Chapter Nineteen of 'Wondrous Lands and Oceans'- Access to the North
Chapter Eighteen.
Title: Wondrous Lands and Oceans (19/about 30)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, George/Angelina, Bill/Fleur, others possible.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, angst, bloody animal death, bonding.
Summary: The emigration to the wild magic world of Hurricane is complete, but not the settling-in process. Harry and Draco struggle to solidify both their own bond and their bonds with their family and allies-while setting out on journeys of exploration that prove there is more to Hurricane than storms.
Author’s Notes: This is a sequel to Reap the Hurricane; that one should be read first. This story will probably be somewhere between twenty and thirty chapters long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nineteen-Access to the North
“Well. That’s different.”
Harry only nodded in response to Draco’s words, while keeping them hovering in the air and his eyes on the mountain that loomed ahead of them. Or, well, a mountain was what Harry had to call it, because he didn’t think he’d ever run into any other word that would give a sense of what it looked like.
Maybe if there had been an English word meaning “a plume of smoke that stays in the same place and shifts back and forth slowly and continuously, with rings of whiter smoke orbiting it,” than Harry could have used that. But a mountain was the closest one-word equivalent.
“That’s where the wild magic that called us is coming from,” Hermione muttered, leaning forwards until Harry longed to smack her upside the head with a breeze to make her stay in her chair. “I’m sure of it.”
Harry nodded in resignation. Of course the call would be coming from a place like that, the strangest and most frightening thing they had seen on Hurricane.
I think the snake-shark was more frightening.
Harry relaxed despite himself. Having someone who could hear his thoughts proved a blessing at the oddest points, and especially at those points when he would have thought it couldn’t.
“Then we’ll have to go up to it sooner or later,” Ron said, eyeing the plume of smoke in dislike. “Doesn’t much matter whether or not we want to.” He nodded to Harry and leaned back in his chair of wind as though he assumed the plain declaration meant they would be moving forwards immediately.
“I know,” Harry said, “but we’ll need to investigate what’s around it.” It looked as though the mountains blurred away into mist around the smoke. He didn’t know if that was only the effect of distance or not. Physical laws worked so differently on Hurricane that he wouldn’t trust something that looked as if it behaved in Earth ways until he had some proof that it did.
“Why?” Ron cocked his head. “We can’t sneak up on it anyway, I don’t think, so we might as well attack it right away.”
“We don’t know if we can sneak up on it or not,” Draco pointed out. “So we might as well behave as if we can. It’ll make us feel safer, and it’s possible that we might be able to.”
Ron gave him a skewed sideways look that made Harry wonder if they were going to have more trouble, but in the end, he grunted and settled back against his chair again. “That makes as much sense as anything else on this bloody planet does,” he said. “Are we going to set up a camp?”
Harry turned to Hermione. “Can you find a place that’s safe for us in terms of the wild magic? Wherever it’s strongest, we might want to avoid. Can you pinpoint where it’s weakest?”
Hermione shut her eyes and turned her head in a slow, seeking motion. She had taken up doing that as they flew further and further north, and especially when they turned east, away from the source of the call. Harry didn’t know why it helped, but then, he didn’t think Hermione would understand the way the breezes blew through his hair and across his face and seemed to speak to him.
“No, sorry,” Hermione said at last, opening her eyes and shaking her head. “I can sense the strongest places, but they’re like bright lights in the gloom. There might be places where the gloom is deeper, but the lights themselves make it hard to see.”
Harry nodded. That was a clearer way of explaining what her gift did than he had thought she would find. “All right. Then just tell me the places where the wild magic blazes, and we’ll make sure we avoid them.”
Hermione directed them around a valley that had another silver oval at the bottom of it, and a place that Harry left with regret, because it was lush and green and looked as though the bottom of the hollow were filled with forest. Of course, on Hurricane, that probably meant dense life and maybe a birds’ hunting ground. In the end, they chose a small rocky hollow with steep walls and no access that they could find through the cliffs. The only way to get out was by flying straight up, but on the other hand, that meant only airborne enemies could really get in after them.
Harry felt Draco twitch as they landed. Because it could have been any number of things, he didn’t draw attention to it, but helped Ron and Hermione set up the camp’s defenses and the fire. Hermione’s gift had led them to another patch of ground where the rabbit-like creatures lived and exercised their magic, so at least they had enough food, even if it was rather bland.
When Harry had watched his friends fall into one of their usual evening arguments about whether they should move the home camp, he drifted towards Draco. Draco stood with his arms folded and his gaze fixed on the distant-volcano, Harry had decided to call it. The word was as good as any other.
“You’re feeling the call again, aren’t you?” Harry asked quietly.
Draco whipped towards him. His face was as pale as salt, and Harry thought he had never seen his eyes so large. “I wasn’t going to answer it,” he said. “But I can hear it, and it’s telling me to come alone this time.”
Harry nodded, and reached out through the bond. Draco reached back to him, his grip as strong and desperate as a wall of water.
We’ll discover the source of the call and stop it, Harry reassured him. And I didn’t think you would answer it. But I wanted you to know that you weren’t alone.
I never am.
Well, this time you’re especially not alone, Harry said, and tapped his shoulder against Draco’s.
It took a while, but Draco’s smile came on, strong and real, and Harry escorted him back to the fire in far better spirits.
*
Draco woke in the middle of the night, turning his head at once away from the still-roaring fire to preserve his night vision. He knew what had awakened him, and it wasn’t the call resonating down the corridors of his mind.
It was the enormous, night-black creature on four legs that stood at the edge of the camp, concealed in the shadows of the fire, and watched them, unmoving. Draco doubted it would have alerted him to its presence under ordinary circumstances, but it was difficult to move quietly on sheer stone, and the creature had sent a pebble skittering.
Draco got his hands beneath him without difficulty. The creature was turning its head back and forth, and Draco made out the heavy horns on the sides. He wondered for a moment if it was a relative of the mummidade, and whether it would be a violation of their alliance with them to hurt it.
But then one foot edged nearer, coming into the circle of the firelight and shadows where it was easier to see. Draco grinned fiercely when he saw it. It was a paw, with nails on it as heavy as iron. Not a hoof, and that made it less likely that the creature was a great goat.
He woke Harry with a pulse through the bond, and told him in the same way not to move or change his breathing. Harry lay there with the wild magic gathering around him, breezes sighing in his face and ruffling Draco’s hair. Interestingly, that didn’t make the dark creature move. Draco wondered if it wasn’t as sensitive to the winds as the mummidade were, or perhaps simply not to the wild magic.
What shall we do?
Move your winds behind it, and hold it there, while I get my weapons to threaten it from the front.
I’m not sure the winds will work, Harry said. It walked straight through the wards and the winds that we put around the valley as if they weren’t there.
Draco barely kept himself from hissing aloud. That implication of the creature’s position hadn’t occurred to him before. You made those barriers permeable to light and air and the rest of the things that we need during the night, though. Make this one as hard as crystal. Nothing should get through it.
Harry didn’t answer in words, but Draco felt the surge of power through the bond, and knew he would be weaving.
They continued to feign sleep, and the creature took another step closer. This time, Draco was watching its flanks, and saw the thick black, shimmering covering over it. He wondered for a moment if they had run into something with hands like a human’s, or at least a servant of human-like creatures. That covering could be a blanket, and perhaps the creature had a rider left behind while it came to scout on its own.
Then firelight danced and sparked as the creature glanced over its shoulder, and Draco saw it from a different angle. The black swam with other colors, purple and midnight blue and sharp half-green, and he realized it was feathers, with the same blur of shades and hues as a starling’s.
A relative of the birds? he asked Harry, when he could sense that Harry had paused from his intense weaving of the wind and was ready to launch his trap.
I think it has four legs, Harry said briefly. The winds have been feeling their way around the edges of it, and it’s like-a buffalo, I think, that general shape and with the heaviness, but with paws instead of hooves and feathers draping it instead of hair.
Draco blinked and gathered his own power in his hands, claws that he knew were longer and more impressive than those on the paws so near them. I wonder why it hasn’t attacked yet? It argues some intelligence to watch us like this, but I suppose it could only be intending to pick the easiest target.
I don’t know, but I’m getting tired of lying here. And there’s the chance Ron and Hermione could wake up any second and see it and shout, which would waste a lot of preparation.
Ever the Gryffindor, on the offensive.
Harry didn’t respond in words, but snapped one hand out. Draco felt the stillness in the air near them as his heavily-woven wind fell over the creature from above, caging it in a mesh of magic, rattling as it hit the stony ground.
The creature promptly reared on its hind legs, crying out with a voice that sounded more like clashing of sheets of metal than anything animal. It stretched up, and up, and up. Draco stared at it, his claws dangling useless at his sides for the moment, and realized that he had underestimated how long it was. Rearing above them like this, the body that had coiled on the ground and trailed back into the darkness was obvious. At least the size of a dragon, and probably bigger.
He wondered for a moment if his claws were such efficient weapons after all, and whether Harry’s wind would be enough to hold it.
But Harry was standing up now, his hands clenched in front of him and his teeth gritted with a determination that ricocheted down the bond to Draco, and winds were diving to aid him. That was the advantage of Harry’s gift, that he could call more help literally out of the air. Draco stood up and moved over to the side, ready to stab the creature if it turned in a way that could threaten Harry.
The creature seemed intent on getting away more than anything, though-that, and tearing the invisible covering of wind over it. It wobbled back and forth, still on its hind legs, and then the great wings lifted away from its sides and chopped at Harry’s magic.
Draco had never seen anything so immense, a thought that he despised as soon as he had it. Of course he’d seen bigger things in the past, and had even helped to cause some of them. It did no one any good to say that he’d never seen anything like that-
And the creature was cutting furiously at the net draped over it, and might get through, from the way Harry was swearing and sweating and swaying back and forth. Draco moved to help him, stabbing at the creature’s legs.
The creature screamed, an even more painful sound this time, and something else came stooping out of the sky to help it.
Draco rolled on his back, lifting his hands. The claws he imagined grew longer immediately, and stabbed up into the breast of this other flying creature, which resembled the one they’d trapped.
The second one shrieked, rolling over and over, its wings banging and flapping. Draco stabbed again and again, trying to cut the flight muscles, trying to create wounds deep enough that it would back away and leave them alone, trying to survive.
Finally, the second creature flew away, casting a shadow over the camp that dimmed the stars and blew out their fire. The one they’d trapped threw back its head and screamed in despair, then cut at the net again.
Harry’s magic fractured. Draco looked quickly around as the bond pulsed and saw him fall. Harry caught himself with his hands on the stone before he could break his nose, and rolled over, but his muscles were as limp as puddles. He was breathing noisily, too, and gulping when he tried to swallow air.
Draco ran towards him at once, ignoring the way the first creature leaped for the sky. Harry’s health was more important.
Harry shook his head impatiently when Draco would have rolled him back over and helped him sit up, though. “It’s just magical exhaustion,” he said. “I tried to handle too much of the wild power at once, and this is the toll it takes. Capture that thing, Draco!” He tilted his head back, and winced. Draco could only catch the edges of the pain the headache was causing him, since Harry considerately blocked most of it from the bond, but the edges were more than enough.
“Not right now,” Draco said quietly. “We did our best to hold it, and lost. At least we can be sure that it won’t come back tonight.” He helped Harry sit up against a boulder and Summoned the satchels that Weasley carried. They were the ones with the richest food inside them.
“How do you know that?” Harry glared at him through eyes that were bright with the coming fever. “We don’t know why it showed up and stood there watching us in the first place. It might come back for the same inexplicable reason.”
Draco shook his head calmly at Harry. “It’s been frightened. If it came at the command of someone else, that person-or being-is more likely to think that we’re powerful and need to be kept away from right now. If it came at the call of its own instincts, then I think we’ve showed it that we’re not prey to be trifled with.”
Harry tried to argue, but it was hard to argue against good sense, as Draco well knew. In the end, he leaned back and shut his eyes with a pathetic little murmur that sounded a good deal like, “I hope you’re right.”
“I know I’m right,” Draco pointed out, his hands working lightly on the spells that would heat some of the rabbit meat and soften it. “You know the same thing most of the time, reluctant though you are to admit it.”
Harry grunted.
*
Of course Ron and Hermione had questions, but it was a long time before Harry could answer them. Draco did everything right for a case of magical exhaustion, what happened when the power built up in a wizard’s body until it simply shut off access to magic at all, but Harry still shivered through a few hours of fever and slept late into the morning.
Draco fussed over him when Harry forced himself back to his feet, but Harry shook his head at him. “As long as I can’t handle the wild magic, then the rest of you are unfairly exposed,” he said.
“Unfairly,” Draco told the horizon. “Yes, he wears himself out in our defense, and then insists that it’s unfair to rest.”
“You need me,” Harry said, and held out his hands. For a moment, he was afraid that Draco was right, he really had exhausted himself too much, and the magic wouldn’t respond. Then the winds sprang up and curled around him like purring cats, and Harry gratefully increased the camp’s defenses back to where they needed to be again.
He turned around to find Draco glaring at him. But when Harry stayed on his feet instead of collapsing at once, Draco shook his head and let him be.
Hermione was gazing off to the north with wide, blurred eyes. “I can sense that the magic around the smoking mountain has grown,” she whispered. “I wonder if that was what sent those creatures after us?”
“Maybe,” Harry said. “But the problem is, the one just stood looking at us for a long time, like it was curious. That doesn’t sound to me like Bodiless sent it. It would have attacked us at once if it was like the storm.”
“How did it get through the wards?” Ron demanded, glaring at his wand as though it had betrayed him.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t know. I do know that it was strong-I’ve never felt something that strong since we got here. The birds are more dangerous, maybe, but it was fighting me even as I held it in the net of wind. I think the wild magic of Hurricane must have combated our Earth magic.”
“Our Earth magic,” Draco muttered, glaring at Harry as if to remind him that he hadn’t used his wand in a long time.
Harry shrugged back at him. At least things had progressed a bit if Draco was willing to consider himself part of a group with Ron and Hermione, instead of his own separate little group with Harry.
Draco caught the edge of the thought and walked away to inspect the slashes that the creature’s claws had left in the stone.
“There’s so much we don’t understand,” Hermione muttered, turning to Harry and frowning as though that was somehow his fault. “No matter how much we learn about it, even with my new gift, we don’t really know what we’re up against.”
Harry raised his hands. “I know. And I’m getting sick of our lack of knowledge, and there’s no mummidade around here for us to ask.” He took a deep breath. “I’m wondering if we shouldn’t simply attack the smoking mountain today, or at least fly directly towards it and see what happens.”
“That’s because you’re mad,” Draco called back helpfully from the edge of the camp.
“We don’t dare right now, I think,” Hermione said, frowning at him. “You’re exhausted, and we’ll probably all need to be at our top strength to survive this.”
And that’s a reason you should pay attention to, since it’s one of your precious friends saying it, Draco snarled down the bond. Harry pushed back attention and affection at him, and shrugged at Ron, who looked as though he would like to be in the air and flying at the mountain along with Harry; at least it would be doing something.
“What else do you suggest we do?” Harry asked Hermione quietly. “We can’t simply remain here, and we don’t know what’s going to be in the north. You can feel sources of wild magic, but you can’t tell us what they are.”
“I know,” Hermione snapped. “Believe me, I spent most of yesterday trying to make this magic tell me what was up there beyond these mountains.” Her hand toyed with her robe for a minute, and then she took a deep breath. “Let’s fly straight north. The mountain is where our enemy is, but maybe we can find out where those creatures came from if we go towards the other source of magic I can sense.”
“Other source?” She hadn’t said anything about that before.
“Something strong and pulsing,” Hermione said. “But not calling. It seems content to sit there and glow to itself, the way a sun would.”
It wasn’t a comforting description, but the only thing that would have made Harry feel better right now was following the course he had laid out, and Hermione was right about the reasons it wasn’t a good idea. He nodded shortly, and they made ready to leave, this time to travel across the mountains they could see looming directly to the north.
*
Draco knew that none of them had felt the mountains were exactly natural, but they had flown among them for long enough now that they had at least adapted to the sight of them. None of them were prepared for the way the mountains fell away in front of them after a few hours’ travel to the north, or for the country that lay beyond.
It was another great grassy plain, but this time more like a vast meadow than the rolling ground they had made their home camp on. The grass was green. The ground was flat, and dotted with wildflowers. Draco found them not as beautiful as the silver flowers tossing their heads in the wind that he and Harry had seen when they flew to the ocean, but one could not have everything. These flowers were white and red and yellow, and probably more homely to people like Granger and Weasley, who almost fell out of their chairs with staring.
“Look!” Weasley’s voice cracked down the middle at the same time as Granger gasped aloud.
Draco followed their pointing fingers, little as he wanted to, and saw shapes skimming above the grass. They were white, like the mummidade, but far lighter and more graceful, with longer legs. More like deer, or antelopes. They trailed back and forth in a long chain, which reversed and bent back on itself, like a dance.
The air above them vibrated, and a long scream came down. Draco looked upwards and saw two more of the creatures like the ones he and Harry had fought circling on wide wings. The white creatures on the ground scattered at the sight of them, leaping straight up into the sky and unfolding wings of their own. In seconds, they scattered into what seemed like a thousand different directions.
“Like a flock of birds,” Harry muttered. “Another survival strategy.”
Another scream sounded as if in response to his words, and Draco felt the air near them shake. Three of the black-feathered creatures dropped towards them, their wings chopping wildly at the air and their paws outstretched.
And on their backs were riders.
Chapter Twenty.
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