[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Harmonies Unconquerable, goblin Harry, gen, 3/5
Part Two.
Part One.
Title: Harmonies Unconquerable (3/5)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: Violence, goblin Harry, present tense, angst, major AU, drama, gore
Pairings: None, gen
Wordcount: This part 5700
Summary: The second half of goblin-raised Harry’s fourth year and the first half of his fifth year at Hogwarts. Voldemort would probably like it if he had Harry’s attention all to himself, but let’s face it, Harry has a Tournament to ruin, insults to get revenge for, the Argent Ocean to research, more goblin and human magic to learn, interfering humans to handle, and a godfather to keep in line. Voldemort will have to wait his turn.
Author’s Notes: This is another in my series of fics that includes, so far, “Music Beneath the Mountains,” “In Their Own Secret Tongues He Spoke,” and “The Dragon-Headed Door,”and “More Marvellous-Cunning Than Mortal Man’s Pondering.” Don’t try to start with this one, or you’ll be seriously confused. The title is a slightly changed line from Tolkien’s poem “The Horns of Ylmir,” which is quoted below. The section titles also come from this poem.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
From Battle Unto Battle
Harry lands lightly in the middle of a large open space. He looks around and finds the most unexpected stone monuments around him. He frowns. Is this a graveyard?
Why would someone want to fight in a graveyard?
He does smile a little when he hears someone Apparate into place behind him and turns around to see Professor Moody standing there. “Did you want to duel me somewhere far away from Hogwarts where no one could interfere?” he asks.
Moody stares at him, grunts, and shakes his hand. Then he gestures with his wand, and the cup tears itself away from Harry’s grip and crashes into a nearby headstone.
Harry narrows his eyes. “You’ll pay for hurting both the cup and the stone.”
Moody appears to be ignoring him now. He reaches behind a stone and retrieves something wrapped in a thick black cloth, tenderly unwrapping it. Harry cranes his neck. Inside is what looks like an incredibly ugly baby, with thick limbs and blazing red eyes.
“I’m sorry to tell you,” Harry lets Moody know, “but that’s not going to be a handsome human when it grows up. Unless it’s supposed to be a kelpie or something like that?’ The little thing is rather handsome for a kelpie.
“Potter.” Moody glares at him, his magical eye whizzing around. “Shut up.” Then he tears the magical eye from his face and throws it away.
“If you don’t want that anymore, can I have it?” Harry’s sure he can think of something to forge that would use a human magical eye.
Moody continues ignoring him as he sits down on a large gravestone and tears off his wooden leg. Harry is beginning to doubt his sanity. Obviously, if Moody fancies himself the superior warrior, then he would want to do something to make the fight fairer, but the leg and the eye both are a bit much.
“Harry Potter,” the kelpie-child hisses, and Harry turns back to it. The red eyes seem to be trying to stare a hole through him, but that doesn’t work, which apparently frustrates the creature. “I will use you and I will destroy you.”
“I don’t see how. You can’t even walk without help.”
Moody groans and shakes, and Harry glances up in time to see his face twist and pop. A regular eye grows in the place of his discarded one, and he limps to his feet with a new leg sprouting in the place of the wooden one, too. Harry is about to ask why he wears the accessories at all if he could do this any time, but then “Moody” faces him, grinning, and he realizes that this is a different person altogether.
“Polyjuice,” Harry realizes. “Your hip flask was full of Polyjuice Potion.”
The man grins and giggles at him, his tongue darting out to lick his lips. Harry looks hard, but he doesn’t see any hint of a fork. This is apparently a regular human who’s chosen to carry a baby kelpie around for some strange reason. “You can be smart after all, little Potter.” He points a gnarled, twisted wand that doesn’t look much like Moody’s at Harry. “Now, shut up and be a good boy, and my lord will do you the honor of killing you himself.”
Harry blinks. “You look mental, but still. Why is your lord a kelpie?”
“I am not a kelpie,” the child-thing hisses.
Harry casts him a dubious glance. “Then you’re ugly for whatever you are. I’m sorry to say it, but that’s the way it is,” he adds, when he sees both Moody and the child-thing staring at him.
“I am Lord Voldemort!” the not-a-kelpie hisses.
“Really?” Harry stares at him. “But how did you get anyone to follow you when you’re that size?”
“Barty, I grow tired of his whining. Bind him!” The not-a-kelpie makes a gesture with one stubby arm that causes the odd man who’s taken Moody’s place to bow deeply and take aim with his wand.
Harry jumps behind a headstone, and speaks to it. The stone bends and grows outwards in a shield, and Moody’s curse, which looks too dark a red to be a Stunner, impacts off it. Chips of stone fly outwards, and Harry winces. He didn’t mean to get the poor thing wounded.
“Imprison him! Bind him!”
Voldemort keeps shrieking, but Barty doesn’t have a good time trying to keep up with Harry. Harry dodges and rolls and hides whenever he can without wounding too many of the headstones. He’s also coming steadily closer to them, but they don’t seem to notice that.
Barty finally focuses on him as Harry pops out from behind a monument shaped like a human with spread wings-do Muggles know about humans with non-human heritage, then?-and smiles as he spins his wand between his fingers. “So eager to reach your destruction, little half-breed?”
Harry ignores that. It’s the kind of insult that people speak when they can’t think of anything better. Harry could come up with about sixteen off the top of his head for Barty and many more for Voldemort. They’re just deficient.
“If I’m to be destroyed, that’s my fate. But I’ll go down fighting,” Harry replies, and sprints towards Voldemort.
Barty turns to point his wand at him, his smile lazy with confidence, but it becomes a bit less lazy when Harry draws his basilisk-fang dagger.
“Master!” Barty screams, and joins the sprint towards Voldemort.
Harry is smaller and faster, though, and he gets there first. The child-thing’s mouth opens in a deep cry, and its tiny hand reaches out as if to grab Harry’s arm and stop the sweep of the dagger.
He’s too small, and Harry is too fast and, this time, too big. He stabs the basilisk fang directly through Voldemort’s chest, with conviction, the way he once stabbed the diary.
There’s a loud and sizzling hiss, as if Harry has plunged a hot blade too fast into the quench, and then Voldemort is screaming on two levels at once, a human voice overlaid with the language of snakes. Harry feels the dagger pass through the body and clang on the stones. He draws back, blinking, but makes sure to retain hold of the dagger. Not even sending Voldemort’s wraith into flight again would be worth losing it.
He watches the black stain spread up through Voldemort’s chest and smiles as it streaks like a crack towards those wide and staring red eyes. Voldemort flails his arms and makes pathetic, hissing squeaky noises in the moment before the crack encircles his neck and his head falls off.
The black goes on spreading, flaking the rest of his borrowed body to shreds. Harry jumps back and stands at the ready as the wraith flies out, remembering Quirrell, but this time, the shade shows no interest in attacking him. It blazes off in a smoky path across the sky.
Harry shakes his head, regretting that he wasn’t able to capture it, but then again, he would need the diamond box and the crystal goblets right away, or he might not have been able to subdue it. It could have possessed him. Harry is a good warrior on the physical battlefield, but he’s not sure he would win on the mental one he would have been facing.
“You.”
Harry turns to face Barty. His face is insane with hatred. Harry wonders for a moment how he pretended to be Moody so well, and then shrugs it off. Well, Moody was supposed to be paranoid and mental.
That reminds Harry that he wants to retrieve the magical eye and the wooden leg before he leaves, if he can. Somewhere is the real Moody who will presumably want them back.
“You,” Barty snaps again, stalking closer. “You fought my lord as a baby and when you were eleven and again now! I will destroy you for hurting him.”
“You want to duel, then?” Harry almost dances in place. Finally, a human who isn’t a coward!
“Yes.” Barty sets himself in what isn’t exactly a traditional dueling stance, but close to it. “Come here and meet your destruction, little brat.”
“You already promised that once before, and couldn’t deliver.” Harry gestures with his daggers, falling back into a defensive stance. “Come on, show me what you have.”
Barty laughs wildly. “Do you know how many more spells I know than you do?”
“No.”
Barty looks wrongfooted for only a second before he launches a spell like a twisting yellow corkscrew at Harry. Harry rolls underneath it and comes up closer to Barty the way he did when he was planning to take down Voldemort, his daggers snapping out.
But while Barty might not be all that smart-as proven by the fact that he wants to serve someone who looks a lot like a kelpie but isn’t one-he at least knows enough to avoid the basilisk-fang blade. He kicks Harry, and his hand hurts, although if Barty meant to make one of Harry’s weapons go flying, he doesn’t achieve it. He snarls and kicks out again, and Harry laughs softly and dodges around him.
“Your hand must hurt!”
“So must your pride.”
They’re close to each other now, tense, circling each other like leaves in an eddy, and Barty crouches and then reaches out and snatches Harry’s arm just beneath the dagger hilt in his left hand. Harry is impressed. He didn’t think someone human would try that much close contact.
“I have you,” Barty says, and presses his wand for a second against Harry’s side. “Crucio!”
The pain grabs Harry and tosses him into a new realm of hurt, but although Harry screams, he retains his senses. His warrior training prepared him for something like this. You might have to concentrate through the pain of a broken limb, or worse, and you still have to be able to fight through it. The most important thing is winning, not the wounds you take along the way.
Harry is spasming, which makes it hard to hold the daggers. But he gets his feet underneath him, and he stands up. Barty’s mouth falls open in astonishment. He takes a step back, fumbling with his wand to produce something else.
Harry’s steel dagger cuts through the wand, stopping the curse abruptly. That means that his basilisk-fang dagger plunges further into Barty’s side than he’d meant it to. He’d only wanted to give him a light cut. That would be enough, with the venom implanted in the dagger, and still give him time to get out and away from range of a counterattack.
Barty screams, and spasms, and falls. The black winds through him a lot more slowly than it did the Voldemort-thing, but he obviously doesn’t have Horcruxes, because he dies in pain. Harry sighs as he squirms and writhes, and kneels down next to him, to at least give his enemy company in dying.
Barty rolls his eyes to look at him, and whispers, “You…bastard. Like my father.”
“Father?” Harry blinks, and then considers the similarity of Barty’s name and Crouch’s first name. Barty. Bartemius. And, well, they do look a little like each other when Harry squints and subtracts some of the age.
“You’re just like him.”
“No. I’m an honorable goblin. He’s someone who couldn’t even hold a duel to settle a blood feud.” Harry pats Barty’s arm where it’s not yet black. “But I promise that I’ll tell him you were more courageous than he was.”
Barty laughs, and shuts his eyes, muttering something about, “All I can expect,” and expires. Harry uses his wand to fold Barty’s blackened, swollen arms over his chest, while considering the matter. He hadn’t heard that Crouch had any children, which was part of the reason that the blood feud could be declared and pursued the way it was.
No, wait. He had the son who supposedly died in Azkaban years ago, for being a convicted Death Eater.
Harry sighs and looks down at Barty. “I’m sorry that it had to turn out like this. You were more courageous than your father, even if you were also madder than he was.” Harry can’t imagine much that pegs the man as more mental than following a disembodied wraith.
But in the meantime, Harry has Hogwarts to get back to, and some people, like Luna, who are probably frantic about his disappearance. He stands up, and looks around first for the magical eye and the wooden leg, then for the cup that Barty cast aside.
It’s lying near a headstone, still wailing in pain. Harry floats it over to him after tucking the eye into his pocket and slinging the wooden leg inside his shirt, and then casts the Levitation charm on Barty’s body. It lurches and drags, but comes over to him. Harry carefully maneuvers one of the still hands until they’re clutching the cup’s handle.
He doesn’t want to touch the body now that it’s completely envenomed, even though he doesn’t know if that would do the same thing as stabbing himself with his dagger. But some experiments he doesn’t need to conduct.
The cup goes quiet when Harry touches it again. Harry rubs it soothingly, and then the jerk happens and he’s pulled through space again. It seems the cup doesn’t mind fulfilling this part of the purpose Barty intended it for.
A Murmuring Drone
There’s a lot of talking after Harry comes back with Barty’s body.
It seems that a lot of people recognize him right away as Bartemius Crouch, Jr., and there’s a lot of screaming and fainting about how he was supposed to have died in Azkaban years ago, and how did he get here, and why did Harry kill him. Harry thinks he can answer those questions easily by showing the magical eye and the wooden leg, and talking about Barty’s decision to fight a duel.
For some reason, though, almost no one accepts this. The first part, Harry supposes he can understand after some listening.
“How could no one have realized that Moody was acting out of character?” Professor McGonagall has her hands pressed to her head.
They’re in Dumbledore’s office, and the Headmaster is sitting behind the desk sucking on a lemon drop and not saying a word. He just keeps looking between Harry and the body-which no one has been allowed to take away yet-as though he thinks they’re an equation that will lead up to a different solution. Harry wants to shake his head at him. Dumbledore is probably years away from his Arithmancy classes, but he ought to remember that you can’t change an equation unless you change its components.
“Albus!” Professor McGonagall swings around to stare at him. “Answer me! Didn’t you notice that Alastor was acting differently?”
Dumbledore sighs. “I am afraid that I did not,” he admits, and at least he sounds pained about it, instead of like he’s trying to excuse himself. “Alastor has always been so paranoid and jumpy and prone to finding answers in shadows…”
“That you thought a convicted Death Eater was him?”
“Could someone go and find poor Mr. Moody?” Harry interrupts. “He’s lying somewhere without his eye and his leg, and he probably wants to have them back.”
“Certainly, certainly, one should go find Mr. Moody,” Cornelius Fudge mutters. He got contacted by Crouch and Bagman not long after Harry came back with the cup and Barty’s body, and he’s nervously eying Harry. He stands as far away from him as possible, and almost never speaks. Harry is satisfied that his curse to speak the truth still holds.
“I’ll go.” Professor McGonagall sounds frustrated with the whole thing. Harry willingly hands over Moody’s eye and leg, and she takes them and stalks out of the office, giving her robes a frustrated little flip on her way down the stairs. Harry thinks he’d like to learn how to do that.
“Now, Harry.” Dumbledore links his hands together on the desk. “I want you to tell me why you killed Mr. Crouch.”
“I didn’t. He’s right over there.”
Dumbledore breaths slowly in and out, probably some new sort of meditation exercises that Blackeye has him doing. Harry’s impressed by how well they’re working for him, since he succeeds in keeping his temper. “Listen to me, Harry. The young man at your feet was also named Crouch. He’s the one I’m referring to.”
“My son!” Crouch breaks in, his hands shaking. “Why did you murder my son?”
“Well, why was he alive when he was supposed to be dead?”
That gets more than one person turning to stare at Crouch. Snape, who is standing in the corner because apparently he thinks he needs to be present for every stupid discussion that happens at the school, hasn’t taken his gaze off either Harry or the body since they came in here, but now he looks straight at Crouch, his eyes glinting.
“Yes,” he says in a low voice, “I would be most interested to know how a convicted Death Eater appeared alive at the school when he was supposedly buried years ago.”
Crouch draws himself up. “I will give you an answer on that when I get an answer from Mr. Potter on why he murdered my son.”
Snape starts to snap something, but Harry answers, “He wanted to duel after I poisoned the body his lord was living in and destroyed it. So I said all right. And he was subject to the same blood feud as you if he was a Crouch. It’s not like I could have refused without losing my honor.”
“Your honor, your precious honor.” Crouch is shaking, looking as if he might explode form the force of his emotions. “And you sit here as if you’re proud of yourself for what you did.”
Harry blinks at him. “I’m not proud for having to kill a madman, but I’m not devastated. And I’m not the one who illegally imprisoned an innocent man, got a guilty one out of prison and lied to everyone about him being dead, refused a blood feud, and refused a duel after agreeing to it.”
“You act as though that makes murder acceptable!”
“Why was he out of prison, Crouch?” That’s Cornelius Fudge, for some reason. Harry raises his eyebrows. Well, sometimes even the worst people are capable of recognizing when someone is making a mistake, it seems.
Crouch looks down. “His mother,” he whispers. “She was dying, and she-she couldn’t stand the thought of her baby boy suffering in prison. All she wanted was for him to be free. It was the only dying wish she had.”
“And that makes it worth freeing him, of course,” Snape sneers.
Then again, Harry thinks, that’s understandable. Snape probably didn’t have a dying mother and can’t think why someone would act on her behalf.
Harry shrugs a little and says, “That’s a sad story, but it means that it’s hypocritical of you to be angry about his death now. You broke the law, you lied and even told people that he wasn’t alive. I only cooperated in making your lie the truth.”
Crouch takes a step forwards, and Dumbledore creates a loud rapping sound with his wand. Everyone turns and looks at him.
“I need to speak with Mr. Potter in private,” he says loudly. “As it is, the Ministry will have some questions for Mr. Crouch about his son, and I’m sure that you want to take the body away and examine it.”
Harry has to admire the skill with which Dumbledore gets everyone to leave the office, except for Snape. Snape seems to think he has a right to stay. Harry disagrees, but he wants to hear what Dumbledore has to say, so he ignores the shuffling around Snape does and the angry, ugly look he gives Harry.
When they’re alone (except for a dishonorable coward), Dumbledore folds his hands on the desk again and stares at Harry. “I need to know everything you know about the body that Voldemort was there in.”
Snape flinches, but Harry can say this for him, he didn’t run madly off into a graveyard to serve a kelpie-thing. Harry nods a little. “Voldemort was there as a spirit possessing this tiny, ugly little body. I think Barty kidnapped me to try and get him a better one. They tried to bind me instead of just kill me, so they had to have some use for me. But when I struck the body with my basilisk-venom dagger, it killed it. His spirit flew away, though.”
Dumbledore sighs and looks old, although a second later he jumps and his head rotates as if he thinks Blackeye is rising through the stones. “I wish you had managed to trap his spirit, my boy. It will be harder to capture him now that he is disembodied again.”
Harry shrugs a little. “I managed to drive him out of the body he was possessing twice before. I can do it again.”
“I wish you would not refer to poor Professor Quirrell that way, my boy.”
Harry ignores that, because it’s just rehashing the cause of the war, and Dumbledore knows all about that by now and shouldn’t need any further education. He stands up. “I’m going to go make sure the cup that Barty enchanted is okay,” he announces.
“I need to ask you a few more questions, Mr. Potter.”
“What about, though? I don’t know where Voldemort’s spirit went or anything.”
Dumbledore breathes again, and then says, “You think that committing murder isn’t something you need to talk about?”
“It was in the bounds of a legally recognized duel, and he’d kidnapped me and was trying to kill me. Why would you think that it was murder?”
“Legally recognized by whom?” Snape demands. “Not the Ministry.”
“My people.” Harry stares blankly at Snape, too. There are some people who can’t take a hint and can’t take a lesson. “Since he’s the son of a man I was having a blood feud with, and he kidnapped me.”
“You cannot go by goblin law concerning humans.”
Harry shrugs. “Crouch proves that I can’t go by human law and expect fair treatment for the people who matter to me, either.” He turns and walks out of the office.
He makes it all the way down the moving staircase and most of the way back to Ravenclaw Tower before he sees Luna moving towards him. Harry stops and waits for her, and she touches his arm and then looks into his face.
“A Nargle didn’t get you,” she says, and sighs. “I was coming to warn you about the Nargle, but I got delayed.”
“It’s all right.” Harry pats Luna’s shoulder. “I decided to go with the Nargle because the cup was hurt, and I wanted to do what I could to soothe its pain. And I defeated the kelpie when I got there.”
Luna’s eyes brighten. “That’s wonderful. Perhaps one day you will pay the kelpie back for the people he’s drowned.”
Harry smiles as they walk back to the Tower to comfort the cup together. No matter what he’s talking about, Luna always gets it immediately. He’s so glad that she’s his friend.
The Immeasurable Hymn of Ocean
“Let us honor today Harry James Potter, amaraczh and goblin warrior and journeyman smith, for his prowess in battle!”
Harry bows as the chorus of cries rise from the throats of the goblins around him. They’re all gathered in the main cavern underneath Gringotts where his clan comes together in times of trouble and celebration. It has a smooth, segmented black floor, and smooth galleries grown from the stone on which many of the goblins sit.
Harry is the only one in the center of the floor, except for Toothsplitter, his master in his craft, and Ripclaw, the goblin who found him all those years ago. They’re the appropriate ones to honor him. Harry turns to Ripclaw, his heart hammering with excitement and his breath coming short.
Ripclaw steps towards him and bows. Harry sighs, and the sigh is echoed from the galleries around him. It’s a big deal for a goblin as old as Ripclaw to bow to anyone, but he also gave Harry his first knife, and it’s right that he be here after Harry’s first duel.
“Harry,” Ripclaw says, his eyes burning with pride like candles in the seams of the Deep Ones. “I give you this day three gifts.”
Harry blinks. He only expected two. “Ripclaw…”
“It is your right,” Ripclaw says. “And it is mine, as Honorer, to say how much I will deliver. Or do you dispute my right?”
Harry dips his chin. “Of course not, Ripclaw.”
Ripclaw nods. “Then this is the way of it.” He reaches into his belt and draws out a finely-made knife, shaped like Harry’s daggers, but with a sharper point and greater heft. “I will train you in the art of knife-song. This is the first blade that you will wield in the pursuit of that art.”
Harry tips his head to the side, baring his throat for a strike if Ripclaw wants it, overwhelmed. It’s the most profound gesture he can make, greater than a bow, and still he doesn’t think it’s great enough to answer the gift. Knife-song is the use of music to make sure that the knife flies straight to its target. Harry can become deadly from a distance, and perhaps even learn to cast wand-spells through the knife as it flies.
“My thanks,” he says at last, with a dry throat.
Ripclaw nods, his eyes gleaming a little, and hands Harry the knife. “Now for the customary two gifts,” he says, and there is laughter and cheering from the galleries, which before this were silent in the most profound recognition they, in turn, could give.
Ripclaw lays his hands on either side of Harry’s face, gazing deeply into his eyes. “The left or the right, young amaraczh?” he asks. “The face or the hand?”
“The right,” Harry says, and breathes out his choice-the one he’s made, presumptuously, years before, even though he knew this day might never come. “The face.”
Ripclaw nods quietly, the truth unspoken between them that few humans would choose to be marked there. But Harry wants everyone who looks at him to know who he is, and that he’s proud of his heritage. His people. The ones he chose.
Ripclaw studies Harry’s face for a second, doubtless memorizing the curves and the cheekbones to decide on the best placement. Then he nods again and moves his claws down, blindingly fast, in the motion for which he was named. He’s sharpened them so much that Harry doesn’t even feel the skin part, only the blood pouring.
Toothsplitter steps forwards, so stiff with pride that she moves like a steel machine, and hands him the customary Searing Cloth. It looks like a simple white handkerchief with a silver zigzag down the middle of it, but when Harry lifts it and presses it against the wound, there’s a flash and a dizzying pull of magic through his face.
When he hands it back to Toothsplitter, Ripclaw is holding out the mirror for him. Harry struggles against his own pride as he views the scar cutting his cheek that’s the mark of a warrior, a perfect zigzag that will never heal. It sizzles from just beneath his right eye to the curve of his cheek, then turns and moves under his ear, then arrows back to stop just short of his mouth.
There are no words to describe the blood-beat in his ears, a match for the thunder of the drums that are being played for him.
“And the third,” Ripclaw says softly, and moves forwards. A bubble of silence comes with him, called into being by this place, this moment, this acceptance of Harry as a warrior and Harry’s acceptance of the gifts.
Harry smiles at him, and waits. Ripclaw bends his head towards him and says tenderly, “Your warrior name is Doomgiver.”
Harry bows his head. In Gobbledegook, the twist of the words means that Harry gives doom and justice, both, ending evil.
It’s an immense honor, especially because he didn’t actually kill Voldemort, the greater threat, in the graveyard. But Ripclaw honors his intentions, and his youth, and the doom-giving potential of the basilisk venom, and the future, all in one swoop.
Harry won’t use the name often. Warriors have their common name and then their warrior name, which is only spoken in the heat of battle and in the inner caverns of the clan. Harry can share it with his enemies as they lie dying, if he wants, as a final gift, but that’s his choice.
But to know that he has it, that he is also a goblin in name now…
“Does it suit, Harry?” Ripclaw asks, and Harry realizes abruptly that he hasn’t given the formal acceptance.
He reaches out, lays his hand against the faded warrior scar on Ripclaw’s cheek, and says, “It is my privilege and my weight to bear until the end of my days, until they end by time or blade.”
Ripclaw grins. The acceptance Harry chose is the more formal one. He could have just indicated that he was happy with the name while retaining the right to change it later if he wanted, but he wants to do it this way. He wants to carry the warrior name, always.
The bubble of silence drops as Ripclaw steps away from him, and Harry bows to the assembled goblins as Ripclaw proclaims, “This is Harry James Potter, warrior of the Arzhenakkhanian Clan, bearer of the warrior name Doomgiver, holder of the basilisk fang, and journeyman to the Master Smith Toothsplitter!”
The deafening cries of the drums and the clan echo back to him, and Harry kneels and holds up his daggers so everyone can see them, the symbols of his right to bear the name, and turns slowly in a circle, so that everyone can see the scar, too.
He knows that he’s the first human in centuries to be so honored, and his pride fills him like the sun.
*
“I think you are ready to see a tributary of the Argent Ocean.”
Harry catches his breath as he watches Toothsplitter open a door in the air that wasn’t there a moment before. It leads past the Argent Ocean, blazing and shimmering, and Harry doesn’t hesitate to follow her through it. He finds himself standing on a grey, pebbled shore, sloping down to a single stream that flows and clangs heavily on its way through rock to the Argent Ocean.
It’s also gleaming gold and copper, instead of the mixed molten silver and water of the Ocean.
Harry turns to Toothsplitter with questions in his eyes. She motions for him to sit down, and takes a seat beside him on the shore, looping her arms at ease around her legs.
“This is a tributary that we have our children practice on,” she says. “It turns silver when it merges with the Argent Ocean, but by the time it gets there, it only has the gold and copper left as stabilizing agents that help keep the souls of our once-enemies at peace in the argent. This stream contains a psychic impression of each human who has died trying to break into Gringotts, cheat us, or betray us.”
Harry nods. Not their souls, then, but a sense of what the human was like. “And all of them are forged before the stream gets to the ocean?”
“Yes. We channel it back and forth until all of the impressions are forged, and the gold and copper can proceed on their way, cleansed.” Toothsplitter turns to face him. “I want you to show me what you have learned, Harry. That you have not let your skills lapse while you were living in the halls of Hogwarts.”
Harry takes a long, slow breath, and reaches down to let his hands rest along the bank of the stream, staring into the flowing gold and copper. This is the first step in the more advanced lessons. Let his mind sink, flow deep, dip down, and meet the psychic impression of the human.
There. A sniveling soul-picture, a devastating sense of darkness and cowardice that makes Harry want to go take a shower. A man who broke into Gringotts and got as far as one of the deep vaults before being roasted to death by a dragon. He died in pain and fear.
Harry feels the impression slipping away from him because of his disgust, and shakes his head sharply. No, he is not going to let this happen. He will forge the impression, and make beauty out of ugliness. Unlike the goblins’ once-enemies whose powers are imprisoned in the Argent Ocean, there is no living human somewhere to return this impression to.
But just because it’s practice doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Harry winds his mind around the other man’s psychic impression and draws it forth, draws it around and on, wrapping it in his thoughts, harmonizing with its song, imagining the copper and gold from the stream coming with and holding it-
And something burning coalesces in his hands, prevented from burning him by the songs wrapped around it.
Harry opens his eyes and glimpses the dripping blade of molten copper that he holds, with a golden hilt. He turns quickly and plunges it into the barrel of water that Toothsplitter carried with them, and the hiss and the steam that result make him smile in pride.
He did it. He forged the psychic impression of a human into something beautiful and shining, even though it would be a highly imperfect blade if he had to use it to defend himself or something else.
When the steam finally fades and he can draw the sword forth, Harry smiles again. It’s a twisted, beaten thing, cracked by the heat. But when he touches it, the copper flashes forth, and the gold is there, hiding and darting in cracks in the hilt.
And there is a new song in his mind. A song that contains notes of sympathy for the dead man’s gambling problem, and remembers his love for his mother, and says that he once stood in awe of the stars.
Harry will remember him. The sword, and the song, will remember him. He is no longer just an enemy of the goblins.
This is the art of a goblin smith.
Part Four.