Pre-Chapter A/N: Bit of a late upload. Been a bit of a wasteman tbh. More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Experimenting with two chapters a week, we'll see how long I can keep this up for.
I should probably have kept the fiendfyre for long enough to destroy these wards at least, it seemed, I thought to myself as I stood before the door. My rationale had been the fact that with the size the fiendfyre had reached, there was no chance I was going to manage that much without basically announcing myself to the rest of this place. And to be honest, I just wanted to get out of here.
I wanted nothing to do with whatever weirdos had decided reviving an old Grindelwald base to run experiments out of was a wise decision. Especially considering they had kidnapped me for some reason. The one that had been pretending to be Julian was probably supposed to leave me in that chamber before leaving to join his fellows. Sadly for him, I was more than he had expected me to be.
"Did you not study warding in Hogwarts, Harry Potter?" Grindelwald asked from his position squatted at my side.
"Obviously not," I hissed as my third attempt to disable the thing hissed and fizzled out in my face.
"Yes, I can see that quite clearly. Would you like my help?" he offered. I turned to look at him, instantly sceptical. I had been keeping a careful eye on my magic reserves, and I was certain he wasn't feeding on my magic or anything. But just because he hadn't started doing anything suspicious yet didn't mean that he wasn't going to do anything eventually. Trusting a horcrux was the kind of mistake that led to a short life and a shallow grave. But what choice did I have?
"And how would you do that? You're nothing more than a projection, after all."
"A projection of the greatest wizard of his age," he said with a sniff.
"And while you did not study warding at Hogwarts, I studied it quite extensively at Durmstrang," he said. Of course he did. No one in the world with any knowledge of European history could deny Grindelwald's skill as a warder. The things he had done in Nurmengard were the stuff of legend. Dozens of curse-breakers had died trying to break into the place after his fall.
It had taken Dumbledore, and a dozen of the best curse-breakers on the continent as well as Gringotts working together to dismantle most of the things he had wrought, and even then they hadn't been able to break all the wards, just managing to remove the worst of them so they could get some of the prisoners out. Emphasis on some. Even with Dumbledore, they still had lost half the prisoners to Grindelwald's failsafes in the end. So yes, I had no doubt he could help me with this. And I had no other choices available.
"Fine. Help, please. How do I get rid of this?" I gestured to the door and the gleaming red barrier around it.
"First of all, what kind of ward is it?" he asked.
"I didn't ask for a lesson. Just help me remove the ward," I growled back.
"Well, it is not like you find yourself spoiled for choice, is it? We either do this my way or not at all," he said. I looked back at him, and he met my gaze, not even flinching or backing down slightly. Oh, fuck it.
"It's a boundary ward of some sort. Creates a boundary that no one can pass."
"Mostly correct. But most wards are boundary wards in one way or another. What kind of ward is this one? I'll give you a hint: the door doesn't matter even slightly," he said.
"So it's not a locking ward then?" I deduced from the hint.
"No. It is not. Those creatures would have broken through something like that easily. Think about what the point of the ward is," he said.
"Is it a containment ward?"
"Accurate enough. Now how do we bypass it?"
"Bypass, not break?"
"This place is built on the intersection of two leylines, and that ward has been up and feeding on the leylines for decades per your account. If you want to try banging your head against a wall and expect it to give way, then be my guest."
"Alright then. No need for you to be so snarky. Okay, we have to bypass it. How do we do that?"
"What do you know about containment wards?"
"Only that they are designed to keep things in a specific space within that space rather than keeping outsiders out of said space more than anything else," I said.
"Yes, that is their primary feature. Magic works on balance more than anything else. And this works by using that balance to its advantage. It has almost no power to prevent ingress and trades that capability for near-limitless power to prevent egress."
"So now that we know how it works, how does it help me do anything?"
"How did you get here?" he asked.
"The portkey on the cup."
"Indeed, and I am sure you don't think your adversary was supposed to remain in that cell with you," he said.
"So you think he is keyed into the wards?" I asked back.
"Most definitely. That is the only way he could make it out of here, isn't it?"
"So we just have to find a way to key myself into it as well. Using his corpse, perhaps?"
"These aren't blood wards from what I can see, else a partial blood adoption would work. You'd just have to be sure to do a cleansing ritual before things became permanent," he said, and I nodded even as I didn't say there was no chance I would just blood adopt myself to a random person to make it through a ward of all things. Not when there were other options.
"Think he could carry someone along with him through the wards?" I asked.
"Most likely," he said.
"Then that works for me," I said, turning back and walking towards the room I'd been imprisoned in.
"Last I checked, you blew a hole in his chest, Harry Potter," I heard his call after me.
"I wonder what they teach at Durmstrang if you think that is an unfixable problem," I tossed back, a smile on my face.
"They must put delusions in the broccoli juice in Hogwarts."
"The what?"
"Broccoli juice? You know, the drink that comes with every meal back in school. You didn't have those?"
"Oh, we did, just that we had pumpkin juice instead."
"Ugh. That sounds terrible."
"Terrible? Nothing sounds as bad as the words broccoli and juice in the same sentence," I shot back before I stepped back through the hole I'd blown into the wall. There was my quarry, still dead as I'd left him.
"I want to see this," he said, stepping past me to get a good look at the target.
I opened a cut on my palm and drew my blood out into the air, levitating it with ease. And then I used said blood to begin to draw runes. Once I completed a rune, it flew through the air before burning itself into the dead man's skin.
"You're going to make an Inferius? How in Morgana's name do you even know how to do that? They didn't teach it in Durmstrang even?" I smirked in reply. I wasn't going to tell him that if anyone at Hogwarts knew I could do this, then I'd be the recipient of more than a few questions.
As for how I had learned it, that was a question for Tom Riddle more than it was for anyone else. Unlimited access to the restricted section from his fourth year meant he knew things about the dark arts that no student had any business knowing. And contrary to what most people would have thought, the Hogwarts restricted section had actually been the Wild West back then. It was Hogwarts policy never to remove books or destroy them, so whenever a magical art was made illegal, all books were moved to the restricted section and forgotten about. At least that was how things had been up to Riddle's time.
The restricted section he had made his second home in his fifth year and the one Harry had wandered into in his first year were worlds different from each other. Probably Dumbledore's meddling.
"Hogwarts isn't Durmstrang," I said as I drew the last of the runes and began to murmur in Gaelic. If I was being technical, this wasn't an Inferius ritual. Those required way more preparation and wouldn't work for these purposes either way. What I was creating was a false draugr. Less powerful than a true one, and also easier to create—the main requirement being that I had the power to animate the body and the remnants of the soul's information, along with the body not having been dead for more than a couple of hours. The more powerful the host, the less time one had between death and all the soul's information leaving.
At least that was how it tended to work according to the books Tom Riddle had read on the subject. He'd never actually done it before. Neither had I. But that was the good thing about the dark arts. They were deceptively easy to use when you had enough talent.
"Rise, and do my will," I muttered in Gaelic, waiting for the spell to take hold. The wind in the room seemed to go still as the body lurched and rose upright. Almost like it was not used to moving. And then it looked down at its chest, seeing the hole within.
"To the door," I commanded out loud, even if I could tell that I did not quite need verbal commands to direct it. I could feel the same kind of mental bond with this creature as I would have had with a transfigured or animated one. It was dirtier—if that was a good word, but that was the best I could think of in this situation.
The body did still begin moving just like it would have if it were alive. Fluid. Not lumbering or stumbling like one would have expected. "There is no chance that you learned that at Hogwarts, my good man," Gellert's voice sounded in my ears as I followed.
"Does it matter where I learned it?" I asked, brow raised. He didn't seem to be the type to care much about rules. I knew he wasn't, in fact, since he'd been expelled from Durmstrang for some magic so dark that even those sick fucks had to wonder what the fuck was wrong with him.
Made me wonder what it was he did though. This version of him didn't seem to bear much ill will towards the school though? Was it making a horcrux? Was that the dark magic that had gotten Gellert Grindelwald expelled? And if that were the case, did Dumbledore know? Was that why he didn't kill him when they faced each other all those decades ago? Was it not that he hadn't been able to overcome the love he felt for his friend but rather that he had known that killing him would not have mattered since it would just have allowed him to come back as a Horcrux? In that case, could that be the path I took with Voldemort when the time came? I would destroy the horcruxes, of course. I would do the best I could in that respect, but if I didn't manage to get all of them, was imprisonment a possibility?
That would mean being so much more powerful than him that I could afford to fight him without going for the kill and still win. Eventually, I would get that powerful, yes. But right now? It seemed more like a pipe dream than anything.
"Take my hand in yours and pull me through the door," I commanded when we reached the locked door.
The draugr, reanimated from a corpse that had not been long gone, still had a good portion of its magic left in it. That meant the wards that were to keep whoever was locked within would recognise him as being keyed to them. And since he was pulling me through, then I should be able to pass easily with no problems. And it worked exactly as planned. The body pulled me through, and then I was on the other side.
"What's the way out?" I asked Gellert, turning to him and knowing full well that trusting him was far from the wisest thing to do in normal circumstances. In this one, he was the only way out. The reanimated draugr wouldn't be able to offer information. Just some part of the spell that made it useless for interrogation. The mind was gone the second the body died. It left with the soul, and while the soul's information remained, that was not the soul. A better way to describe the soul's information would be to call it the pins that kind of stapled the soul to the body.
Once the soul left, the pins began to detach themselves as well. But if you were quick enough, you could access enough of them to allow you to bring the body back to some semblance of life. Some facsimile of it.
"Left," he said, and I nodded, directing the draugr to bring up the rear as we began walking through the building. Gellert led me through turn after turn until we reached a door. In doing so, we passed no windows of any sort, and any attempt I made to apparate came up against the unyielding wards.
"Okay, time to confess some dishonesty," he said.
I turned to him, snapping my wand in his direction.
"You know what I am," he said more than accused. I did not confirm or deny.
"You don't need to pretend otherwise. The second I saw you perfectly animate a false draugr, I knew you would know. And that is because you and I are alike. Just like I did not allow Durmstrang to tell me what I could or could not do, the magic I could or could not learn, you did the same with Hogwarts. Because if even Durmstrang would hesitate to teach the theory around creating draugrs, then there's no chance you learned it at Hogwarts. My Aunt Bathilda went to Hogwarts, you know? If she learned anything even close to this interesting, then I would know."
"What do you want, horcrux?" I spat.
"I want you to retrieve my physical receptacle. Do so, and I will guide you out of here. I'll guide you for the rest of your life if you let me."
"It's so simple, is it?" I asked.
"Yes. Yes it is."
"And what is it? What is the physical receptacle?" I asked.
"My necklace. It's made of silver and has the symbol of the three brothers on it," he said.
"And it's behind this door?" Because of course, he led me straight towards the thing he wanted.
"Yes," he said.
"What else is behind this door, Gellert?" I asked, feeling a bad feeling begin to creep up.
"The Chinaman has taken to wearing my receptacle around his neck. If you need to remove his head to get it, then feel free to do so."
"The whole point of this was to escape without being noticed, Gellert. What the fuck?"
"That's silly. They've been watching you since you arrived."
"What?"
"Surely you did not think they would leave a prisoner without a means of keeping track of things?" he asked in return.
"And you didn't think to mention it either way?" I asked in a furious hiss.
And then the door swung open.
"Please come in, Harry Potter," I heard the voice from the end of the room, not even able to see who was speaking from my present angle.
I looked back at Gellert, finding him ushering me forwards with his hands. Oh, this motherfucker. If they knew I was free and had been preparing for me for that long, then there wasn''t much of a point in trying to run.
"You're going to owe me one for this," I said, walking indoors and ignoring whatever recital Gellert thought he could allot to this situation.
The man who had spoken was sat on a throne at the end of the room. Gellert had directed me to a dining hall of some sort. Or what had once been a dining hall, at least. The arrangement of the room could only lead to that conclusion, even if at present the tables were pushed against the walls and the only visible chair was the throne the man sat atop. The man himself was interesting. Like Gellert had said in one of the least appropriate ways possible, the man was visibly of Asian descent. The only other special thing there was about him was the way he lounged on the throne. This was a man used to the throes of power, for all that it meant. Beyond that, he had the kind of face that you would forget if you saw him in a crowd.
"My name is… Well, it does not matter much either way. What matters is that you have something of mine," he said.
"Something of yours? I didn't take anything from anyone," I said.
"We both know that is far from the truth, Harry Potter. It is in your left pocket, after all."
"What are you talking about?"
"The stone, of course. Did you think that Julian did not have any benefactors? Our deal was that he would forfeit the stone to me after he used it for five years for his purposes. Of course, you saved me the trouble of having to kill him to get out of that pesky little thing. Now be a good boy and hand it over here," he said, stretching out his hand.
A/N: And so the twists keep turning. Next four chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.