about his parents and magic?”
For some reason, Severus stepped forwards then like he was going to hurt Aunt Petunia, but the cat-woman got in his way. The plump woman wasn’t smiling anymore. “Do you think he ran away, Albus?” she whispered.
“I suppose he might have.” The Headmaster didn’t look happy. “We have to find him. He has magic, and that means he belongs at Hogwarts.”
Harry shook his head. Sure, he had magic, but he was a necromancer, not a wizard. And he thought he’d heard enough. Aeron had made an offer the other day that Harry had been thinking about, for Harry to come and live with him.
It was probably time. Harry hadn’t ever enjoyed being around the Dursleys, and now he thought people would be watching the house just in case he came back. He turned and walked out the door in the middle of his cloud of grave dirt.
There was nothing here that he wanted to keep.
*
“It is time to do something about that scar.”
Harry looked up. He and Aeron were in another abandoned house, one that was mostly nice on the inside. The dead knew all the secrets in the world as they drifted along on the cold currents that passed through iron and stone, and they didn’t mind being asked questions the way they did being summoned. “I know you said it had something of the dead in it. But what exactly is it?”
“A piece of that incompetent bastard’s soul.”
Harry started. He was used to the way that Aeron talked about Voldemort, but he hadn’t expected-he pressed his hand gingerly against the scar. “You think he split his soul to put a piece in me on purpose? But why? Why would he want to lose part of it?”
“Not on purpose. That’s why I said he was an incompetent bastard. He was trying to make something called a Horcrux.” Aeron made an impatient sound when Harry just stared at him. “Come on, boy. It was in that book I gave you to read.”
“Well, I didn’t read it,” Harry muttered. He didn’t learn well from books. He learned by watching and doing. Practicing his summoning necromancy was a lot more fun than reading a boring old book.
“Next time, do.” Aeron stared into his eyes. “He was trying to murder you and then put his piece of soul into an object. Then he could be immortal as long as he wanted. He didn’t want to make the deal with death that we do, oh, not him. He was too afraid of it to seek it out and embrace it. So instead he flubbed up the situation good and proper. Left it to a skilled necromancer to deal with.”
“How can I deal with it?”
“You’re going to get good enough to deal with it, boy. You’re going to spend a lot of time studying soul magic, and being able to find the pieces of his soul that he stuffed into objects.”
“So you think this wasn’t the only piece of soul that he tried to put into a Horcrux?”
“‘Course not. It’s too small. He has others somewhere, and you’re going to find them and learn to control them, and then you can really make the bastard dance to your tune.”
Aeron actually sounded angry. Harry blinked. “Why do you care so much about this? Why not just let me find it out on my own and handle it if I got it wrong?” That was the way that Aeron usually approached teaching Harry.
“Because he dared to do this to a necromancer, boy.” Aeron’s eyes had a bright red shine when he turned his head far enough into the light coming through the broken window. “We’re the best of the best. We don’t suffer from incompetence, and we don’t get turned into Horcruxes. He’s going to pay for what he did to you. What he dared to do to you.”
Harry thought it was kind of rich that Aeron was so upset about this now, when Harry hadn’t been a necromancer when he was actually born and the Horcrux had happened when he was a baby, but he would take it. His relatives hadn’t cared about him. The wizards hadn’t cared about him enough to ever check on him before they sent his Hogwarts letter. Harry would take what he could get.
Part Two.
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