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Chapter Text

Harry James Potter of Number Eleven and One Third, Southampton Street, London, was proud to say that he was highly unusual, thank you very much. He was the first person anyone who knew him would expect to be involved in anything strange or abnormal, because weird and dangerous things seemed attracted to him like a moth to a flame. This highly offended his only living relatives, who in their ignorance failed to understand just how extraordinary he was even by the standards of his own kind—his own kind being wizards, who lived in secret under the noses of the much larger muggle population. 

He was tall, though not exceptionally so, capping out at exactly six feet. His skin was fair, his perpetually messy hair jet-black, his eyes a distinctively vibrant green, like cut emeralds. He had a thin face with high cheekbones, thick eyebrows, thin lips, a narrow nose, and a slightly crooked smile, which gave him the look of an aristocrat who had turned outlaw. On his forehead, partially obscured by his fringe, was a thin, faded pink scar shaped like a bolt of lightning, souvenir of the night his parents were murdered, and he had lived. Years of Quidditch and combat training had allowed him to build a respectable amount of muscle on his deceptively slim frame, but no one would ever call him a bodybuilder. 

As the only person in recorded history to survive the Killing Curse and the vanquisher of Voldemort, the darkest wizard in history, Harry was about as famous as a wizard could be. He was known by many titles, most of which he hated rather passionately: The Boy Who Lived, the Wizard Who Won, the Chosen One, the Second Coming of Merlin, Triwizard Champion, Jewel of the Auror Office’s Crown. The only titles he had ever enjoyed holding were Gryffindor Seeker and, most recently, Godfather. 

So it was that on the 28th of November 2001, Harry found himself not in his magically concealed flat in the heart of London, but on holiday in the Azores with his infant godson, Teddy Lupin, and Teddy’s grandmother, Andromeda Tonks. The island, one of the smallest in the chain, had been privately owned by the Black family for generations and was concealed from Muggles by enchantments. Yet, despite being made Unplottable, its location was known to the Ministry of Magic, which had made it useless to Sirius as a hiding place in the final years of his life. These days, it served as a private getaway for Harry and his patchwork family. Normally, Ron and Hermione would have been here too, but just now they were on their honeymoon. 

Having just bade Andromeda goodnight, Harry was sitting on a rock just outside their tent, staring at the waning moon while his thoughts unwound. It had been full the previous night, awakening the lone side effect of Teddy’s werewolf heritage; a surge of energy like an adrenaline rush that resulted in a complete inability to sleep while the moon was full. It was such a silly, mundane inconvenience, that he thought Andi had been joking the first time she’d described the phenomenon. 

His gaze shifted to the moon’s reflection on the waters of the Atlantic, and the rough beach twenty meters away from the tent. Hundreds of kilometers to the northeast lay Great Britain and home. He wondered how the latest generation of first years was adjusting to life at Hogwarts. He had personally advised Professor McGonagall on how to update the obsolete elements of the House system and curriculum that had given him and his generation so much grief, and she had listened to his suggestions with a humility that disconcerted him. 

“You have more than proven yourself a natural at teaching,” she’d told him with obvious pride. “Your D.A. lessons helped produce the finest fighters of your generation. There will always be a place for you at Hogwarts, should you ever decide you’ve had enough of the Aurors.” 

Harry couldn’t deny that it was a tempting offer, but he would not accept it any time soon. He, Ron, Neville, Seamus, and Dean had all volunteered for Kingsley’s emergency deputization program after the Battle of Hogwarts, and since then had gone through a modified version of the Auror training program. Those who had missed their Seventh Year of schooling had taken correspondence courses and W.O.M.B.A.T. tests in lieu of their N.E.W.T.s, and everyone had done well for themselves since then, but Ron, Neville, and Dean had confided their plans to quit the office now that the last of the Death Eaters had been imprisoned or killed. 

Harry wasn’t ready, though. He had grown so used to constantly fighting for his life that he couldn’t bear the thought of sitting behind a desk in a classroom when he could be out hunting down the scum of the earth and keeping them from hurting anyone else. That was probably not a good sign, but to say that he was “highly reluctant” to trust a therapist with his story was putting it mildly. Hermione, he had to admit, was quite right about his saving-people-thing. Still, he didn’t need to be a full-time teacher to— 

The evil slammed into his senses like a wave. No, not something so small and humble as a wave; a tsunami. He leaped to his feet, wand slipping into his hand, searching frantically for the source of the malice pressing on him like debris from an avalanche, and flinched when he looked in the direction of home again. It was like trying to look directly into the sun, if the sun was blacker than a night with no moon or stars. 

The pressure was growing rapidly. He tried to open his mouth to shout and warn Andi, but he couldn’t form the words. The horizon, which had been stained navy blue by the moonlight reflecting off the ocean, was darkening unnaturally. The stars and moon stained themselves violet, and then they vanished. Death or something worse was approaching. He was certain of it. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do about it. 

Death, Harry did not fear, but that didn’t mean he was ready to let it take him. He certainly didn’t want it to take Teddy, Andromeda, or anyone else he cared about.

A voice as dark and vast as space without stars invaded Harry’s thoughts, so terrible it made Voldemort’s sound angelic by comparison, a voice he felt more than he heard. “Know me,” it roared, “for I am Dormammu, he who comes from the outer dark! He who has waited eternities to possess your frail universe! Look upon my visage and know fear! Hear my words in your soul and feel it crumble! I scream blood and murder at your weak stars! And my screams are the armies of Hell!”  

A great eye fashioned from scarlet and violet flame replaced the moon. Ripples of power flowed from it into the black night around it, creating a darkness so absolute it swallowed the very memory of light, the eye offering no relief at all. 

Please, Harry thought desperately. Not like this. Not after everything we did, everyone we lost. It can’t end like this!  

The shadow was almost on him now. He could not breathe. His limbs were frozen. His mind was slowing. Damn you, you bastard , he thought, knowing it was pointless. You won’t take us!  

Dormammu must have heard Harry’s defiance. “It’s over,” he said with a laugh like a continent cracking in half. “Your world is now my world, like all worlds.”  

With the last of his strength, Harry forced his mouth to open just wide enough to whisper. “As long as I’m breathing, it’s not over.” 

The advance of the darkness slowed, then stopped. Warmth flooded Harry’s body, and he gasped, falling to his knees. There was heat at his back, as if he were standing next to a bonfire. Another voice, a voice fashioned from crackling, billowing flame, spoke from over his shoulder, its tone deceptively gentle. “That’s the spirit, Harry, but this time it won’t be enough.” 

He whirled, or tried to, scrabbling on hands and knees. When he finally got a look at what had been behind him, his jaw dropped. 

The giant figure resembled nothing so much as a woman carved of solid flame. She was four meters tall, and her body was devoid of any real details beyond her hourglass figure and the long fan of fire that hung from her scalp. Her featureless face was almost too bright to look at, and she radiated such heat that Harry could hardly bear it. It was like standing with ice to his back and a volcanic crater to his front. 

“Who are you?” Harry croaked, getting to his feet. His throat felt dryer than a desert, and his limbs were shaking. 

“I am fire and life incarnate. I am the one who holds the power. I am the beginning, the middle, and the end.” 

Harry found himself raising a sardonic eyebrow. Time had seemed to have stopped except for the two of them, so he supposed he could get away with it. “Do you have a name?” he asked.   

The burning figure’s outline flared ever so slightly. “I have been called many things. Balance, Destruction, the Original One, the Spark that Gave Life to the Universe, the One Who Sings the Endsong. But the name I prefer, the one I go by when I walk among mortals is… Phoenix . I sired the magical firebirds that share that name.”  

Harry almost asked how a woman could ‘sire’ anyone, given that the word explicitly referred to male parentage, but decided that it didn’t matter. He had no way of knowing if Phoenix was truly a woman or was mimicking the form of one. “Why are you here?”  

“Because we need each other,” Phoenix said. “It is part of what you might call my job description to deal with monsters like that ,” she waved negligently at Dormammu’s frozen eye, leaving a trail of flames in her wake, “but I cannot intervene directly. I need a vessel to act through.”  

A fresh wave of fear surged through Harry’s body. “You’re going to possess me?”  

“Nothing so crude. You would still be yourself, but there would be something extra. You won’t become a god who can wave his hand and solve any and every problem that comes your way, but you will have access to a power that can balance the scales.”  

Suddenly hopeful, Harry asked, “So I can save my world?”  

“No. It’s already too late to stop Dormammu from absorbing your world, but you can avenge it.” Was it his imagination, or did the last few words sound like a joke? “And you will have a chance to save another world from a similar fate.”  

“What about my godson? Andromeda?” It was bad enough that everyone else was dead. He couldn’t bear the thought of failing Teddy.  

“This island is out of sync with time,” Phoenix said, “but time is passing. They have a chance, as do you, but you must choose now.”  

Harry glanced back, wincing at the absolute darkness of Dormammu’s power staining the sea and sky, an even more painful sight contrasted against Phoenix’s light. Slowly, but with growing speed, the shadows were starting to spread again. Moody would have killed him for being so reckless, but what choice did he have? “If this is what it takes, then so be it,” he said.  

Phoenix extended her right arm. “Take my hand.”  

He stared at the proffered hand for a long moment, knowing he was probably going to regret this. The lesser of two evils could hardly be a good thing, after all. He grasped the long, fiery fingers.  

And something vast and powerful—so unimaginably powerful—invaded his body and swept through his entire being. His mind, his very soul, was fused with a fire so bright that to call it hot was to call an ocean a puddle. It drove all rational thought from his head with the sheer force of its presence. He reacted on instinct, thinking only of Teddy, Andromeda, and safety. The darkness swallowed everything, the fire consumed the darkness, and the world vanished.  

The last thing Harry heard was Dormammu howling with impotent rage. 

The impossible geomagnetic event that came to be known, somewhat unimaginatively, as the Golden Storm started with a bang. Crimson and gold auroras exploded into existence at the north and south poles with unusual speed and violence. They spread across the ends of the Earth, defying all known laws of physics to make themselves visible in Scotland and the Cape Horn of South America. Electrical grids worldwide flickered, and airplanes lurched as their delicate avionics systems stuttered. 

At the Dark Energy Mission facility in the Mojave Desert, the Tesseract’s ever-present blue glow exploded into such brilliance that it would have blinded anyone unfortunate enough to see it, burning through its lead-lined containment vault like a Star Wars lightsaber. When the light finally dimmed, the vault was a slagged ruin, every electronic device within a hundred feet had been fried beyond repair, and the cube itself had melted through the floor into the bedrock below. 

Meanwhile, SHIELD’s main Helicarrier had been floating on the surface of the ocean rather than in thin air, which was fortunate because, for one terrifying instant, all its systems failed. Nick Fury, recently appointed Director of SHIELD, had been displeased, to say the least. His dismay, and the World Security Council’s, had increased when it became clear that there was no discernible explanation for what had caused the malfunction, and no guarantee that it would not happen again. The news about the Tesseract and its power surge didn’t help matters. 

In Sokovia, a young war orphan who held a deep anger was startled awake by a nightmare of burning wings and birdsong. Her scream of fright awakened her twin brother, who immediately panicked, fearing more bombs were coming. The matrons of their orphanage were unsympathetic and punished them for the disturbance with beatings. 

Many light years away from Earth, the last Titan found himself troubled by similar visions. It would take him a long while to find the information necessary to decipher them, and he was most upset when he did. In his anger, he didn’t bother trying to halve the population of the next planet in his crosshairs; he bombed it into a lifeless wasteland. 

In the heart of Kamar-Taj, where permanent portals linked it to the three Sanctums Sanctorum, the Ancient One cried out in surprise and anguish as the various alternate futures she had been observing suddenly and violently shifted. With her concentration shattered, her spell fizzled out. The Eye of Agamotto sealed itself, and she stumbled into the wall of the chamber, narrowly avoiding the sealed doors to the Hong Kong Sanctum. She forced herself to shake off her disorientation and looked up at the floating Orb of Agamotto, the artifact primarily used to monitor the integrity of the barrier against extra-dimensional beings created by the Sanctums.  

The shield was alternating between surges of unusual strength and flickers of weakness, as if something extraordinarily powerful had forced its way through without causing permanent damage. Such a thing could only have happened if an entity too powerful to pass through directly had taken up a mortal host on Earth. The jagged fragments she retained from her interrupted journey through possible futures told her exactly what the entity was, and the knowledge filled her with a terrible mixture of hope and fear. If time was a river that could potentially lead to different destinations, then the course of the river had been thrown off. Old possibilities had disappeared, and new ones had taken their place.  

She would have to act quickly if the world was to survive.  

On Asgard, Heimdall turned away from the Bifrost gateway and strode out of his observatory at a fast clip, heading straight for the Royal Palace. The Allfather had certainly sensed it as well, but it would still be prudent to discuss the matter in private. The Phoenix Force had returned, and it had already chosen a host.

May the Norns have mercy on us, he thought.

Chapter Text

By the time the Ancient One had recovered from the effects of her shattered future-vision, she knew it was too late to completely hide all evidence of the Phoenix’s arrival. The only way to do that would be to risk invoking the Runes of Kof-Kol, and that spell was forbidden for very good reason. With quick gestures, she reopened the Eye of Agamotto and conjured a gateway to the site of the Phoenix’s arrival. 

The first thing she saw when she stepped through was the aftermath of an explosion. A huge swath of forest had been reduced to ash, creating a scar that resembled a black, circular flower. Its edges still burned with lingering flames, beyond which the ground had become a mire of steaming mud. The mud formed a moat of sorts between the burn scar and the snow-covered forest beyond. The lingering heat of the initial blast kept the air warm, while the relative humidity indicated that there hadn’t been enough time for the Siberian winds to blow away all of the moisture created by vaporized snow and plant life. 

Ignoring the strong smell of charred wood, the Ancient One focused on the unconscious figure lying on his back five meters away, at the center of the blast site. He was still wrapped in a rose-gold mist, making it impossible to gauge his exact height, build, or coloring, but the Ancient One had no need. She knew he was a young Englishman on the tall side, with an untamable thicket of black hair, vivid green eyes, and a scar on his forehead shaped like a bolt of lightning. Ten meters beyond him lay a modest looking tent, its entrance flap dark. Even as the Ancient One watched, the tent lit up from the inside. 

To the north lay the Russian city of Irkutsk, one of the few large settlements in Siberia. To the south was Baikal, the world’s deepest lake. There was no point trying to hide the burned swath of forest. Even if she used the Eye of Agamotto to undo the damage, there was no way the people of Irkutsk and the surrounding towns hadn’t seen the explosion. The Russian army would be here at any moment. 

With a sharp gesture of both arms, the Ancient One enveloped the unconscious man, the tent, and herself in the fractal walls of the Mirror Dimension. A split second later, a woman in a deep purple nightgown adorned with white swan patterns emerged from the tent, her expression frantic. She was tall and strong jawed, with a thin mouth, long eyelashes, dark gray eyes, and a cascade of thick, shiny brown hair. In her right hand she clutched a slim wooden stick that the Ancient One immediately recognized as a magic wand. 

At the sight of the Ancient One, the woman’s face darkened, and she pointed the wand straight at her face. “Don’t come any closer,” she hissed. 

The Ancient One slowly lowered her hands to her sides, keeping the Eye of Agamotto open. She’d seen the woman in her visions, but her jagged recollections made it almost impossible to remember the details beyond her appearance. “You have nothing to fear from me. I mean you no harm,” the Ancient One said. 

The witch, for she could be nothing else, did not relax. “You expect me to believe that? We were nearly swallowed by some abomination from hell, then we’re transported here by some thing I don’t even have a name for, and now here you are telling me there’s nothing to be afraid of?” She had the characteristic accent of a British patrician, if less pronounced than was typical. Despite her attempts to look intimidating, her voice shook slightly, and there was a flicker of barely contained panic in her eyes. 

The Ancient One’s heart climbed into her throat. “Abomination from hell? What did it call itself?” 

The witch looked confused. “Are you daft? Surely you heard that voice? Deep as the void of space, evil enough to make my sister blush, very large ham?” 

“I heard nothing of the sort,” the Ancient One said. “Your world may be lost, but mine survives, and I will defend it with my last breath if necessary. What demon is responsible for your displacement in the multiverse?” 

“You really don’t know,” the witch marveled. “I never put much stock in the theory of the multiverse, but this doesn’t feel like an alien planet either. Honestly, I don’t understand how we’re alive.” 

“His name,” the Ancient One insisted. 

“Dormammu. He called himself Dormammu.” 

Allmother’s tits . This was bad. This was quite bad. 

Between them, the prone figure of the new Phoenix Host, Harry Potter, stirred. The visible aura around him had dissipated, but the Ancient One could feel him. His presence in her third eye’s sight was like a dying campfire, but she knew better than to think it would stay that way. The power of the Phoenix Force was the very essence of fire; under the right conditions, the smallest spark could and would expand into an inferno. That would take time, though. Right now, the man was as raw and wild as a novice trying to conjure the Flames of the Faltine. 

“What is going on here?” the witch demanded. What was her name? A— Tonks? Andromeda Tonks, that was it. 

“You have been transported across the multiverse to an alternate version of Earth, a distorted reflection of the world you called home,” the Ancient One explained, taking a slow step forward despite Andromeda’s earlier admonition to keep her distance. 

Andromeda raised her wand, and the Ancient One paused, half expecting a curse to erupt from the tip at any moment. “I can’t dispute that, given the evidence. Keep talking.” 

The Ancient One suppressed a sigh. “We are safe for the moment because I have moved us all into the Mirror Dimension. No one outside will be able to perceive us, and our actions will not affect the real world.” 

Andromeda raised an eyebrow, clearly impressed against her will. “Handy trick. And who are you who possesses the power to accomplish this?” 

“My title is Sorceress Supreme, for I am the leader of the most eminent organization of magic practitioners on this earth. I am called the Ancient One by my disciples. I answer to the name because my thoughts are orders of magnitude older than my body, and because my true name has been lost to the ages.” 

Andromeda’s eyebrow climbed higher. “Interesting. How did you manage that? Philosopher’s Stone? Body regenerating potion? Chugging phoenix tears?” 

It was the Ancient One’s turn to look dubious. “The only true phoenix I am familiar with is a cosmic entity of near-incomprehensible power with a volatile disposition and an affinity for psionics. An entity which has bonded itself to your friend there on the ground.” 

Andromeda’s face hardened. “Do you think this is a joke, Ancient One ?” she demanded in a voice like acid, making the epithet sound like an insult. 

“She’s not joking,” a weak male voice croaked. Both women looked down at the space between them. Harry Potter’s eyes had slid halfway open, and golden flames danced feebly around his splayed hands. 

Harry forced his eyes to blink open and shut, trying to clear the haze across his vision. He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for an indeterminable length of time. If not for the voices, he probably would have slipped back into darkness. It had taken far too much of his strength to speak, which meant that Andi was on her own against the strange woman who called herself the Ancient One. He forced himself to ignore the stab of guilt that brought him and focused on performing the checks that Moody—the real Moody, rather than the fake from his fourth year—had taught him to perform after coming into contact with unknown enchantments or magical substances. 

He felt no nausea, pain, or cold emptiness in his stomach, no itching or numbness or odd heat or cold in his skin, no tingling of the lips or strange tastes in his mouth. His muscles felt weak, but there was no pain or sensation of distended or contracted tissue, and his head…. 

Harry detected no surges of emotions he didn’t recognize, heard no strange voices in his mind’s ear. His thoughts were clear, unobstructed by the echoey floatiness of the Imperius Curse or the disorientation of a Confundus Charm, but something had changed. In the back of his mind, where he could barely sense its presence, was a new fire, little more than an ember. 

It took him a moment to remember exactly what had happened, and when he did, a wave of grief and fear propelled him to his feet. The ember had grown into a fireball, sending surges of strength down his limbs, and his wand leaped from its sleeve holster into his hand. 

The strange sorceress, this “Ancient One,” was rather androgynous in appearance; tall for a woman, with pale skin, a shaved head, thin eyebrows, a narrow nose, and gray-green eyes. She wore a rather extravagant set of gold robes cut to reveal her black leggings and boots, a modification likely meant to allow for easy acrobatic movement. On her right hand glinted a strange two-fingered ring. On her right hand glinted a strange two-fingered ring. A heavy bronze-gold amulet hung around her neck, opened to reveal a brilliant green glow at its center, like a magical third eye.  

Harry’s magical senses had been blasted into numbness by his encounter with Dormammu, but he could sense the immense power contained in the amulet, a beacon in a starless night.  

The Ancient One’s eyes immediately fixed on him, as if he posed a threat. That was fine. Better him than Andromeda, in case a fight broke out. 

Harry pointed his wand at the Ancient One’s stomach, uncertain whether any curses he fired would be affected by her amulet. Despite the burning energies flooding his body, he doubted his chances of victory here. Something fundamental had changed inside him. His magic was different; it had been elevated too much, too quickly. Where before, its flow had been too steady and too deep for him to feel it except under very specific conditions, like when he’d used the Imperius Curse, now it flickered just beneath his skin, as volatile and intense as a bonfire. His wand felt cold in his hand. 

His phoenix feather wand. Felt. Cold. No, not cold—its warmth was being drowned out by the heat he carried within. 

There was a look in the Ancient One’s eye that told Harry she knew exactly what was going on in his head, no Legilimency necessary. 

“Harry,” Andromeda said from somewhere behind him and to his right, her voice echoing strangely, “what are you talking about? What have you done?” 

He wasn’t sure he knew himself. “I made a bargain,” he said faintly. His own voice echoed as well. Was that a side effect of being in the Mirror Dimension? 

“What bargain?!” 

“You have bonded yourself to something whose nature is beyond human comprehension,” the Ancient One interrupted, “and it has irrevocably changed your magic on a fundamental level. But right now, you have no control, which makes that power more danger than asset. Try casting a spell you consider simple if you don’t believe me.” 

Harry hesitated. She hadn’t made any threatening moves, and she seemed sincere, but that meant little. After all, there was a chance she just wanted him to lower his guard. On the other hand, she knew about his transformation or fusion or whatever it was, which should have been impossible, yet she hadn’t attacked while he was still helplessly splayed on the ground. His magic had changed… he didn’t need her to tell him that, but if she was going to give him a free opportunity to test his new limits, it would have been foolish not to take it. 

He pointed his wand carefully at a tree behind the Ancient One’s left flank, a line of fire that wasn’t near her, but which wasn’t far either. He had heard her description of the Mirror Dimension while he’d been struggling back towards consciousness, so he ignored the strangely distorted images of approaching muggle vehicles. “ Incendio ,” he said, giving his wand a wave. 

He intended to ignite the branches of that single tree. Instead, a surge of energy raced down his arm and through his wand, instantly heating it until it was almost unbearable to touch, and a dozen snow-caked evergreens burst into flames. He yelled in surprise as his wand bucked in his hand, nearly dropping it. The holly was smoking. 

For a long moment, no one spoke, the only sound, the crackling of the flames and the splintering of wood as the sap within the burning tree trunks vaporized. The Ancient One looked straight at Harry, a knowing if sympathetic look in her eyes. Harry avoided her gaze by looking back at Andromeda. 

Andi’s face, so similar yet so unlike her sister’s, was stricken. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said. It wasn’t a question. 

Harry shook his head. His legs felt like lead. “No, it wasn’t.” He turned to look back at the Ancient One. “You know what’s going on, don’t you?” 

She nodded. “More or less. What I don’t know is likely to be found in my order’s library.” 

Fair enough. “Andi,” he said in a low voice, wishing he could trust his magic enough to cast a Muffliato Charm, “go check on Teddy. There’s no way he slept through what just happened, he’s probably terrified.” For a moment, he thought she would protest, but then he heard her huff resignedly and shuffle through the ash-strewn ground back to the tent. 

“Thank you for not making this difficult,” the Ancient One said. 

Harry scowled at her and stowed his wand back in its holster. At least the spells he’d already cast seemed to be holding up. “Don’t thank me yet. We’re not going anywhere with you without answers, so start talking.” 

She nodded and raised her arms. With a pulling gesture of one arm and a push of the other, she fashioned a complex, dustbin lid-sized mandala out of fiery gold energy before her. Harry caught sight of various runes and symbols woven into the construct as it flared in response to the Ancient One’s final gesture. It expanded and burst into gold sparks, which instantly traced several objects into existence: a square canopy of gray cloth mounted on a wooden frame, complete with a lit chandelier, a simple but elegant circular rug, two small yet plush couches with deep lavender cushions, and a coffee table. 

Harry, despite himself, was impressed. Simultaneous conjuration of different types of objects was beyond the skill of anyone short of Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall, and only Dumbledore could have done it with such ease, especially factoring in the functioning electrical lights. There didn’t seem to be any spells for holding back the cold, but the burning trees emitted such heat that Harry felt oddly comfortable. 

As her mandala dissolved, the Ancient One made another, more casual gesture with her ring-laden hand. A hoop of the same gold sparks swept over the top of the table, depositing a tray laden with a complete, if unfamiliar, tea setting. She sat down on the couch opposite him, poured a cup of tea for herself, added honey, and swirled the dark contents, all without physically touching anything. 

She was showing off, though what she hoped to achieve by doing so was anyone’s guess. 

Seeing no other choice, Harry sat down across from her. Her seemingly limitless facility with wandless magic was disconcerting. Harry had worked hard to develop his own skills in that area, but he was no Dumbledore. He could apparate and cast various charms, primarily those with telekinetic effects, but wandless transfiguration, let alone conjuration, remained beyond his capabilities. He didn’t touch the refreshments. 

The Ancient One summoned her cup to her hand and took a sip. Harry continued to gaze at her with open suspicion, and she smiled wanly. “I haven’t poisoned that tea, you know,” she said. 

He scowled at her. She sounded far too much like Remus insisting he eat chocolate after his first encounter with a Dementor. On the other hand, he knew better than to think she was lying. If she were hostile, she could have easily taken him and Andromeda down without having to go to all this trouble of making herself look friendly, which meant that she genuinely wanted him to trust her. Why? She reminded him of Dumbledore, a comparison that elicited as much distrust as hope. Dumbledore’s manipulations had been motivated by necessity rather than malice, and they had doubtless led Harry to victory, but they still hurt. 

They also had no bearing on his current citation. He poured himself tea. He drank it black, never having cared for sweetness in his caffeine, and was pleasantly surprised at how delicious the brew was. “This is good tea.” 

The Ancient One’s smile became genuine. “Thank you. I’ve had centuries to perfect it.” 

Harry sipped his tea again, savoring the flavor for as long as he could while he braced himself for the conversation to come. Finally, he swallowed and asked point blank: “What do you know about the multiverse? What are the Phoenix and Dormammu?” 

“You know, it’s generally considered more polite to ask one question at a time.” 

“I’m running short of politeness right now. Almost getting devoured by an eldritch abomination and losing your entire world will do that to you.” 

“Fair enough,” the Ancient One conceded, her smile vanishing. “The short answer is ‘not as much as I would like.’ The very term multiverse is equivocal. In one sense, our universe is splintered into different layers, as it were, an endless ocean of dimensional realities, all distinct from one another yet interconnected. Then there are alternate timelines, where the fate of one universe has been changed by this or that nexus event. Some universes are so distinct from their alternate timelines that they are well and truly different worlds with no connection to one another. Others are less definitively defined. The structure of the multiverse, or omniverse if you prefer, is neither parallel nor a grid. The closest analogy is a spiderweb, if spiderwebs are infinite and exist in three or five dimensions with endless chaotic, messy nodes and strands with ever-changing connections. 

“In an infinite multiverse you will inevitably find infinite dangers. It is the duty of the Masters of the Mystic Arts, led by the Sorcerer Supreme, to protect our reality from both mystical and extradimensional threats, though the two are often one and the same. Some higher entities, like the Vishanti, are benevolent and helpful, lending us fractions of their power to strengthen our magic without demanding anything in return. Most are either indifferent or hostile. Of all the demons, dark gods, and monsters we have encountered, Dormammu is perhaps the worst. He is a multiversal conqueror who seeks to absorb all dimensional realities into his Dark Dimension.  

“How he came to assume control of the Dark Dimension is not clear—he might have been a sorcerer of some sort who ascended to a higher plane of existence, or he might be the personification of the Dark Dimension itself. What we do know is that time and death as we understand them do not exist in the Dark Dimension. Past, present, and future are all one and the same there, which means that nothing new is ever born, and nothing that already exists ever dies. The Dark Dimension only ever changes during and as a response to Dormammu’s consumption of other realities, which suggests to me that Dormammu’s continued existence is essentially dependent on his endless conquests. 

“As for the Phoenix Force… we know even less about it than we do about Dormammu. It’s a primordial entity, like Dormammu but older—as much as that’s possible when they're both beyond linear time—a sapient personification of the very essence of life, fire, and destruction. Its exact function in the greater workings of the multiverse is not fully understood, but our observations suggest that it can exist in multiple places at once. It has been sighted traveling the various planes of the multiverse as an indistinct mass of energy shaped like a bird, but it is either unable or unwilling to act directly by itself. It must have a host, a mortal being to whom it has bonded. No two hosts are ever exactly the same, much like how no flame is ever the same flame. 

“Sometimes it takes absolute control of a host, using them only briefly as a focal point through which to act, while other times it bonds with a chosen person, transforming them into an extension of itself while leaving their individual selves intact. It only seems to employ the latter in cases where what mortals would consider long-term action is needed, though different degrees of both have occurred. I believe your bond with it most closely resembles that particular variation. As for why it chose you, for now we can only make educated guesses. The Phoenix Force defends and promotes life, but it is also volatile in the extreme. You can think of it as a guardian or as a trauma surgeon, as likely to destroy as it is to heal. The one thing all Phoenix Hosts have in common is that they have an incredibly strong mental balance and sense of self. They are almost inhumanly resilient in the face of trauma, and they have the sort of good judgment one hopes to see in those tasked with deciding the fates of others.” 

Harry thought of how he had been affected by his abusive childhood with the Dursleys, about the various traumas he experienced during his magical education, and winced. Research into how an unstable upbringing affected a child’s psychological development had reached new heights in the years following Voldemort’s death, and more and more, Harry was amazed at how well adjusted he was. Granted, he’d had Remus looking out for him since he was six, scaring the Dursleys into treating him better than they would have preferred, but still, he was technically a child soldier. There was no way that had been good for his mental balance, yet here he was. 

Not for the first time, Harry wondered what he might have looked like if his parents had survived and raised him themselves, if there had been no Voldemort to destroy their lives. Would he still have become as good as he was in Defense Against the Dark Arts, or would his talents have matured elsewhere? Would his teenage self have been an airheaded Quidditch nut with a penchant for pranks, like his father had been? Or had he always been destined to be a quiet introvert who preferred to keep to himself? 

He would never have his father’s charisma or his mother’s vivaciousness, but was that simply who he was, or had those traits been stomped out of him by the Dursleys? Remus had only been able to protect him so much…. 

“What happens to people who are swallowed by the Dark Dimension?” 

The Ancient One frowned. “Scouting the Dark Dimension is no easy task, but what we have found is… not pretty. What light exists within it is cold, supplying illumination but no energy emissions. Every reality it has absorbed appears to have been corrupted to reflect Dormammu’s own nature. What lifeforms he chooses to kill are the lucky ones. Those of sufficient will to preserve their own identity in the face of his power are tortured endlessly in ways beyond our understanding. Those who are unable to resist are transformed into Mindless Ones, immortal husks forever enslaved to Dormammu’s will.” 

Harry’s breathing grew ragged. Stay calm , he told himself. Stay calm. But how could he stay calm? Everyone he’d ever loved, everyone he’d ever known, his entire world, was worse than dead. There was fire behind his eyes and in his throat, threatening to consume him from the inside out. Abruptly he leaped to his feet, his teacup bursting into flames and falling to the floor. “How could this have happened?” he demanded, too upset to notice or care about the loss of control over his magic. “How?” 

The Ancient One set her own teacup down on the table before her, but did not rise. She just gave him a stern look. “The thing that makes a dimensional reality most vulnerable to beings like Dormammu is knowledge of their existence, but that is far from the only possible angle of attack. Some universes have stronger natural defenses than most, but invaders powerful enough to rasp away at such barriers do not necessarily act alone. They often send lesser minions to pave the way for their arrival, or they enlist native magic wielders to summon them. I don’t know enough about your universe to deduce exactly how Dormammu found and broke into it.” 

“And what about this reality?” Harry nearly screamed. The entire tea setting sparked and began to melt, like the wax of lit candles. The furnishings shook. “How do I know he won’t follow us here and finish what he started? How do I know someone won’t summon him?!” 

The Ancient One’s hands moved with blinding speed. Green light from her amulet traced itself into mandalas and rings around her hands and wrists, and Harry’s world froze. When he could move again, he found himself sitting on the couch again, holding his intact teacup. The tea setting and the table it sat upon looked undamaged. 

Harry blinked. His wand floated between the Ancient One’s hands, which now held fiery gold mandalas once more. They emitted a hazy aura that flowed into the length of holly, which spun like a barber pole. The wood became solid gold, which moved and flowed like water, fashioning itself into the shape of a bird with a long tail and its wings spread, small enough to fit in the palm of a child’s hand and dangling from a length of chain. The mandalas dissolved into sparks, and the Ancient One flicked her fingers, sending the amulet flying towards Harry.  

He caught it reflexively. It felt warm and familiar in his hand, like an old friend. On closer examination, he realized the bird was a phoenix, so lifelike he half-expected it to start flapping its wings and zooming around like a snitch. The dying bonfire behind her seemed to cast her face into shadow. “What just happened?” he asked, unnerved. 

“As I said, the Phoenix Force is quite volatile,” the Ancient One said, as calm as the surface of a lake under a clear sky. “You will need to learn to control it, or it will consume you.” 

“I meant how did you stop me from going on a rampage.” 

The Ancient One tapped her amulet. “The Eye of Agamotto was created to house one of the six Infinity Stones, relics of immense power that date back to the creation of the universe itself. In theory the Eye could be used to contain and harness any one of the six, but since its creation it has held the Time Stone. I’m sure you can extrapolate from there.” 

He could. Time-turners were certainly impressive and dangerous, but the Ancient One was implying that she had stopped and rewound the flow of time itself, and the odd change in his perspective, from on the verge of a complete mental breakdown and a fiery rampage to sitting back down with tea in his hand, gave him no reason to disbelieve her. If anything, Harry was surprised he remembered the moments she’d rewound to begin with. Perhaps it was a Phoenix Host thing, being able to perceive things beyond mortal comprehension. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. There was still fire in his chest, a horrible, sick heat that made him want to claw his heart out. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper. None of this is your fault.” 

“It’s quite alright. You have every right to be upset, and you’re bonded to a fragment of the Phoenix Force. I would have been surprised if you hadn’t reacted that way when you did. Emotions are dangerous for Phoenix Hosts.” 

“Is that why you transfigured my wand into an amulet?” he asked, holding up the gold phoenix. “Very impressive magic, by the way. Where I come from, that’s not supposed to be possible.” 

The Ancient One nodded. “While you were frozen in time, I used the Eye to look into possible futures. What I saw helped me piece together the best ways in which to help you.” 

She spoke of using a relic of unfathomable power to freeze time while simultaneously looking deep into the future so casually, as if she were discussing the weather. It was unsettling. What mad sort of world was this? 

The Ancient One continued. “Your wand has the tail feather of a phoenix for a core—I confess I still do not fully understand that—but it helps you focus your magic. I suspect that if you were using a wand with any other type of core, it would have exploded in your hand when you tried to cast magic through it.” 

That drew a shudder from Harry. “How does turning it into an amulet help, then?” 

“I have turned it from a focus into a regulator of sorts. It will not directly help your spellcasting, but it will help you stay in control of the Phoenix until you’ve mastered it.” 

Harry wasn’t sure whether to smile or glare. “Training wheels,” he said flatly. 

She grinned at him. 

“Alright,” Harry sighed, fastening the amulet around his neck. Immediately he felt something inside him settle. The fire inside him hadn’t died, but it was softer, less harsh. “Where were we?” 

They resumed their discussion. The Ancient One’s next piece of information chilled Harry to the bone. Though it was little more than a spark at the moment, his bond with the Phoenix Force would strengthen over time. It was part of him; even if he separated himself from it permanently, the effects of being its host would linger for the rest of his life. 

Soon, he would reach a point where he would have to actively separate its volatile essence from his own feelings. The more he felt, the more energy he would release; if it grew past the threshold of his control, that process would reverse itself into a feedback loop, where the more energy he released, the stronger his emotions would grow. If that happened… no. He would not let it get that far. 

The last thing the universe needed was another Dark Phoenix. 

The other issue Harry would have to face was how this universe would react to his presence. He was not the first host of the Phoenix Force, and while past hosts had been heroes, those that became Dark Phoenixes had caused apocalyptic destruction before they were destroyed. In particular, the Shi'ar Empire had gone from worshiping the Phoenix Force as a deity to hating it with fanatical zeal. Once they found out about Harry’s presence, they would come for him. 

At this point, aliens didn’t even make Harry bat an eye. What was alien life compared to the mind-numbing, nightmarish reality of the multiverse? On the bright side, it would take time for word of Harry’s existence to spread, so he had plenty of time to prepare and master his powers.  

Unfortunately, Earth had its own share of issues. For one, magic wasn’t the only strange and powerful force out there. While their existence wasn’t well known, many people around the world had the potential to develop superhuman powers and abilities unrelated to magic. 

Some were the descendants of those who had been experimented on by aliens in the ancient past. Others possessed a rare, naturally occurring genetic pattern that caused their bodies to react to otherwise harmful chemicals or radiation by undergoing a complex series of (usually) beneficial, if dramatic, mutations. Most people in the latter category went undiscovered and lived perfectly normal lives, but many had been exposed to radioactive materials back in the early twentieth century. Many unscrupulous organizations, including sovereign governments and terrorist groups, had sought to control such people and their powers, leading to a nasty surge of human experimentation. 

Most of the world remained oblivious to the full scope of the superhuman population, but persecution of “enhanced individuals” was still a problem. The so-called mutants had played a prominent role in the Cold War, but their efforts to secure the rights of non-standard humans had met with only limited success. While enhanced were protected from open discrimination in most countries, even the most open-minded governments tended to treat them like timebombs. SHIELD, an America-based intelligence/paramilitary organization sponsored by the United Nations to protect the world from “the weird stuff” was just as likely to kill or imprison people with powers as help them, depending on who was in charge and how they were feeling. 

Since the Cold War ended, public interest in enhanced humans had waned, in large part because the superhuman community’s numbers had been dwindling. Once the real dangers of radiation and chemical cocktails had become widely known, cases of exposure had dropped dramatically, leading to much fewer people having their genetic potential triggered. There had also been crackdowns on programs to artificially grant superpowers, prompting governments to focus more on technology and advanced weapon research. These days, the population of enhanced individuals was mostly made up of senior citizens, and therefore beneath notice.

Then there was the magical community. As the Sorcerer Supreme, the Ancient One was the most powerful and influential magic-user in the world. Her order, the Masters of the Mystic Arts, was as old as human civilization and dominated Earth’s supernatural underworld, but there were several independent covens and enclaves of magic users around the world, each with their own unique style and traditions. The Masters kept an eye on these practitioners, but never interfered in their affairs unless absolutely necessary; the magic-wielding population was simply too tiny and scattered to warrant a proper international government. 

Unlike Harry’s own world, anyone could learn this world’s Mystic Arts to some degree, similar to how anyone could learn to play a musical instrument. No one was born magical—on rare occasions, someone might be born so naturally gifted that they’d subconsciously manifest magical abilities without any formal training, but there was no subrace of humanity with a physiological connection to magic. 

Still, that wasn’t enough to erase bigotry. Some mages held extremely rigid views on what constituted appropriate use of magic, while others were dangerously power-hungry and self-serving. Unlike in Harry’s world, dark wizards here rarely had ambitions of world domination or mass murder, and those who did preferred to either rule from the shadows or call upon extradimensional forces to achieve their goals. As such, the Masters of the Mystic Arts only stepped in when rogue practitioners couldn’t be dealt with by their own covens or enclaves. 

“If I’m the host of a cosmic entity,” Harry said slowly, “how will the Masters of the Mystic Arts react to my presence? Won’t they see me as a threat to their mission or something?” 

The Ancient One hesitated. “Some might. But you are a fledgling; less than a fledgling. But you are also a multiversal refugee. We don’t see that very often, but it has happened, and we are obligated to help when it does.” 

“Will they tolerate me going out into the muggle—er, non-magical world and using my powers to help out there?” Harry asked. “I mean, if the Phoenix Force is meant to be some cosmic guardian, and science in this universe is as advanced as you claim, I’m going to have to, if only to defend myself from the Shi’ar or anyone else with a chip on their shoulder.” 

She nodded. “That is true, but some sorcerers may be… reluctant to accept that. They will question your worthiness and criticize your decisions.” 

Harry allowed a nasty smile to bloom on his face. “Let them. I’ve been unjustly accused of being a monster before.” He leaned forward. Now for the unpleasant bit. “My question is why I should trust you. ” 

Her response was to raise her eyebrows. 

Harry continued. “My entire life was defined by a civil war in the magical community. I was the subject of a prophecy that named me as the person destined to end it all, one way or another. Prophecies only have as much power as the people who believe in them, at least where I come from. Problem was, the darkest wizard in history was insane enough to believe a baby could pose a threat to him, and plenty of other wizards were daft enough to believe it as well, even when all they had to work with were rumors. Their belief that I was the Chosen One made it reality, and that cost me everything.” 

The fire in Harry’s chest was starting to sear him from the inside out again. 

“My mentor, Dumbledore, sincerely wanted what was best for me, but his priority was saving wizardkind from a bloodthirsty madman who would have driven us to extinction in his obsession with immortality and dominating others. I was a child, so I didn’t fully understand how much danger I was in, except on the many occasions I was forced to fight for my life. I didn’t understand what kind of sacrifices would be necessary. No teenager could ever be expected to win a war, let alone beat a magical terrorist with a body count in the thousands, but our government was useless, and Dumbledore could only do so much by himself. 

“So he compromised. He controlled my life from the night my parents died, spied on me in the name of keeping me safe, hid important secrets from me to keep me focused on what he felt was important. He put pressure on me to develop into a soldier so that I could finish the job when he wasn’t there to protect me. And you know what? As much as it hurt me to realize the truth, I can’t even hate him for any of it, knowing he hated himself enough for both of us. Horrible as it was, if he hadn’t done what he’d done, our side would have lost. I would have died. He did care about me, but that doesn’t make it any less horrible, any less painful. 

“I forgave him for it, sort of, but I also promised myself that I would never let myself be manipulated like that again. I swore that I would never follow someone else’s lead until I was absolutely certain I knew I could trust them. So you’re going to tell me something.” Harry lowered his voice to a menacing growl. “Why do I sense the shadow of the Dark Dimension on your soul?” 

The Ancient One became very still. She could have been a statue painted to replicate life, except for her short, even breathing. On her forehead, a symbol briefly flashed into existence, a scar in the shape of a sinister-looking rune. She blinked, then gave a long, weary sigh. “Your senses are most impressive. No one else has ever been able to detect my hypocrisy.” 

“Magic, especially dark magic, leaves traces. My people all have— had— a sixth sense for it. Mine happens to be particularly refined.” It had taken several minutes for his psychic feelers to recover from the effects of bonding with the Phoenix Force, and several minutes more for him to identify the subtle taint on the Ancient One’s soul. Had he not already been exposed to Dormammu's dark energies, he might never have recognized it. 

The Ancient One’s stoic facade crumpled into an expression of great weariness and regret. It struck Harry as the most genuine face she’d shown him yet. “I’ve had this conversation so many times,” she tapped the still-open Eye of Agamotto, “and yet I feel as if you’re confronting me for the very first time.” She summoned her teacup back to her hands and took a sip before continuing. “I was born in the year 1300 after the birth of Christ. I joined the Masters of the Mystic Arts when I was sixteen years old. There were high hopes for the future of the order at the time. Our numbers were great, we had a competent Sorcerer Supreme. 

“Then a cult of dark sorcerers attacked Kamar-Taj and the surrounding settlements. They were vicious. We repelled them, but not without casualties. Worse for us, the attack was a smokescreen; cultists stole a book of dark magic from one of our outposts and used it to attempt a ritual to summon Dormammu. That incursion cost us dearly, and when it was over, our numbers had been decimated, and Dormammu had left a parting gift in the form of a special strain of the bubonic plague. Perhaps you’ve heard of it in your universe? It caused the worst pandemic in human history.” 

Despite the fire in his chest, Harry felt a chill run down his spine. “The Black Death.” 

“Precisely.” 

“I’m guessing it was more widespread than Europe in your—this universe?” 

“It affected the entire planet,” the Ancient One said mournfully. “Millions died across all hemispheres. I was named Sorceress Supreme in the aftermath. The Masters of the Mystic Arts were at the weakest they’d been in millennia. Humanity had been devastated, and none of my students at the time showed the traits of a Sorcerer Supreme. I could not trust any of them to carry the mantle if I died. I did what I felt was necessary to keep our world from being overrun.” 

Harry understood. “You were trying to guarantee the future of your order when it was at its lowest point. To save the garden, you buried your hands in dirt. With the worms.” 

Her androgynous face wore an expression that did not suit her: shame. 

Harry chose his next words carefully. “If you’ve managed to harness this power to extend your life for this long and not succumbed to Dormammu’s influence, you must be doing something right.” 

They regarded one another, and the Ancient One suddenly looked familiar. He saw the compassion-concealed-by-sternness of Professor McGonagall, the ancient weariness of Dumbledore, the self-doubt of Remus. It was as if all three of his most important teachers had been distilled into a single strange, mysterious, unbelievably powerful woman. His insight into Voldemort’s mind had allowed him to develop his own limited facility with Legilimency, but there was no way to peer into the Ancient One’s mind in his current state. 

And yet, Harry saw her, saw through her. He saw her shame, her determination to keep the world safe, her compassion, her strength, her pride. Her mind was unfathomably old, etched with the memories of countless possible futures. What she’d experienced on her journeys through time far outnumbered any number of years she’d physically lived, yet far from destroying her faith in humanity and her cause, her age had granted her a depth of wisdom that made celebrated gurus and sages look childlike in comparison. 

She had opened herself to him, and for all his present weakness and instability, some instinct told him that it wasn’t an act. Even if her only goal was gaining his trust, such vulnerability before a stranger was hard to fake. 

She would not break him the way Dumbledore had. 

Eventually, they came to an agreement. The Ancient One promised to do what she could to help Harry master the Phoenix Force, and to shelter his family—what was left of it—while they got their bearings in their new world. Harry in turn would become an honorary member of the Masters of the Mystic Arts. He would hold no authority, but none save the Ancient One herself would hold authority over him while he was a student there. He would have as much latitude as he needed to conduct his duties as a Phoenix Host, regardless of whether they fell under the purview of the Masters and their mandate. 

After three years working for an Auror Office that held him in higher esteem than the actual head of Magical Law Enforcement, Harry had grown used to being an anomaly on the chain of command, so he had no issues with holding an invisible rank. If anything, that would make things easier. 

Now, he had to convince Andromeda to go along with the plan.

Joy. 

Andromeda, as it happened, was not pleased by any of this. 

Though she had obeyed when Harry told her to stay in the tent with Teddy while he spoke with the Ancient One, she refused to let him deal with a strange witch of unknowable power by himself. If she couldn’t stand by him directly, the least she could do was eavesdrop via a Supersensory Charm. It wasn’t easy dealing with a distraught toddler when all your senses were dialed up to eleven, but she managed; resiliency was one of the few useful traits she’d inherited from her horror show of a family. 

Her thoughts reeled with each stunning new fact. Being stuck in an alternate universe where her old home and culture didn’t exist was bad, though not as bad as it could have been. With her husband, daughter, and son-in-law dead, and her one surviving sister not being on speaking terms, her only real family was her grandson and the remarkable young man who was his godfather. As long as she had them, she had something worth living for. 

The thought did little to fill the new hollowness in her stomach. Be strong, she told herself. Be strong.   

If half of what the Ancient One claimed was true, there was every chance that she’d lose Harry as well. A cosmic entity from which all phoenixes were descended had bound him to it, and his only chance of controlling its power was to hollow himself out. He’d already lost everything, and he was poised to lose still more. How could he stand it? She could hardly bear it herself. 

Andromeda willed her tears not to well up. There would be time for that later. Be strong.   

Teddy had been a terrified, crying mess earlier. Now, he slept fitfully in his tiny bed in the rear of the magically expanded tent. His hair had been stark white during the chaos of Dormammu’s attack and the fiery vortex that had saved their lives. Now it was a deep, royal purple. His skin had turned chalk white. Knowing as she did what that meant, she wished for the umpteenth time that there was a spell to prevent nightmares. 

The Mirror Dimension made sounds echo slightly, but not so much that Andromeda couldn’t hear Harry returning from his conference with the Ancient One. The Dimension certainly didn’t prevent her from feeling the way airflow changed around her, displaced by human beings moving and conjured objects being vanished. She canceled her Supersensory Charm and left Teddy’s room to meet him. 

They nearly collided with one another in the cozy living room. Harry stumbled, his movements slow and halting. She’d seen him like that before, in the weeks after the Battle of Hogwarts. His exhaustion was more mental than physical; like hers. Gray eyes met green. 

“You heard everything, didn’t you,” Harry guessed. 

Andromeda nodded wordlessly. She’d learned how to hide behind a stoic mask at an early age, a necessity for survival in the Black household, but there was no concealing her feelings now. 

“I’m—” 

“Don’t you dare apologize, Harry Potter,” she half sobbed, half snarled. “It’s not your fault. It was never your fault.” 

She pulled him forward, and he collapsed, bawling into her shoulder. The last of her strength fled, and her own tears flowed like waterfalls.

Chapter Text

The Ancient One gave Harry and Andromeda as much time as they needed to regain their composure. It was just as well she had. By the time their tears had run dry, Harry was empty, like a victim of the Dementor’s Kiss. He was a hollow eggshell with no yolk or white inside; one wrong move, one rough jolt, and he would shatter into a thousand pieces.  

As soon as they were ready, the Ancient One insisted on transporting them, along with Teddy, to an uninhabited atoll in the Indian Ocean, where the tent could be safely set up outside of the Mirror Dimension. She did this using a portal edged in spiraling gold sparks, the same magic she’d used to summon the tea setting earlier. Neither Harry nor Andromeda expressed surprise at yet another display of powers that weren’t achievable back in their own world. They’d seen too much in the last few hours.  

In the interim, Harry and Andromeda had taken stock of their magical supplies, aware that they were unlikely to replace things unique to their own world. For once, Harry’s post-war paranoia had paid off. With Hermione’s help, he’d created a magically expanded suitcase equipped with everything he could ever need in the event of a cataclysmic emergency: a library with copies of every magic book in his personal collection, including the entire Black and Potter family libraries, a pensieve, a potion brewing station with assorted ingredients, a greenhouse full of magical plants, a refrigerated case of creature parts, a safe-room for practicing spells, a cabinet of enchanted objects such as brooms, and modest living quarters.  

There was also a vivarium for magical creatures, but it was empty—Harry wasn’t a magizoologist, and therefore wasn’t qualified to carry around a menagerie like the ones Luna and the Scamanders maintained. He did, however, have an unhatched, glossy blue-green egg, which had been a gift from Luna for his twentieth birthday. She’d found it abandoned in the wilderness while on a magizoology expedition in Greece and saved it from being devoured by a manticore. In true Luna fashion, her only reason for giving it to Harry was that she sensed it contained something he would need in the future, and none of the detection spells he tried could tell him what creature it came from or why it wouldn’t hatch. 

Stranger still, when Harry took the egg to Hagrid for analysis, Hagrid had gotten a funny look in his eye and insisted that this was something Harry needed to figure out for himself. Harry didn’t have the heart to use Legilimency to learn more. 

No House-Elves had accompanied them on their holiday in the Azores, and Harry did not dare hope that he could summon Kreacher from across dimensional realities, assuming Kreacher had even survived Dormammu’s initial onslaught. They would have no special help except for whatever they got from the Masters of the Mystic Arts. 

At least, Harry thought as he watched Andromeda pack up their tent with a wave of her wand, we won’t have to start completely from scratch . 

The Ancient One arrived on their little island just as the sun rose, her portal whizzing behind her. “Are you ready?” she asked.  

Harry and Andromeda looked at one another. She was holding Teddy with one arm and showed no signs of outward tension. That was no surprise; she’d grown up in the household of Cygnus and Druella Black, with Bellatrix for a sister. She wasn’t a warrior by nature the way Harry was, but she was strong. Whatever happened from this point forward, he knew he had nothing to worry about where Andromeda was concerned. Teddy was still asleep, his hair gray today.  

Together, Harry and Andromeda followed the Ancient One through the portal, leaving the Indian Ocean Island behind. 

They emerged underneath a freestanding gateway on a raised platform halfway down the wide edge of a vast, rectangular space encircled by red-brick buildings with brown-tiled, sloping roofs. Long halls connected pagoda towers of varying shapes to form a single, compound structure. A pair of square pits to Harry’s left and right divided the central courtyard into longitudinal sections connected at their corners by narrow walkways. The tallest pagoda rose from the opposite end of the central avenue from the gate. 

Turning around as the portal closed, Harry saw that the towers on the gateway side of the expanse weren’t connected like the rest, and the resulting gap revealed a stunning view of the city of Kathmandu. Between them, the narrow walkway dropped off like a cliff. Looking down, he realized that the entire multi-level courtyard served as the rooftop for several subjacent stories.  

When Harry turned back to the Ancient One, he saw that she’d stepped away from the gateway and was gesturing for him to do the same. Guessing that the structure served a similar function to designated apparition points in wizarding buildings back home, he hastened to join her, Andromeda on his heels. 

“Welcome,” said the Ancient One, “to Kamar-Taj.”  

With that, she led them down the long courtyard to the high tower. As they walked, she explained that though the temple of Kamar-Taj served as both the headquarters and the training ground for the Masters of the Mystic Arts, the organization’s most important bases were the three Sanctums Sanctorum. They were built on natural convergences of mystic energy around which major cities had grown—New York City, Hong Kong, London—and stocked with enchanted relics. The Sanctums generated a ward around the entire planet that served as its primary defense against extradimensional entities. Each Sanctum was guarded by its own Master; the Sanctum Masters were the most important magic users in the world after the Sorcerer Supreme, which meant that Harry had to be introduced to them before his training could begin.  

Bloody typical. Harry had become the center of attention in the magical community simply by existing. Again.  

The entrance to the tower was a wide, tall gateway that radiated a mysterious-feeling, alien magic. As they passed through, Harry felt for the first time what he’d known to be true for the last twenty-four hours. No matter how superficially familiar it might be, this was not his world.  

Inside, the Ancient One led them to a square sitting room with lofty ceilings held up by thin, ornately carved stone columns. The floor tiles formed a black grid on a red field, and the grated windows sloped upward to merge with the eaves of the slanted roof outside. The furnishings were minimalistic and deceptively spindly. Everything was decorated with eastern mazes and symbols.  

Sitting on square cushions or in squat chairs were three sorcerers, whom the Ancient One introduced after inviting Harry and Andromeda to sit on a long bench. The tall, bald black man was Daniel Drumm, Master of the New York Sanctum. The long-faced Middle Eastern man with a thick beard was Sol Rama, Master of the London Sanctum. The petite Japanese woman was Tina Minoru, Master of the Hong Kong Sanctum. 

All three Sanctum Masters glanced curiously at Andromeda and Teddy, but kept the better part of their attention on Harry, studying him openly. He resisted the temptation to fidget. Their scrutiny reminded him of how he’d felt when Auror Proudfoot interviewed him at the end of his first and second years.  

“So,” said Rama, “you are the new Host of the Phoenix Force. You were a powerful wizard in your own world, an alternate universe that has now been consumed by Dormammu. You instinctively tried to use your new powers to save yourself and those around you, and now here you are. A family of multiversal refugees.”  

Harry nodded wordlessly. Rama had listed each fact like it was a criminal offense.  

Minoru flashed Rama a look of mild disapproval, then said, “We have on occasion dealt with multiversal refugees, but in most cases, we were able to send them home. Your home no longer exists. You have our condolences.” 

“Thank you,” said Andromeda stiffly. Harry just nodded again. 

“We have already discussed your situation, and no one has any objections to our arrangement,” the Ancient One said, seating herself on a meditation mat she conjured from nowhere, “but the Masters have insisted that you tell us your story.”  

Harry raised an eyebrow. “My story?”  

“We wish to understand why the Phoenix chose you,” Drumm explained. “It is quite picky, and for it to bond with a multiversal refugee, much less one who can use magic, is unheard of.”  

Harry hesitated. He’d never told anyone his full life story before. Everything he’d told Ron, Hermione, and Sirius about his childhood had been explained in increments. Even Andromeda had only heard the stories in bits and pieces.  

“Teddy shouldn’t hear this,” he said, looking at Andi. “He’s too young to understand it.”  

She showed him a sardonic look, then tapped Teddy’s head and very deliberately said, “ Muffliato. ” 

Harry sighed. “Fine. You’d better get comfortable, because it's a long story and needs a bit of historical context to understand.”  

He began with a history lesson, explaining the general background of his people and how they’d formed a separate culture alongside muggles, how Hogwarts had been founded as both a school and a fortress against muggle persecution of magic. He summarized the four founders and the houses they’d founded, how Salazar Slytherin had, in his paranoia, tried to persuade the other founders that muggle-raised witches and wizards couldn’t be trusted, and that there needed to be a greater focus on the Dark Arts, leading to arguments and Slytherin’s eventual departure from the school. He described the legend of the Chamber of Secrets, with particular emphasis on the concept of the Heir of Slytherin, and how wizarding aristocracy had reinterpreted Slytherin’s paranoid distrust of muggleborns into blind disdain for anyone who wasn’t a pure-blood wizard.  

He summarized the centuries-long deterioration of muggle-wizard relations that culminated in the enactment of the Statute of Secrecy, and how the wizarding community had become even more insular, leading to even more bigotry. Having set the stage for the drama that defined his life, he proceeded to describe Tom Riddle, scion of the House of Gaunt and the Heir of Slytherin, whose reign of terror was the product of centuries of wizarding foolishness and cruelty.  

“Voldemort wasn’t the first wizarding terrorist who tried to take over the world, and it’s a matter of debate whether he was truly the most powerful dark wizard in history, but he was definitely the most unhinged and vicious. He was mad, and that made him oblivious to some obvious truths of reality, but also cunning, virtually unbeatable in personal combat, and a master of psychological warfare. There were less than a dozen witches and wizards worldwide who stood the slightest chance of defeating him in combat, and he killed most of that lot personally. He and his followers focused on the British Isles, but the first Blood War affected the entire world. Anyone could be working for him, willingly or not. After a few years, people grew so afraid of him they wouldn’t even say his name.  

“Voldemort’s reign of terror lasted for eleven years, and he almost wiped out an entire generation of witches and wizards. For all his rhetoric about pure-blood supremacy, he was happy to kill or torture whoever got in his way. He didn’t give a damn about anyone except himself, and no one who earned his personal attention lived for very long. Many of his followers, the Death Eaters, raised their kids to be loyal to him as well, and to uphold his ideology while they were at school. Most Death Eaters were former Slytherins, so Slytherin House itself became associated with evil. The only person Voldemort feared was Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts. Voldemort couldn’t kill Dumbledore, but he was too slippery for Dumbledore to pin down either, and with the Death Eaters dancing to his tune, it was only a matter of time before Voldemort won.  

“This was the environment my parents went to school in. Things got worse each year, and many of their classmates joined up with Voldemort as soon as they graduated. When my parents graduated, they became some of Voldemort’s worst enemies. Lily was a first-gen, and James was a pure-blood, but just barely. His family, the Potters, was quite old, but also small, never stood out in magical history, and never really bought into that blood purity nonsense—at worst, they wanted to avoid the drama of keeping or revealing the big secret to any muggle in-laws. Mum and Dad were both amazing magic users—not on Voldemort’s level, but easily some of the best of their generation. He tried recruiting them despite Mum’s heritage. They defied him to his face three times and lived to talk about it, which very few others could claim.  

“But shortly before I was born, a Death Eater named Severus Snape overheard a witch giving a prophecy that described the person who would destroy Voldemort. Snape only heard part of the prophecy, which he immediately relayed to his master. Voldemort, being the brilliant but insane creature he was, believed wholeheartedly in the validity of the prediction and sprang into action to prevent it. Based on what Snape had overheard, he concluded that the prophecy alluded to two newborn boys, one half-blood, one pure blood. Of the two, Voldemort assumed that the real threat was me, because I’m a half-blood, like him.  

“Fortunately, Voldemort’s complete inability to comprehend human nature, and love in particular, was his undoing. Snape was in love with my mum, you see, even if it wasn’t exactly healthy love. They were childhood friends until an incident at Hogwarts, when she realized he was planning to join the Death Eaters. Snape was just as gifted a wizard as either of my parents, definitely the greatest potioneer alive in his day, but he was also a stupid kid from an abusive household who wanted to be recognized for his power and intelligence. When Snape realized Voldemort was targeting Lily Evans because of the information he provided, he changed sides in a panic, became a spy for Dumbledore.  

“My parents could hold their own against Voldemort, but even working together they couldn’t defeat him—he was too powerful, knew much more magic than they did, and had decades of experience on them. With baby me and a prophecy to worry about, they had no choice but to stop fighting and go into hiding. What they didn’t realize was that one of their best friends, Peter Pettigrew, had betrayed them and was a spy for Voldemort. Pettigrew had enough guts to pull off some daring stunts when he was under pressure, but in his heart, he was a coward.  

“Acting on information only Pettigrew could give him, Voldemort came to our house on Halloween when I was one. My parents were completely caught off guard, never stood a chance. He killed my dad right away, but he offered to spare my mum, because Snape had asked him to; maybe he was feeling generous towards the man who he thought had guaranteed his victory. But Mum refused to step aside and offered her own life instead, and that’s what sealed Voldemort’s fate. When he killed her, he triggered a form of ancient magic that turned her sacrifice into the most powerful protective enchantment I know of. 

“Voldemort’s favorite spell, a lethal curse no one had ever survived in all of history, rebounded off my skin and turned him to ash. He would have died, but he’d taken steps to ensure his own immortality and slunk away as a disembodied shadow, his powers broken, while I got away with nothing but a scar. I became famous overnight, not because of anything I did, but because I lived when my parents didn’t. 

“The Death Eaters were so lost and confused without his leadership that most were easily caught in the aftermath, but many were wealthy aristocrats who knew how to play the justice system and escaped punishment by claiming they’d been cursed into helping him against their will. That lot were all interested in me, thinking they could either get revenge for their master or rally around me as his replacement—they didn’t realize that my parents were the real heroes.  

“I was supposed to live with my godfather, Sirius Black, but Peter Pettigrew used a mix of lies, animal transformation, and a Blasting Curse to fake his death and frame Sirius for his crimes. The Head of Magical Law Enforcement, Barty Crouch, was already looking for an excuse to get rid of Sirius, so he ate up Pettigrew’s ruse without even bothering to investigate and sent Sirius to prison without a trial, over Professor Dumbledore’s objections. Crouch was pressured into resigning after he caught his own son with a group of Death Eaters and sent him to prison too, but the damage was done. 

“With Sirius incarcerated and the Ministry of Magic compromised, Dumbledore was the one effectively responsible for my protection growing up. Even then, though, the only person left who could legally raise me without arousing the wrath and suspicion of the wizarding community was my aunt Petunia, who happened to be estranged from my mum. Petunia and her whale of a husband hated magic, but they took me in because Mum’s charm could be maintained as long as I called home the place where my family blood lived, with the added bonus of extending the protection to everyone else who lived there. 

“Thus, I was raised by the Dursleys, pathetic idiots obsessed with being ‘normal,’ who thought they could squash the magic out of me by hiding its existence and keeping me as miserable as possible. They were wrong, of course. When Dumbledore found out what was going on in that house, he was furious, but he didn’t want to break my mum’s charm—and he was quite right, because without it I’d be dead several times over.”  

The admission ignited flames in Harry’s heart. The Bond of Blood Charm had kept his mental connection to Voldemort closed until they’d met face to face for the first time, blunted the corrosive influence of the soul shard in his scar, saved him from Quirrell, and tethered him to life when he let Voldemort kill him in the Forbidden Forest. But were the long term gains worth the pain? If Dumbledore put so much stock in the power of love, why hadn’t he searched for a variation of the spell that could function without forcing Harry to live with a blood relative? 

The great irony was that while selfless love did indeed fuel the original enchantment, it wasn’t the reason the spell manifested. Countless witches and wizards had willingly given their lives to protect their loved ones, but very few had managed to invoke magic that could give their sacrifice tangible power.  

No, the entire enchantment had been predicated on Voldemort's offer to spare Lily’s life if she let him kill Harry and her decision to explicitly offer herself as an exchange. Not Harry! Take me instead, she’d screamed. In taking her life, Voldemort had unknowingly accepted her as a substitute victim, which meant that all his subsequent attempts on Harry’s life were effectively breaches of a magical contract.  

The same thing had happened at the Battle of Hogwarts; Voldemort had explicitly declared that Harry’s friends and allies would be spared if Harry surrendered his life, an offer Harry had accepted by willingly walking to what he thought would be his death. Voldemort had then proceeded to attack them again when they refused to bow to him, breaking his word, and the magic stirred up by Harry’s “death” had reacted by protecting them from the worst of his spells.  

“Mr. Potter?” Sol Rama prompted gently. 

Harry blinked. He’d lost track of the story. Where had he been? Ah. Dumbledore and the Dursleys. "Sorry ,” he said. “If Dumbledore tried to legally interfere in my home life, I’d have been removed from the house forever and lost the blood wards. Instead, he arranged for one of my parents’ friends to move into our neighborhood to look after me. That friend was a wizard named Remus Lupin.  

“Remus was prohibited from having full custody of me because he was a werewolf, but he was one of the nicest blokes you could ever meet, and highly competent to boot. He couldn’t openly confront the Dursleys without bringing the Ministry down on his head—werewolves were severely persecuted—but his presence scared them enough that they didn’t dare openly abuse me. The Dursleys still neglected me and used the threat of legal action to keep Remus from telling me the full truth about my heritage, but I was always able to turn to him when I needed someone. It wasn’t the best way to grow up, but it was bearable.”  

“All this because your godfather was imprisoned?” Master Drumm asked. “If the blood wards were so important, would you have been allowed to live with him at all?”  

“Sirius and I were related through my great aunt Dorea, so yes, living with him would have kept the protection alive, if just barely.” 

Minoru chimed in, “And you had no other living relatives?”  

“None. My grandparents and their families all died before or during the war, and my dad was an only child. Technically, all the pure blood families are interrelated, but those relations were all too distant to maintain the blood wards or were Death Eaters.” 

Harry paused, waiting for other questions, but none came. He continued. “When I turned eleven, I received my official letter of acceptance to Hogwarts. I didn’t learn the whole truth about my past right away, but I did find out everything the Dursleys knew. In due course, I’d bought my wizarding supplies and was on my way to Hogwarts for the very first time. The years I spent there were… dramatic.” 

From his seat upon Hlidskjalf, Odin Borson could see anywhere in the Nine Realms with only a little focus, much like what Heimdall could do naturally with his enhanced senses. Still, he knew better than to think he could spy on the Sorcerer Supreme without her knowledge or consent. Everything he saw and heard as she and her disciples discussed Harry Potter and his life before the Phoenix Force only reached him because she permitted it. One flex of her will, and the hole in the wards around Kamar-Taj that allowed him to observe the conversation would close.  

Odin had worked with three Sorcerers Supreme to defend Midgard over the millennia, and he had a particular liking for the Ancient One—he had originally found her moniker amusing at best and insulting at worst, given his own age, but eventually he grew to understand that it was less about her physical age than it was her mental age, the countless possibilities she lived out when she peered into the future with the Eye of Agamotto, or her journeys through branching timelines. It was a burden every bit as heavy as his own, if not more so.  

As Harry Potter described the incidents that disrupted his magical education, Odin’s one remaining eye grew wider and wider. Fighting a teacher possessed by Voldemort’s wrecked spirit in his first year to protect a Philosopher’s Stone. Killing Slytherin’s monster, a serpent that could kill with its eyes, with a sword when it was unleashed by a Voldemort-possessed student in his second year. The confrontation with Peter Pettigrew and such horrid creatures as dementors in his third.  

By the time he finished describing the Triwizard tournament and Voldemort’s horrifying resurrection, Odin found himself wanting to have a frank discussion with Albus Dumbledore about split duties. You could be a teacher or a leader, but not both. When Potter described Minister Fudge’s reaction to the news of Voldemort’s return, Odin had to suppress the urge to throw Gungnir at a wall. What kind of leader buried his head in the sand and defamed a teenager? And that Umbridge woman… had she tried to pull any of her bilgesnipe tripe on Asgard, she’d have been stripped of her powers and exiled. The death of Potter’s godfather sounded like a cruel trick of fate, on top of everything else.  

Even by the standards of Phoenix Hosts, the boy’s fortitude was astounding. Most people in his position would have been consumed by hatred for the world, yet Harry had determinedly pushed forward, determined to save people who didn’t deserve him from a monster of their own creation.  

It was at this point that Harry hesitated for the first time in his narrative. He didn’t want to talk about how Voldemort had achieved his immortality.  

“Why do you hesitate?” the master called Daniel Drumm asked. “We are charged with protecting our world from creatures and beings every bit as horrible as this Voldemort. You do not need to worry about us following in his footsteps.”  

Odin watched Harry carefully. His companion, Andromeda, put a hand on his forearm. “He’s dead now. This knowledge won’t hurt anyone.”  

“It’ll hurt you,” Harry told her flatly. “It still hurts me to even think about it.”  

“Sometimes,” the Ancient One said, “to heal an old wound, you must first reopen it.”  

Harry was silent for a moment. He visibly fortified himself, as if preparing for a blow, then began to talk about the various mechanisms of immortality wizards from his world had discovered: the Philosopher’s Stone, unicorn blood, potions made with Phoenix tears, physical augmentation rituals, essence transfer, canopic jars, phylacteries. But each of these methods had drawbacks and limitations that someone as thanatophobic as Voldemort could not accept.  

Instead, Voldemort had settled on a practice so vile that most dark wizards, no matter how depraved or desperate, balked at the very idea of it.  

Using magic to commit a true, deliberate, conscious act of murder—actual murder, rather than an act of self-defense or a mercy kill—without regret or remorse damaged a wizard’s soul. It was possible, through the darkest of magic, for a wizard to take advantage of such damage to literally split off a piece of his soul and conceal it within an object prepared by dark magic: a Horcrux. As long as the Horcrux remained “alive,” the wizard who created it would remain anchored to the mortal plane, unable to die, even if their physical self was killed. If they were disembodied, they would have an infinite number of chances to generate a new body for themselves.  

The process of creating a Horcrux was, as Harry emphasized, a violation of life and magic itself, one that doomed the practitioner to a tortured existence no sane person would ever willingly endure.  

Very few witches and wizards had ever heard of Horcruxes, and even fewer had created one of their own. Voldemort, deranged as he was, was the only wizard in history to create more than one Horcrux; Dumbledore initially suspected he’d made two or three. In fact, Voldemort planned to split his soul into seven pieces, for seven was considered the most powerfully magical number.  

Tom Riddle’s cursed diary was his first Horcrux, created with the murder of Myrtle Warren when he was sixteen and intended to be used as a weapon as much as a safeguard against death. The others were his grandfather’s signet ring, three enchanted relics of the Hogwarts founders—Slytherin’s locket, Hufflepuff’s cup, and Ravenclaw’s diadem—and, most unusually, a magical serpent named Nagini.  

In creating multiple Horcruxes, Voldemort had driven himself completely mad and rendered his soul so unstable it was liable to break apart. It was this erosion of his humanity on such a fundamental level, combined with certain dark transformations he underwent to increase his power, that resulted in his hideous appearance during his reign of terror.  

As his failures and successes both demonstrated, Voldemort was insubstantial in many ways, and all the more dangerous for it. By all rights, Harry had stood no chance against such a foe.  

And yet… and yet.  

After Dumbledore’s arranged death at Snape’s hands, Harry had found and destroyed the last of Voldemort’s Horcruxes, an arduous quest he refused to describe in detail beyond the fact that it required him to break into the wizarding bank and culminated in a battle at Hogwarts itself. That battle saw the deaths of even more of Harry’s friends and loved ones, including Remus Lupin and his wife. Yet, there had still been one more sacrifice to make, one that couldn’t be avoided.  

“No,” said Andromeda, horrified. She hadn’t known this part—no one had, save Ron and Hermione. “ That’s how you were able to… but that means—.”  

“Let me finish,” said Harry as patiently as he could manage. He’d hoped to keep this a secret, but there was no concealing it now. Not here, not from the likes of the Ancient One and her cabal. He told them what he’d found in Snape’s memories and what happened in the Forbidden Forest, though he was careful to omit the Resurrection Stone and his chat with Dumbledore’s spirit, just as he had taken care to refer to the Elder Wand only as “Dumbledore's wand” when he’d goaded Voldemort into making his final mistake in the Great Hall.  

The Deathly Hallows were too dangerous a secret, even here, even now. He’d been very careful to never hold all three at the same time, lest they react to one another and trigger some unknown magical transformation.  

“How are you alive then?” Andromeda demanded. “I know how Nagini and Riddle died, but…”  

Harry smiled. “As I’m sure you’ve all realized by now, Tom Riddle violated natural law so badly he might as well have climbed to the top of a mountain during a thunderstorm and held up a lightning rod. For all his power, he was practically begging magic itself to destroy him. Every decision he made, no matter how beneficial it seemed, came back to bite him in the arse.  

“When he was planning his resurrection, he could have taken the blood of any number of witches or wizards who hated him. But he insisted on using mine so he could phase through my mum’s sacrificial protection, protection which only lasted as long as it did because I lived with Aunt Petunia, horrid as she was. But it only worked partially; he could touch me and use magic on me without harming himself, but he’d bound his life to mine. I anchored him to life as a pseudo-Horcrux, but he did the same to me. So, when I let him kill me….”  

“The shard of soul in your scar died, but you didn’t,” the Ancient One finished.  

That wasn’t quite right, but close enough. Harry nodded. He gave the short version of what happened next: tricking Voldemort into offing himself with a backfiring wand, his non-traditional career as an Auror, his studies of advanced magic, and his work reforming the British Ministry of Magic. “I don’t know how Dormammu broke into our reality,” he said. “But the Phoenix Force intervened and offered to merge with me. I don’t know why it was looking out for me or why it thought I’d make a good host, but it was, and it did. So here we are.” 

“Modest to a fault.” The Ancient One was looking at him with a mix of compassion and respect. “But, as is often the case, the being who least desires power is the one most suited to wield it. With your experiences, you understand life and death in a way no one else can, and with your magic, you can push the boundaries of what is possible for a Phoenix Host. Why it needs to push boundaries to begin with… well, we shall cross that bridge when we come to it.”  

“Oh, lovely,” Andromeda muttered.  

The Sanctum Masters looked at one another, then at the Ancient One, and then back at Harry.  

“I think,” said Master Minoru, “you will fit in quite well among us.”  

“Indeed,” Sol Rama said.  

“Welcome to the Masters of the Mystic Arts,” Master Drumm finished. 

From his office aboard the Helicarrier Theseus, Nick Fury contemplated a deceptively innocuous pager as if it held the secrets of the universe. The Golden Storm was beyond frightening, and the lack of a discernible explanation for what had caused it made his teeth itch with anxiety. What had triggered it? Would something like it happen again? What could he do to safeguard the world against a worse version of it?  

He’d considered the possibility that it was simply the result of particularly violent solar activity, but his scientists had quickly shot down that idea. The lack of ionizing radiation or damage to the Earth’s atmosphere suggested that whatever this was, it only affected modern technology, which suggested that it was a deliberate attack. No technology SHIELD knew of could cause an event like the Golden Storm. Fury’s only recourse, then, was to assume that it was the work of aliens. He knew all too well how real the possibility of an extraterrestrial invasion was, and as far as he could see, humanity was hopelessly, hilariously outgunned.  

Thus, the pager. Carol had told him to use it only in case of emergency. He wasn’t sure this qualified, but then again, if it turned out this was an emergency, and he didn’t call her….  

Damn it all to Hell.   

Fury tapped the sequence of buttons Carol had taught him and watched as the little screen lit up with her signature emblem. He knew the World Security Council would give him hell over this, but he also knew from experience that it was better to ask for forgiveness rather than wait for permission. Still, Carol alone wouldn’t be enough. No single Avenger, no matter how powerful they might be individually, was ever enough. He needed an initiative, a team.  

He set aside the transmitting pager and dialed up his secretary through the office phone, ordering her to prevent anyone from disturbing him for the rest of the evening unless it was an emergency. Once that was done, he privacy-sealed his office and fiddled with his computer. He spent several minutes unlocking the password and biometric firewalls that protected SHIELD’s classified databases, then began surfing through the records for suitable candidates.  

There weren’t many. The only mutants he knew of who had the power and the training were all retired or imprisoned members of Erik Lensherr’s Brotherhood of Mutants. Lensherr himself was believed to still be alive, though his whereabouts were anyone’s guess, while the identities of the mysterious ‘X-Men’ who had opposed him remained unknown, even to SHIELD.  

Not for the first time, Fury wished he at least knew their names, if only to consult them on the possibility of recruiting and training younger mutants. Even then, though, mutant numbers had been dwindling rapidly in the last few decades, as fewer and fewer people with the genetic potential were exposed to the right chemical or radiation stimuli. Fury was not going to experiment on human beings in the name of bringing the Avengers Initiative to life.  

What about other types of enhanced individuals? It didn’t matter to him where their powers came from as long as they didn’t compromise the person’s character.  

Hank Pym was a no-go, as he was still bitter from his nasty falling out with Howard Stark and SHIELD, not to mention in his fifties. His wife, Janet van Dyne, was dead in the line of duty. Their daughter, though…. Hope van Dyne knew much more about Pym Particle technology than she liked to admit and had demonstrated that she was capable of getting her hands dirty. Perhaps she could become the new Wasp? Fury decided to flag her as a maybe. 

Namor definitely had the power and the skills, but he was also volatile, mysterious, and unpredictable. He’d rendered the Allies aid during World War II, yes, but only after a great deal of persuasion from Captain America, whom he’d encountered by sheer chance. Similarly, Namor had been involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but only on behalf of his undersea interests, whatever those were. So far as SHIELD could determine, Namor only cared about what happened on the surface when it had the potential to affect his mysterious aquatic kingdom. Convincing him to commit to the Avengers Initiative in any capacity would be next to impossible without some sort of leverage. Another maybe, then. 

Logan Howlett, though, gave Fury some hope. A World War II veteran rumored to be over two-hundred years old, Howlett was a mutant with superhuman strength, a truly astonishing regenerative healing ability, and knife-like retractable claws set into his wrists. After being captured and experimented on by the horrific Weapon X Program, the already dangerous Howlett had been brainwashed, subjected to brutal combat training, and had a vibranium-based metallic substance called adamantium grafted to his entire skeleton, making it effectively indestructible. 

Since gaining his freedom, Howlett seemed to be aging at a tenth the normal human rate, hence the rumors about his birth date. No one dared bother him after what he’d done to the last military hit squad sent his way, and he seemed content to live out the rest of his life in peace. The man was abrasive, ferocious, and distrustful, but he was also known to be highly protective of children, whether they were mutants or not. He’d be difficult to persuade, but not impossible.  

No other viable superhuman candidates presented themselves, so Fury decided to switch gears and focus on SHIELD’s special talents. His thoughts immediately jumped to his favorite specialist: Clint Barton, a.k.a.: Hawkeye. Barton had no superhuman abilities per se, but his eyesight, ability to calculate trajectories, and physical condition were, quite simply, perfect. Training from a pair of professional assassins masquerading as circus performers had turned him into an astonishingly lethal hand to hand combatant and the world’s best marksman, bar none, and he was very intelligent, despite never completing his high school education. 

Barton had served on a Special Forces team in the Army for a few years before resigning in protest of an unethical mission and becoming a freelance assassin. SHIELD had recruited him only four months ago, shortly after Fury was appointed Director, but he was already a Level 4 agent and universally regarded as their most effective operative. With his bewildering arsenal of trick arrows and sheer competence, Barton’s inclusion was a no-brainer.  

Carol Danvers and Clint Barton for certain, Logan Howlett with a bit of patience, Hope van Dyne and Namor as potential ‘maybes’. It was a more promising start than Fury had expected, but it wasn’t enough. Who else was there? 

Agents Bobbi Morse and Melinda May were currently the only SHIELD specialists in Barton’s league, but they lacked his firepower and operational flexibility. The only assassins Fury knew of who could match Hawkeye were Black Widows, and the odds of one defecting to SHIELD were only slightly better than Captain America and the Red Skull becoming pen pals. Erik Lensherr had the power, skills, and experience to boot, and age didn’t seem to have weakened him, but Fury wasn’t desperate enough to trust a former terrorist, no matter how understandable his motives and regardless of whether the man had supposedly reformed. There was a reason people worldwide still feared the name “Magneto.” 

Fury sighed and put his head in his hands, planting his elbows on his desk. Why on Earth did he let Peggy Carter convince him to accept this job? 

Kamar-Taj, it turned out, was a tiered, five-storey compound with multiple levels of towers, turrets, and courtyards. Unlike most of the residents, who stayed in modest suites lining the outer walls, Harry had been given chambers directly connected to those where Andromeda and Teddy would be living until their identities in this reality were established. Their shared turret stood between two small courtyards, one of which was reserved for their personal use.  

It was a lovely place to bask in the mountain air, with a stunning view of the Kamar-Taj grounds and the city of Kathmandu. Atmospheric spells imbued into the rooftops kept out the elements, but everything beyond their reach was blanketed in snow. To the west, so close it abutted the compound’s outer walls, lay the famous Swayambhu Mahachaitya religious complex. To the south lay Birendra Army Hospital.  

If Kamar-Taj were a hotel, the private courtyard would have been a spot for relaxing after a long day, but Harry knew the real reason it had been reserved for him was so that he’d have a private space to meditate and exercise. It was also a place for him and Andromeda to speak in private. Harry sat on a backless stone bench and watched as she paced the courtyard, looking furious. The setting sun cast everything in dim, ruddy light. 

Finally, the tension became unbearable. “If you’ve got something to say, then say it,” Harry said. “I know from experience that bottling up your feelings isn’t helpful.” 

She rounded on him, and the scowl on her face made her look so much like her mad sister that Harry had to suppress a wince. “Oh, there are several things I would like to say,” she snapped. “We’re trapped here in an alien reality we don’t know nearly enough about, surrounded by strange magic and other powers, and one of those powers has decided it wants to use you as an instrument of its will. What were you thinking, accepting an offer from an unknown entity like that?”  

“What else was I supposed to do?” Harry shot back. He knew she was lashing out because she was afraid, rather than genuine resentment, but her words had struck a nerve. “Let Dormammu just take us? If I hadn’t bonded with the damned firebird, we’d be worse than dead. Or did you forget that?”  

She made a noise of frustration. “You know I haven’t. But I don’t like it. I don’t like any of this. How can you be so quick to trust these people?”  

“I trust the Ancient One to do what she thinks is best for the world,” he said, carefully.  

“That’s precisely the problem. She reminds me too much of Dumbledore, and not in a good way.”  

Now, Harry did wince. “You’re not wrong, but this is different.”  

“Is it? Is it really?”  

“Think about it. Dumbledore was fighting a shadow war against an immortal magical terrorist who had infiltrated all levels of our society, and the most important piece on his chessboard was a child who needed to die for our side to win. He did the best he could with what he had. Now, I’m an adult, and the Ancient One and I understand each other fairly well. We’ve both told each other our most important secrets. Plus, this Phoenix Force is notoriously volatile. She knows better than to try manipulating me while I’ve got that thing inside me; the risk if it backfires is too high.” 

“And if she decides to kill you, instead? Not now, you’re too tender from your… fusion, transformation, whatever it was. If she wanted you dead now, you’d be dead. But in the future?”  

“I doubt the Ancient One is the type to fear someone simply because they’re powerful. I think she needs my help with something, even if she doesn’t know what. But she’d be a fool not to have contingency plans. You can bet she’s been working on those since before she came to get us this morning.” When Andromeda didn’t respond, he continued. “I haven’t told you anything you couldn’t figure out for yourself. What’s this really about, Andi?”  

She glowered at him for a few more seconds before her expression crumpled. “I’ve lost too much in my life, Harry. I had to fight tooth and nail to find love, and it was taken from me by my own sister. You and Teddy are all I have left, and now I’m going to lose you too.”  

He stared at her in horror. “What are you talking about? You’re not going to lose me.”  

“Won’t I? Your life doesn’t belong to you anymore. You have to share your entire existence with a cosmic entity that cannot and will not ever understand what it means to be human. It will eat at you from the inside, burn you up in the name of its own agenda, whether you realize it or not.”  

“You don’t know that,” said Harry, but his words lacked certainty. “And I’m not going Dark.”  

“I’m not worried that you’ll become a Dark Phoenix. I will never doubt your heart, Harry. But make no mistake. Your new purpose, whatever it is, will wear on you like rain on a mountain. There is no burden heavier than duty.”  

“You think I won’t be there when you need me.”  

She shook her head. “No. I’m afraid you won’t be there when Teddy needs you.”  

Harry shuddered. She had a point. He thought of Sirius, who had gotten himself thrown in Azkaban by recklessly pursuing Wormtail for revenge. He thought of Remus, too crippled by self-doubt to act without Dumbledore’s say-so and too hampered by the Wizarding World’s atrocious legal system to be there for Harry as much as he ought to have been. He thought of his parents and the ancient magic they’d invoked. They had all laid down their lives for him, but in doing so, they had left him completely, utterly alone.  

Harry would not hesitate to lay down his life for Teddy or Andromeda, but that wasn’t what they needed from him. They needed his presence, his support and attention. They needed him to be part of their family, not just their protector.  

“I’m sorry, Andi,” he said quietly. He stood up and approached her. “I can’t ignore this new destiny, whatever it is. But I promise I won’t abandon you in the name of duty.”  

They embraced. 

“This isn’t fair,” she said into his shoulder. “Haven’t we suffered enough? Haven’t you done enough?” 

“No, it isn’t fair,” Harry agreed. But then, life in general was unfair, and his life was about as unfair as it got. “But I’m going to make the best of it.” 

The Ancient One had told him that the Phoenix Force was a cosmic entity, with powers that were almost incomprehensible to mortals. It would take time to rebuild himself now that it was bonded to him, but once he did, well. Dormammu didn’t kill everyone when he devoured a new universe—the ruler of the Dark Dimension was less of an annihilator and more of a conqueror. Not everyone under his power became a Mindless One.  

For the sake of those survivors, Harry would do more than simply learn to use his Phoenix-infused magic; he would master it, as Dumbledore and Merlin had mastered their magic, as Voldemort had mastered the Dark Arts. He would climb the highest mountain, dive into the deepest ocean, explore the deadliest jungles if that was what it took. Then, once he had the power to tear the stars from the sky and hold them in the palm of his hand, he would use it to reach into Dark Dimension and rip his people free from Dormammu’s grip.  

Dormammu was beyond time and death as mortals understood them, but his time was coming.  

“It seems,” Odin said to the room, “that our past has come back to haunt us.” 

His family winced. They were sitting around a low table in his private study in the heart of Valaskjalf; Odin beside Frigga on one couch, Thor and Loki on the other, Hela by herself in an armchair. 

“What will we do, then?” Hela asked. She was filing her nails with a knife she conjured, but Odin wasn’t fooled by her nonchalant facade. He saw the wariness in her eyes, the subtle tension in her shoulders. 

“For now, nothing.” 

“Like we did nothing the last time it took a Host on Midgard?” Thor demanded. 

“It is not our place to babysit or order around beings who are not part of our kingdom,” Odin said, patiently, “no matter how powerful they may be. But I will not allow this one to suffer the same fate as his predecessor. We shall watch and wait, and forge an alliance with him when the time is right. No more, no less.” 

Loki asked, “And how will we know when the time is right?” 

“I suspect,” said Frigga, “the opportunity will present itself soon enough.” 

Everyone focused their gazes on her. Even Hela ceased her nail filing. 

“You’ve foreseen something?” Odin asked. 

“I have. Midgard has been like a worm in a cocoon this last century. Now, as the time for it to emerge in its new form approaches, its fate balances on a knife’s edge. A butterfly is most vulnerable when it first emerges from its chrysalis. This Phoenix Host will tip the scales.” 

The unspoken f or better or worse resounded through the room like a cannon shot. 

“The Ancient One allowed you to observe him?” Loki asked, looking at Odin. 

“Yes.” 

“Well?” 

Odin took a deep breath. “His name is Harry Potter, son of James and Lily. He is a refugee from another dimensional reality that has now been destroyed. He is also a wizard, born to magic.” 

Thor, Loki, and Hela gaped in open shock. Frigga merely raised an eyebrow, but, like Hela, Odin knew her well enough to see through her impassive mask. 

Loki, naturally, was the first to recover his composure. “How is this possible?” he asked. 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Odin admitted. “The Masters of the Mystic Arts understand the multiverse and its dangers better than I ever have. All I know for certain is that Potter’s homeworld was an alternate version of Midgard with a population of wixen who took to living in secrecy to avoid persecution from the mundane population. It was consumed by Dormammu, the Cosmic Conqueror, but the Phoenix Force allowed him to save himself and those closest to him. His magic has been fundamentally changed by his merging with the Phoenix, so he will need time to rebuild himself.”

“Is he… stable?” Hela asked, leaning forward. 

“Relatively. Whether he will stay that way is another matter.” Odin summarized the story Potter told the Sanctum Masters 

When he finished, Thor said, “Most impressive. And most disturbing.” 

“Indeed,” Loki agreed. “If he has been manipulated so heavily over the course of his life, he will not react well when he discovers that the Ancient One allowed us to learn this much about him without his consent.” 

“No, he will not,” Odin agreed, “but he is no fool. He cannot afford to assume that his relationships with the protectors of the world are what they seem. I’m certain he’s already deduced that the Ancient One is developing contingencies in the event he becomes a threat.” 

Thor’s expression was grim. “Do you think we will be forced to fight him?” 

“I hope not, my son. I truly hope not.”

Chapter Text

I do not own any of the source material for this story. Reviews and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated. 

::::: 

“Tell me about your magic,” the Ancient One told Harry the following day. “How did it work before the Phoenix?”

They were kneeling across from one another on the floor of her audience chamber, a smaller version of the room where he’d met the Sanctum Masters. Both of them were dressed in black. “I’m not much of a theoretician,” Harry began slowly, “but I'll do my best. Researchers from my world believed that the ability to use magic is linked to the soul, and I think they were right. My magic is a living part of me, an extension of my being that responds to my instincts.” 

“Give me an example.” 

Harry thought about it for a moment, then said, “The Patronus Charm. An ancient, extremely difficult piece of magic that most adult witches and wizards struggle with, if they can cast it at all. You’re supposed to dredge up the happiest moments of your life and use them to create a tangible spirit guardian. Most people can only produce an incorporeal Patronus, but if properly formed, it will take the form of an animal that symbolizes something deeply important to you. Then there are the Unforgivable Curses.” 

The Ancient One raised an eyebrow. “Unforgivable?” 

“Three Unforgivable Curses,” Harry recited, knowing he sounded like Barty Crouch Jr. posing as Moody and hating it. “Some of the most powerful and sinister spells my people know of. The use of any one of them on a sentient being without special dispensation from our government would earn you a lifetime in prison, partly because of their effects, partly because the requirements to cast them are indisputable proof of intention to cause harm.” 

“Describe them, please.” 

Harry did so. The fake Moody had shown him and his classmates the curses, but he’d neglected to explain how to cast them or why they were considered worse than, say, the Blood Boiling, Bone Breaking, or Entrail Expelling Curses. The Imperius Curse could only be properly cast if the practitioner truly believed that their victim didn’t deserve to have the option of disobeying them; more, that the caster themselves deserved unquestioning obedience. It was not impossible to use the spell for good, Harry knew from experience, but it was undeniably sinister, despite the calm bliss unresisting victims experienced. 

The Cruciatus Curse, as Bellatrix had demonstrated, required genuine sadism and a desire to cause harm. That spell, alone among all that Harry knew of, could not be used for benevolent purposes. Not in its proper form, at any rate—lesser instances fueled by righteous anger were about as effective a defensive weapon as the Stunning Spell, albeit more vicious. 

The Avada Kedavra Curse used the practitioner’s absolute intention to kill their target to extinguish the victim’s life force, like water dousing a fire. Merely producing the infamous bolt of green light was proof that the practitioner fully and unhesitatingly intended to kill their victim, which meant that the spell’s only unambiguously benevolent applications were euthanasia, as Snape had done for Dumbledore, or as a means of destroying uncontainable threats. If Voldemort were to appear before him now, Harry would have used the curse on him without hesitation, but that was the exception. 

“It seems to me,” the Ancient One said when he was finished, “that to draw out your full potential, you must draw on your feelings to shape your spells.” 

Harry nodded. “More or less, and I tend to feel things pretty strongly. That’s how I was able to master the Patronus Charm when I was thirteen.” 

The Ancient One’s lips twitched. “Let us move on, for now. You’ve described how your magic is fueled, but how is it categorized?” 

This would be easier. “Most of the spells my people invented are categorized as either Charms or Transfigurations, though in a lot of cases, the distinction is so blurry as to be irrelevant. Charms change an object’s state or properties, while Transfiguration changes what the object actually is. Most conjuring spells are designed to create something from pure magic, so they’re considered a variation on the transfiguration formula, but several conjuring spells summon existing matter from elsewhere without pulling it through the intervening space, so those are considered charms. Counterspells do exactly what they say, whether that means breaking an enchantment or undoing a piece of transfiguration. 

“Dark magic is what we call any magic that’s specifically designed to harm others or requires the practitioner to harm others to achieve the desired effect. We categorized it by the severity of the harm. Jinxes are pranks—annoying, but mostly harmless. Curses are the most potent kind of dark magic, with severely debilitating or lethal effects. Hexes fall somewhere in between; less harmful than curses, but worse than jinxes. Of course, people disagreed on which category a spell qualified for. The Stunning Spell is technically a charm that knocks targets unconscious. It doesn’t normally cause any physical damage, and it’s easy to undo the effects, but it’s still a spell that’s designed to leave you helpless if you’re hit with it, so I personally consider it a hex. 

“Many magical effects are easier to achieve or made extra effective by potions. Burn-healing spells, for example, aren’t very effective on anything worse than first or second-degree, so for those, we use potions and pastes. We had cures for the common cold, truth serums, poisons, a sleeping potion so powerful it’s called the Draught of Living Death, and so on.” 

“Do all of your spells require a wand to cast?” 

“No.” Harry paused. This was where things would get interesting. “A wand is nothing more or less than a focus, something that helps us draw out and direct our magic. Wands make spellcasting a lot easier, and they have helped my people expand the possibilities of what our magic can do. They also acted as practical tools: keys, ID markers, and so on. The problem is that it’s very easy to become dependent on them. Most schools of magic, including the one I attended, used wands, so I’m not very experienced in wandless casting. What I’ve found, though, is that wandless magic is more instinctive and less precise. It’s like painting with your fingertips instead of a brush.” 

“Interesting.” The Ancient One adjusted her posture slightly, then adopted the expression of a lecturer. “Now turnabout is fair play, so listen carefully. As I’ve told you, no human in this world is ever born magical—it is a talent like any other, one that can be embraced or neglected as one chooses. Different magical traditions have their own methods of accomplishing various feats, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. The more a practitioner commits to a particular way of doing things, the harder it becomes to adopt new approaches. The Masters of the Mystic Arts, therefore, have strived over the millennia to grow our knowledge and maintain flexible traditions so that our disciples will be as well equipped as possible to deal with the many dangers of our lives.” 

She motioned with her hands, drawing lines of fiery energy in the air with deliberate slowness.“At the root of existence, mind and matter are the same. The language of the Mystic Arts is therefore as old as civilization, for any language can be used to shape magic. Practitioners must find the words and phrases most strongly linked whatever it is they are invoking and combine them with appropriate symbols to fashion spells. There is no such thing as a true name per se, but the stronger the connection our choice of language is to something, the more we can control that concept. The universe isn’t a simulation, but it does have a source code if you will, and magic is our way of hacking the program. 

“We harness energy drawn from our life force, from the universal force that keeps the multiverse in balance, and from other dimensions to turn words and images into reality. The energy lines you see me drawing now are formed from eldritch ichor, a substance we sorcerers generate from universal energies to craft shields and weapons, and spells. Sometimes, we use the ichor to manipulate forces and entities native to our reality. Other times, eldritch ichor sigils invoke the powers and abilities of extradimensional entities. Personal energies require no such constructs to cast, but their applications are far more limited—a human body, after all, has only a very limited amount of life energy to spend. 

“Occasionally, we perform rituals that allow us to tap directly into an extradimensional entity’s powers, not even using eldritch ichor spells, but this is difficult and dangerous, for many such entities demand a price for calling on their powers. As you know, I have been using such magic to siphon power from Dormammu without his consent. This has allowed me to extend my life and increase my overall power without becoming a slave to his will, but I still had to sacrifice for that power.” 

A thought occurred to Harry, and he blurted out the question before he could stop himself. “Your name? You gave up your name for immortality?” 

Without acknowledging his outburst, the Ancient One flicked her hands, and the construct expanded in Harry’s direction, spraying him with a warm burst of wind. The lines of energy dissolved into sparks. 

She lowered her hands back to her knees. “Some spells require too much power to sustain without risking self-harm, so we rely on enchanted objects to cast them. All Masters of the Mystic Arts are equipped with sling rings, for instance, which allow us to open portals and navigate the different layers of reality. We use potions only in a limited capacity because ingredients with the appropriate properties are scarce on Earth. When we do, they are typically used as a means of delivering spells that are less effective when cast by traditional means, or as a means of manifesting spells that are too powerful to cast unaided. In some cases, potions are used as mediums for a practitioner to ingest spells.” 

Harry frowned. “Ingest spells?” 

She shrugged. “Some rituals are all about preparing a long and complex incantation, then dissolving it into a potion as a means of taking it inside yourself. No matter what, our practices do not typically mesh well with strong emotions. Everything we do is, shall we say, clinical. We operate in a calm place and let the power come to us. Our thoughts and intentions become reality, but not our feelings.” 

“That sounds… so bizarre to me,” Harry admitted. Magic was more than a set of rules and practices. Yes, inventing new spells and potions was a very scientific process, but magic was much like the Phoenix; fire and life . It responded to the eddies and flows of the practitioner’s deepest feelings, whether they wanted it to or not. Trying to cast a Patronus Charm or a Killing Curse without drawing on a well of emotion would be like trying to cultivate a plant without water. 

“I think,” said the Ancient One, “that you will need to bridge the gap between your practices and mine if you are to master the Phoenix Force. And that means you will have to walk a fine line.” 

“And how exactly do I go about that? Spells like the Patronus Charm won’t work without the associated emotions. But if I tap too deeply into my feelings, I risk losing control of the Phoenix. And if I try to live without feeling anything at all….” 

“Have you ever heard of the concept of the edge of chaos?” 

“No.” 

“It’s the idea that life needs a balance of order and disorder to survive and thrive in the long term. If a society or an individual changes too much, too quickly, if they take too many unnecessary risks or shed all restrictions, they will tear themselves apart. But if you refuse to change or move forward, if you are too rigid, you will stagnate, or snap when subjected to the unexpected or the complex. The secret to a healthy society and a healthy person, then, is to find the edge of chaos and stay there.” 

“That’s an awfully fragile balance.” 

“Indeed, but one you must learn to live in. You must find the cliff and keep yourself two steps away from its edge; no more, no less.” 

Harry nodded. He’d known this wasn’t going to be easy, but the idea of living at the edge of chaos was more than a little frightening, given what lay at the bottom of the Ancient One’s metaphorical cliff. 

Many wizards from Harry’s old world would have assumed that bonding with a cosmic entity capable of enhancing one’s magic was the greatest blessing imaginable. Voldemort would have salivated at the possibilities offered by a force capable of controlling life on a fundamental level. But Harry knew better. Great power wasn’t a blessing; it was a curse. 

Yes, the Phoenix Force would one day make him effectively unstoppable, but the process of bonding with it had badly scrambled his powers. Far from being a god of magic, his raw power remained static, and his control was shot. He’d never had to go through physical therapy, but if he did, he imagined it would feel something like this, rebuilding skills he considered basic from the ground up. Hence, his initial routine consisted of meditation, reading, and physical exercise, including martial arts training. 

For much of his short life, Harry’s magic had been a fundamental part of his identity. By the time he’d taken his W.O.M.B.A.T.s, it had become a third limb. He took great pride in his powers, the same way a musician would in their instrument. Having to rebuild himself from the ground up was as frustrating as going back to muggle primary school. 

At Hogwarts, his academic performance had been… inconsistent. He’d never been as zealous as Hermione, but he’d always been intuitive and eager to learn. Over time, stress and distractions from his insane life had taken a toll on his academic focus, leading to lower marks than he knew he was capable of. At the same time, it had propelled him to take a greater interest in esoteric, extracurricular subjects, like the Patronus Charm and the Animagus ritual. The Triwizard Tournament had forced him to accelerate his development as a wizard, but during the first few weeks of his fifth year, depression and post-traumatic stress had sapped his energy until he barely saw the point of trying. O.W.L.s hadn’t seemed important when the Ministry of Magic was burying its head in the sand while Voldemort gathered his strength. 

It wasn’t until the D.A. lessons that his passion had been reignited. Learning the full contents of the prophecy later on hadn’t exactly buoyed him, but it had filled him with a new drive to make himself the best wizard he could possibly be. He’d known he stood no chance of defeating Voldemort in direct combat—no amount of training could bridge the experience gap between them—but he still needed every advantage he could get. 

Of course, having a fragment of soul stuck in his head hadn’t helped matters. Harry had lived with the parasitic entity attached to him for so long that he hadn’t realized how painful its presence had been until it was gone. 

From the beginning, his greatest advantage during his Hogwarts years had been his raw power, which was as high as it could naturally get and, with the right motivation, allowed him to cast master-level spells before he even came of age. At the same time, his inconsistent study habits had initially made his spellwork somewhat inflexible and imprecise, much like a giant whose fingers were too thick and clumsy to pick up a grain of sand. After Voldemort’s death, Harry explored and trained his magic extensively, not merely out of a desire to fight, but to truly live. His skills hadn’t reached their full potential when Dormammu consumed his world, but he’d been well on his way. 

His best subject had always been Defense Against the Dark Arts, but it was far from his only strength. His Charmwork and Transfiguration were excellent, and while he was no Newt Scamander, he was better than most with magical creatures. Though not the prodigy Professor Slughorn had mistaken him for, Harry was a highly capable potioneer when he didn’t have Snape breathing down his neck. Flying came to him with almost unnatural ease. He’d switched from Divination to Ancient Runes in his Fourth Year, though it had taken him a long time to truly appreciate either area of study. He’d dabbled in Arithmancy during his Auror career, and his experiences seeing into Voldemort’s mind had inadvertently given him a passable understanding of Legilimency. And despite his initial struggles with Occlumency, no one had penetrated his mental defenses since the Battle of Hogwarts. 

The Masters of the Mystic Arts did things very differently from Hogwarts. For one, all the students were adults, which Harry wasn’t used to outside specialized training programs like those for Aurors and Healers. For another, subject-specific classes were divided according to the sort of powers that a sorcerer wished to invoke, rather than the fundamental nature of the spells themselves. Instead of Charms and Transfiguration, there were classes on the different types of mystic energy and their uses, spell formation and direction, portal creation, invocation of mystical forces or entities, and the multiverse. 

Kamar-Taj divided students into ranks based on their level of magical aptitude. The lowest rank, novices, wore white robes and were held to a fairly rigid curriculum designed to teach them the basics. Once they learned the core techniques of summoning mystic energies, fashioning eldritch ichor into basic constructs for spellcasting, and opening portals, they were promoted to apprentice rank. Apprentices wore deep crimson robes and were free to study on their own, provided they made a worthy effort, attended classes taught by the Masters whenever they wished, or else received private tutoring sessions. 

It was rather like attending a university, except there were no grades to pass a course, there was no monetary cost, the subjects taught were often fiendishly difficult, and the standards were sky high, regardless of one’s area of study. While novices were kept under close observation to ensure they didn’t accidentally hurt themselves, apprentices learned at their own pace and were free to leave whenever they wished. The programs one had to complete to graduate to Master rank were brutal, but that was only sensible, given the duties expected of the Masters: teaching complex and dangerous magic, dealing with threats to the integrity of the world’s shield against extradimensional invasion, and policing the use of magic worldwide. 

As multiversal refugees who practiced their own form of magic, Andromeda and Harry didn’t fit into the normal system. Andromeda was invited to study the arts practiced at Kamar-Taj at her leisure, though she had little time to explore new ways of using magic when she had Teddy to take care of. Harry, with his invisible rank, was effectively an apprentice who answered exclusively to the Sorcerer Supreme, but that only meant that he was held to an even higher standard than his alleged peers. 

Since Kamar-Taj had been established for the express purpose of training monastic warrior sorcerers, its training philosophies heavily emphasized not only meditation and spirituality, but martial arts and athleticism as well. Harry was no stranger to the latter—Quidditch players and Aurors alike had to be in top physical shape to perform effectively, and the latter were trained in the basics of melee combat to increase their survivability—but he found himself pushed to a whole new level even so. 

Quidditch players had to develop strength in their entire bodies to be able to control their brooms while performing complex, dangerous aerial stunts. Aurors were trained to be able to keep a clear head and cast advanced magic no matter how distracting or stressful their surroundings, no matter how exhausted or injured they might be. Both professions had required Harry to hone his reflexes and endurance to the nth degree, and he’d had plenty of opportunities to put all of that training to use despite his relative youth. 

The fitness standards set by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement were high. The standards of the Masters of the Mystic Arts were higher. There was also a much greater emphasis on the “martial” side of the coin.

As soon as he had the so-called basics down to the exacting standards of his instructors, Harry was made to repeatedly strike objects of increasing hardness with more and more force using his hands, elbows, forehead, and feet to deaden his sensitivity to impact forces. At the same time, his hands were constantly treated with an enchanted herbal remedy that would temper the advantageous damage into his skin without compromising his dexterity, which itself was honed through mind-boggling sleight of hand, string games, and other routines to prepare him for advanced spellweaving. 

There were other, more unorthodox forms of physical conditioning as well. Harry was trained to hold his breath underwater for ten minutes or more without magic, a completely natural yet rarely used capability of the human body. He meditated in desert heat and glacial cold with minimal protective clothing to increase his resistance to the elements. He trained his body to resist poisons and drugs through highly controlled doses of those substances he was most likely to encounter as well as how to recognize them in his environment in order to avoid exposure. 

As his athleticism grew, so too did the intensity of his martial arts training. He drilled his katas for hours on end with little rest, then put them to use in merciless sparring sessions with the Masters that usually left him bloody and bruised even when he won. He practiced gymnastics and parkour skills so dizzying and complex that he vomited more than once and fell on his face or arse on countless occasions. 

In addition to unarmed combat, Harry was taught how to wield a variety of weapons, including swords, knives, quarterstaffs, whips, war fans, and bows. The weapons used in sparring matches were all very real, albeit enchanted to cause only skin-deep damage, under the belief that the greatest teacher was pain. The goal wasn’t to turn trainees into living weapons, but rather to temper their minds and bodies so that they could handle the dangers a Master of the Mystic Arts was expected to face. It was a brutally effective philosophy that Harry hated and respected in equal measure. 

At least once a week, a group of apprentices would embark on survival training exercises in the isolated, sometimes extradimensional wilderness. On such trips, they had nothing but their wits, their lessons, and strictly limited magic to carry them to the safety of a portal linked to a Rotunda of Gateways. Sometimes, they would be given extra objectives, such as killing monsters summoned to hunt them down or retrieving enchanted objects. Harry wasn’t allowed to participate in such exercises yet, but he knew he’d be expected to as soon as he learned the appropriate magic. He wasn’t worried; wizards weren’t usually trained to go without food, rest, or comforts for extended periods, but Harry had experience with all of these things. Similarly, he sailed through sensory overload and deprivation training, having already been subjected to it by the Aurors. 

Every day, he and his fellow apprentices would spar with each other and their instructors in the rooftop courtyard of Kamar-Taj for at least an hour. They would also spend time meditating on philosophical questions or their lived experiences, sometimes with the aid of focus candles, incense, acupuncture, or drum beats. When he wasn’t pushing his body to its limits, Harry read books from the Kamar-Taj library as well as his personal collection, learning everything he could about not only his new surroundings, but also how they compared to the wisdom of his old world. 

It was bitter work, but his physical and martial abilities developed fast. He was proud of that. What he wasn’t proud of was his progress with magic. 

“Normally,” the Ancient One had said during his first practical lesson, “we only introduce the Mirror Dimension to apprentices when they reach a point in their training where they cannot unleash their full power within the walls of Kamar-Taj without causing collateral damage. But you constitute a special case.” 

As Harry watched, she waved her hand, cracking reality in front of her like glass. The distortion rippled and undulated as if it were water under wind, forming a wall of jagged, ever-shifting planes of crystal. She strode into it, disappearing into her reflection. Harry followed her without hesitation—he’d seen stranger things—and this time was able to feel the shift in the nature of the universe around him. 

The Mirror Dimension was inherently less tangible, less… real. Reflections showed only half of the original, so it made sense for a dimension that only existed as a reflection of the real world to be a less defined, more malleable place. 

With gestures of both hands, the Ancient One did one of the most amazing things Harry had ever seen. Every geometric surface in the room, the patterned floors, the ceilings, the walls, even the windows, grew consecutive reflections of itself, like flowers sprouting new petals in endless blooms. In seconds, the chamber expanded into a psychedelic cavern half a mile across. 

He blinked. “Good show,” was all he’d said. 

In the beginning, she had him focus on basic powers and control exercises. Since Phoenix Fire had become a part of his magic, the core abilities common to all Phoenix Hosts quickly became second nature to him— legilimency, pyromancy, and telekinesis—to the point that he could manifest them with a mere flex of his will, not even casting proper spells. Most of Harry’s telekinetic charms, the very spells that were easiest to cast wandlessly, became redundant to the point of uselessness. 

Meanwhile, fire magic was too easy now; he could just as easily summon an ordinary, insubstantial flame as produce a concentrated bolt that was more energy than fire, similar to a Blasting Curse. Many times, he accidentally created uncontrollable infernos that the Ancient One was forced to smother using her reality-folding magic. He shuddered to imagine how any Fiendfyre he summoned might look. 

To his relief, Harry did retain some powers from his old self and could use them freely without any special modifications to account for Phoenix Fire: apparition, his Animagus form, his sixth sense for magic, nonverbal incantations, and Parseltongue. Indeed, his effective apparition range expanded greatly after minimal practice. Most of his astronomy knowledge carried over as well, and for that, he was grateful, since astronomy allowed wizards to empower more conventional forms of magic by invoking appropriate constellations and celestial bodies—it was easier to conjure a lion when Leo was visible in the night sky, easier to summon blizzards by invoking the image of frozen celestial bodies like Europa. 

Unfortunately, that was where Harry’s luck ran out. Tasks he’d once considered simple, including transfiguring a matchstick into a needle, had become as difficult as they’d been when he first attempted them at Hogwarts; it was as if he’d regressed into a first year. He had to painstakingly practice his spells and frequently modify them to account for the lack of a wand or the permanent changes wrought on him by Phoenix Fire. On top of that, he was expected to learn the practices of the Masters of the Mystic Arts.

It wasn’t enough to simply adopt their method of writing spells in the air with eldritch ichor, as Harry’s magic did not typically respond to energy formations, no matter how esoteric the symbols he drew might be. Instead, he focused on magical traditions from outside Kamar-Taj—this dimensional reality’s equivalent of alternative witchcraft—and how they overlapped with his own traditions and those of the Masters of the Mystic Arts. Gradually, carefully, he found and harnessed connections between the symbols of the Mystic Arts, the rituals and runes of the witch covens, and the various principles he’d learned back home. It was diabolically complicated, and progress was slow. 

The biggest problem, though, was potions. Any potion, even a basic Boil Cure, required at least some spellwork from the brewer; without the appropriate charms to draw out and bind together the magical properties of the ingredients, a potion would be nothing more than a nasty-tasting mess likely to cause food poisoning. And for all his successes in adapting old spells to his new self, Harry could not for the life of him get potion-brewing charms to work. Every time he tried, his creations literally blew up in his face. It happened with such regularity that even Seamus Finnigan would have been impressed. Worse, his emergency supply of ingredients was extremely limited. 

While mundane ingredients were fairly easy to acquire, most of the magical plants and creatures he needed were completely unavailable. According to the library of Kamar-Taj, there were a few species of magical organisms native to Earth, but most were exclusive to alien planets or dimensional realities that were difficult and dangerous to access. 

It had been a shock to learn that the Nine Realms of Norse mythology were real. The gods of Asgard were alien beings with their own brand of magic, as were the Jotnar, Vanir, and other beings. Of all the planets encompassed by Yggdrasil, Alfheim was most abundant in magical creatures familiar to Harry: unicorns, winged horses, griffins, et cetera. Dragons and fire-dwelling salamanders were found on Muspelheim, while selmas (aggressive cousins of sea serpents) inhabited the frigid seas of Jotunheim. 

However, even if the creatures he needed existed, and even if he went to the trouble of hunting them down, they were not quite the same as he was used to. His magic was alien to theirs, which meant that they would not react in recipes as he expected them to. Thus, he, and by extension Andromeda, was forced to rely on the limited supply of creature parts in his trunk. With a bit of work, he’d be able to establish a sanctuary for his supply of magical plants, but he did not dare dip into his precious stash of creature parts until he was certain he could use them safely, and even then he would save them for absolute emergencies. 

Andi, at least, was still able to brew potions correctly, and as she’d passed her Potions N.E.W.T. with an Outstanding, Harry had complete confidence in her ability to manage their brewing supplies. If they worked together, they might even be able to reinvent potions with new ingredients. They weren’t expert potioneers on Snape or even Slughorn’s level, but they could manage, if they worked hard and smart enough. 

The Masters of the Mystic Arts had potions of their own, but, as the Ancient One had intimated, they were very different from what Harry was used to. The Masters generally relied on a strange combination of mundane materials and magically captured sensory ingredients—the sound of someone’s voice, the smell of a flower, the heat of a sunny day—to create their brews, and the potions themselves weren’t usually used the way wizarding world potions were, except for the simplistic healing balm and its like. 

Nothing is ever easy , Harry reflected as he put down Key of Solomon that evening. He was sitting at a communal study table in the darkened Kamar-Taj library, alone with his thoughts and the librarian, an amiable, older fellow from Pakistan named Khan who spent most of his time playing on his Gameboy at the reference desk. A glance at his watch told Harry it was ten past midnight, which explained the bleary feeling in his eyes and his building headache. His ointment-lathered fingers throbbed; he’d cracked bones punching a tree trunk today, and an exasperated Andromeda could only heal so much. 

Before he could decide whether to keep going or call it a night, Harry was distracted by the sound of footsteps on the library’s stone floor. Turning in his seat, he was surprised to see a round-faced Nepalese man a few years older than him dressed in white novice’s robes perusing the stacks, several volumes already tucked under one arm. 

“‘Lo, Wong,” Harry said, his voice hoarse with disuse. 

Wong started in surprise. “Apprentice Potter,” he said, his voice slightly gravelly, and inclined his head. 

“Can’t sleep?” 

The older man hesitated before saying, “No. And neither, it seems, can you.” 

Harry offered a weak smile and shrugged. “Join the club, we’ve got jumpers.” 

Wong didn’t laugh. As stern as his countenance suggested, Wong was not only humorless, but an utter stoic. He had arrived at Kamar-Taj not a week after Harry and his family, recruited by a troubled apprentice around Harry’s age named Lucian Aster. Aster, for his part, refused to talk about his past, but Wong admitted to quitting a stable job at a Target store in Kathmandu to search for spiritual enlightenment and a purpose in life.

How miserable and aimless does one have to be , Harry had wondered when he first heard the story, to willingly abandon consistency and safety for a life of fighting monsters? Wong hadn’t been groomed into an underage warrior, as far as he knew. 

Harry recalled the miserable daze he’d lived in following Sirius’s death, the contradicting desires to be alone and to have company. Knowing now how unhealthy it had been to isolate himself from his friends, he forced himself to speak through the lump in his throat. “Have a seat, if you want. We can be night owls together.” 

Wong studied him for a moment, then approached and sat opposite him, setting his books down with a thump. They stayed like that for an hour, reading, the only sounds the rustle of pages being turned, pens scratching notes, and Khan the librarian putting down his game to take a walk through the stacks. Eventually, Harry’s exhaustion became too great to ignore. Once he realized he was reading the same sentence over and over, he decided to call it a night. He looked up and Wong had fallen asleep on his desk.

“ Ennervate ,” Harry said with a wave of his hand.

Wong winced in place and groaned. “Ugh. Let me sleep.”

“Not here, mate. You want to sleep? Find a bed.”

“I hate you.”

“Cheers.”

The next morning, Harry sat in the center of the hard, cold stone courtyard outside his quarters, legs crossed, hands resting on the tops of his knees, trying to quiet his troubled mind by focusing on the mental image of a single candle’s worth of flame. A common misconception held that meditation was defined by the absence of thought. In reality, to meditate was to clear one’s head of emotion and focus on either a single thought, activity, or outside object. It helped organize the mind by stabilizing and clarifying thoughts, reducing stress and anxiety while promoting peace and self-awareness. 

He’d first tried meditation as part of his disastrous Occlumency lessons with Snape, but he’d had no chance of actually learning anything at the time. On top of being a naturally emotional person with a tendency to brood, he’d been a traumatized, angry teenager operating under far too much pressure. He’d needed a particularly patient and helpful tutor. Instead, he’d been stuck with a pathetic excuse for a teacher who’d hated his guts. 

Exceptional wizard and spy Severus Snape had been, but also a bitter, unrepentant arse who had no business teaching children. He was a lot like Aunt Petunia that way. 

Dumbledore had tried to curb Snape’s unprofessional behavior once he’d learned the full extent of how badly it was hampering students’ education, but with limited success; Snape had bettered himself for the sake of ordinary students, but he refused to put aside his schoolboy grudge. Worse, he’d tormented Neville for not being the one Voldemort personally targeted, as if that somehow made him responsible for what happened to Lily. 

Harry could not excuse that kind of hypocritical, childish spite in anyone, let alone in an educator. He owed his life and his final victory against Voldemort to Snape’s spycraft, but there was too much animosity between them for Harry to feel anything for him other than reluctant, grudging respect for his accomplishments. He’d made a point of telling people the truth about Snape’s loyalties after the war ended, but no more than that. Neville’s view of the matter was even dimmer. 

In an act of blatant hypocrisy, Snape had once condemned him for wearing his heart on his sleeve and claimed it made him weak. If Snape, obsessed with the past as he was, could compartmentalize well enough to hide his thoughts from Voldemort, then Harry could find peace in the face of his losses. And he had to; with the Phoenix Force bound to him, his mental balance was of utmost importance. 

Thoughts of Snape led Harry’s attention in a new direction. Dumbledore had been the one to bring Snape over to Harry’s side of the war. From a strategic perspective, that had proven to be one of his greatest victories, given how invaluable an asset Snape had been. Unfortunately, that victory had come at the expense of the students of Hogwarts, just as Harry’s safety had come at the expense of his childhood. 

Harry understood why Dumbledore had done things the way he had, really he did, but understanding did not equate to forgiveness. Not completely, at any rate. He owed his life to Dumbledore’s manipulations, but did that justify them? There wasn’t a right answer. If Harry had lived with anyone who wasn’t a blood relative, he’d have died before he ever reached Hogwarts. If he stopped returning to the Dursleys for even a single summer, he would not have had the option of returning to the world of the living after Voldemort struck him down in the Forbidden Forest. A neglectful, quietly cruel childhood had been the price for his survival to adulthood. 

Surviving wasn’t the same as living. 

As for Remus, well… a werewolf living in arms reach of the Boy Who Lived risked Azkaban if he sneezed wrong, so he wasn’t entirely responsible for his role in the mess. But he wasn’t free from blame either. 

Every adult in Harry’s life had failed him in this regard. He knew Hagrid and Professor McGonagall had been there the night he was placed with the Dursleys. The entire arrangement, minus the details about the blood wards, was a matter of public record. Harry never hid how he felt about his relatives, not even from Draco bloody Malfoy, yet Dumbledore had sent him back there every summer regardless, all in the name of his long-term survival. Everything had been about Harry’s long-term survival, whether he liked it or not, and he’d resented Dumbledore and Remus a long time for that. 

Once he’d had time to think about it, though, the bulk of Harry’s ire concerning his childhood had settled on the Ministry of Magic and Barty Crouch Senior. If Crouch had bothered to give Sirius a trial, Harry would never have gone to Privet Drive to begin with. Of course, if Sirius had been responsible and prioritized Harry’s safety over his need for revenge, Crouch would never have gotten the opportunity to throw him in Azkaban in the first place, but it was harder to be angry with Sirius when Sirius’s failure was acting too rashly, rather than doing nothing at all. 

Regardless, what was done was done. Every parental figure Harry had ever had—Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were great, but they didn’t count—had given their lives for a cause they believed in. He respected their dedication and their bravery, but that didn’t stop a small, selfish part of him from wishing they hadn’t. He never wanted anyone to die for him. 

::::: 

Carol Danvers wasn’t sure what to expect when she saw her communicator light up with the special signal from Nick’s pager. She’d told him to use it only in a potentially world-ending emergency, so she braced herself for the worst: a Kree invasion (as unlikely as that was), an Asgardian grudge match (even more unlikely, but not impossible given what loose cannons Odin’s children were), a civil war among the Skrull refugees on Earth (she dearly hoped not), a Ravager raid (some clans were dumb enough to go after worlds under Aesir protection). 

She was therefore very surprised to find Terran space as peaceful as it had been when she’d left it. The relay satellite she’d left in orbit to boost the signal from her pager was functioning normally. There were no signs of a recent space battle, nor could she detect any ships in orbit. Puzzled, she checked her communicator’s screen for details on the location of the pager signal. It was coming from an object traveling along Interstate Ten through Louisiana. 

So Nick wanted to meet clandestinely. Perhaps there was a problem with the Skrulls. 

Nick and Carol had both agreed it would be unwise to reveal her existence to the wider world unless it was absolutely necessary, so she took care to shift her photonic energy output into a pattern that would prevent her from being detected by any radio telescopes and other sensors that might be trained on her approach lane. Once she was satisfied with her self-made cloak, she entered the upper atmosphere, deliberately shifting her entry vector so that she’d make planetfall on the outermost edge of New Orleans. 

She wasn’t worried about witnesses. Her top atmospheric speed, while orders of magnitude slower than her acceleration in hard vacuum, was too fast for the human eye to perceive, and the veil of cosmic energy suffusing her body to facilitate her flight had the handy side-effect of swallowing and muffling up her sonic boom. Worst case scenario, some lucky soul in a neighboring state would see her at the top of her descent and mistake her for a meteor. 

In a fraction of a second, she went from the edge of the exosphere to the top of a forest canopy. She noted changes to New Orleans and the land around it as she approached the ground; the suburbs had expanded, and she could have sworn that the coastal wetlands had shrunken. 

In the next fraction of a second, she decelerated to a soft, momentum-defying landing on the forest floor and shut off the glow of her powers. She retracted her helmet and strode through the shadows cast by the moss-laden trees. A minute or two later, she found the edge of the woods, and there sat a house with a wraparound porch; her favorite house in the world. 

“Welcome back, Auntie,” said a voice that was at once familiar and strange. “You’re just in time for Christmas.” A young woman, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, got up from a swing bench hanging from the porch ceiling, set down her book, and sauntered down the back steps to the lawn. She was tall and slender, with dark brown skin just like her mother, dark eyes, and a short head of black hair that spun around itself in tight ringlets. 

Carol smiled. “Well, look who’s all grown up,” she said brightly as she approached Monica Rambeau. Inwardly, she cursed the circumstances that had prevented her from being there to watch Monica’s growth. She hadn’t been there for the moment when her best friend’s daughter outgrew the nickname “Lieutenant Trouble,” and assumed the shape she wore today. 

It’s for a good cause , Carol told herself. She had to believe that, or she would never be able to live with herself. She’d searched tirelessly for a new home for the Skrulls, but thus far failed to find a suitable planet. It didn’t help that she’d been sidetracked multiple times by flare-ups of conflict with the Kree and other interstellar powers. The scout team accompanying her on her travels professed to understand her ongoing failure, but she knew their patience had to be wearing thin. She needed to do better. After she finished with whatever Nick wanted from her. Assuming it’s worth the effort . 

If Nick had called her over nothing, she’d tell him exactly where he could shove it. 

Monica’s embrace pulled Carol out of her dark thoughts. 

“It’s good to see you, Monica,” Carol said, returning the hug. “How have you been?” 

They meandered back to the house, catching each other up on what they’d been up to since they’d last seen each other. It had been three years since Carol’s last visit, but it seemed that little had changed, save Monica herself. With college on the horizon, Monica had decided she wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become an airwoman, and she had already made inquiries into the process of joining ROTC. Her high grades and steely nerve had impressed the recruiters she’d spoken with, and Maria was supportive, despite clearly disliking the idea of her only daughter risking herself in such a dangerous career. 

One odd thing had happened, though. A month ago, the auroras of both poles had flared wildly and unnaturally, showing themselves in latitudes where they normally never appeared and shining brilliant, deep gold for several hours. The energy surges that accompanied the strange phenomenon had disrupted electronics worldwide, though there had been remarkably few deaths attirbuted to it. No cause for the so-called Golden Storm was ever pinpointed, which had led to wild speculation about secret government weapons programs, solar activity, and aliens. 

The back of Carol’s neck began to prickle. “Did any of the Skrulls know what was going on?” she asked. 

Monica shrugged. “Don’t know yet. I haven’t seen any of them since before the light show.” 

“Not even Talos and his family?” 

“They moved up to New York last year for work. Gi’ah wanted to stay, but Soren wouldn’t let her.” 

Carol was disturbed. Her homeworld was changing, as all things bound by linear time did, and she was missing out, just as she’d missed out during her years as an amnesiac Kree super soldier. She wished she could stay here for a while, fully reconnect with her roots, but she couldn’t. Duty called. It was pure dumb luck that the call had brought her back here. 

An hour later, Carol, sitting at the breakfast table with Monica, a hot latte in her hands, heard a car pull up to the driveway. A few minutes after that, Carol was joined at the table by Nick Fury and Maria Rambeau. A warm family reunion, it was not. They’d been brought together by necessity, not choice. The talk was all business, and the business was, as Carol anticipated, the Golden Storm. 

“Talos said he doesn’t know of any weapon, Kree or otherwise, that could have caused it, and I believe him,” said Nick over his black coffee. “But I still want your perspective.” 

Carol fixed him with a look. “You called me from the other side of the galaxy for my perspective?” 

“ Something lit up the poles and disrupted every electronic device on the planet simultaneously,” Nick said testily. “I can’t just ignore that, not when all the evidence says it wasn’t a natural event.” 

Point . “Honestly, there isn’t a lot I can tell you,” Carol admitted. “I don’t know of any weapon or force that could have caused an event like that, unless some cosmic entity decided to play a prank.” 

“Cosmic entities?” Maria said, clearly dubious. 

Carol nodded. “Yeah, those are a thing. Most of them only exist in myths and legends, but a few are real, known quantities.” 

A vein pulsed in Nick’s neck. “Go on.” 

As Carol began to speak, she wondered whether she was making a mistake in speaking up at all. Nick was a good guy in many ways, sincerely dedicated to protecting the world from anything that might threaten it, including itself. He didn’t have a self-interested bone in his body. Unfortunately, as the old saying went, the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Nick Fury, for all his good intentions, was a paranoid control freak willing to go to extremes to achieve his goals. 

Carol knew he genuinely sympathized with the Skrull refugees, but she also knew he had no qualms about taking advantage of their status to further his own goals by employing them as spies. In telling him the little she knew about cosmic entities like the Celestials and the Phoenix Force, she was giving him yet another threat to obsessively prepare for. 

Civilizations thousands of years ahead of Earth had tried to meddle with such entities, either to control them or destroy them, and failed every time. She’d never met a Celestial, but she’d seen what they did to those who provoked their wrath. It wasn’t pretty, and she said as much. Cosmic entities weren’t superbeings like her; they were more like forces of nature. Dangerous. Awe-inspiring. 

Unstoppable. 

If Nick didn’t take her warnings seriously, he might resort to even more extreme risks in the name of global security. Like messing with the Tesseract, which Carol was fairly certain contained an Infinity Stone. 

Too late to turn back now , she thought resignedly. 

When she finished, Nick visibly stamped down his alarm, no doubt to confront it at a later date, and began to tell her about the Avengers Initiative. Before he was done, Carol realized another alarming truth: Nick Fury, bless his heart, was utterly nuts. 

::::: 

Eight months after his arrival at Kamar-Taj, Harry had crossed three major milestones. First: he’d found reliable ways to adapt any spell from his old world to his new, Phoenix-infused magic, regulate the degree to which Phoenix Fire affected his spellwork, and even recombine the methodologies he grew up learning with those of Kamar-Taj and other organizations in his new reality. 

In addition to relearning powers native to his old reality, Harry worked on replicating the various powers developed by the Masters of the Mystic Arts. He learned to feel the fractal planes of the Mirror Dimension, omnipresent reflections of the real world that he could reach for and summon to create gateways. He also learned to warp reality within the Mirror Dimension into geometric patterns, folding or expanding space and matter to twist landscapes into mind-bending designs of his choosing. Most sorcerers could only do this on a limited scale, but Harry’s access to Phoenix Fire allowed him to perform manipulations as grand as the Ancient One’s Dark Dimension-fueled magic. 

It still wasn’t easy—every incantation from his old world took on new, deeper, more diverse meanings beyond those the spell creators had intended, which meant that they could each produce different or amplified effects. Furthermore, he had multiple options for aiming them. He could hurl spells as bolts of energy that took effect on impact, like arrows, or he could affect targets remotely by combining incantations with his telekinetic grip. The former was faster and easier to aim, while the latter offered more control upon contact, rendering offensive spells virtually unblockable once cast. Alternatively, he could send out his spells as diffusing waves, sacrificing precision and range for reliable coverage of his immediate vicinity. 

On the one hand, this increased his spell flexibility significantly. On the other hand, it took three times the work to properly master so many different expressions of magic. Between that, physical conditioning, studying arcane lore, and familiarizing himself with the geopolitical and historical landscape of his new reality, Harry barely had time to eat and sleep, let alone help Andromeda take care of Teddy. 

Christmas was a miserable affair, at the end of which he and Andromeda had vented their grief and anger by throwing fireballs and the worst curses she knew at an army of Death Eater-shaped target dummies. A few weeks after that, Harry learned an incantation that replicated the properties of a sling ring, allowing him to open interdimensional portals at will. 

Once he had that trick down, he was able to travel freely in and out of the Mirror Dimension without the Ancient One’s supervision, a privilege he took full advantage of to practice his spells. He experimented with astral projection, physical augmentation, healing, and spell-assisted martial arts. He found that while couldn’t directly channel the powers of extradimensional beings the way normal Kamar-Taj sorcerers did, he was able to replicate the effects of such invocations with varying degrees of success. He also learned to fly by telekinetically suspending himself in the air.

Take that, Riddle . 

Harry’s second milestone was not a leap in progress toward mastery of magic and the Phoenix Force, but a crucial decision regarding his long-term living conditions. Kamar-Taj had housed him and his family generously, but it was ultimately a hall of learning, and a martial one at that. It wasn’t a suitable place to raise a child or make a regular life. 

Thus, Andromeda had decided to move back to England, though not to her original home in Suffolk, but instead to the West Country, where Harry had been born. It was hard calling any part of the United Kingdom home when it was, in fact, a mirror image of Harry’s true place of origin, but referencing the semantics of it all even in his head was too much of a headache. 

Harry, for his part, had decided to keep living at Kamar-Taj for the foreseeable future, but he also planned to construct a series of safehouses around the world. He’d start with a simple cottage in Scotland, a practice run of sorts, and go from there. He knew it was paranoid of him to preemptively prepare bolt holes when he already had a safe space in Kamar-Taj, but he also knew that his safety was something of an illusion. If the Masters of the Mystic Arts decided that the Ancient One was wrong about the wisdom of training him, he’d need every advantage he could get. 

That brought Harry to his third milestone: interpersonal relationships. He knew better than to think that he’d ever have anyone like Ron and Hermione in his life again, but he couldn’t afford to become a complete shut-in. Thus, he’d allowed himself to bond with Wong, the only student who seemed to work as hard as he did, and developed a rapport with many of the senior masters, including the Sanctum Masters and the Ancient One’s Second, Karl Mordo. 

Out of everyone he’d met at Kamar-Taj, Harry found Mordo the most interesting. Mordo had a troubled past and, perhaps as a result, rather rigid ideas about what constituted appropriate use of magic. He was less concerned with dark magic, though, and more with the consequences of meddling with the higher mysteries, such as time and the soul, which Harry understood and could even respect. They’d broken the ice between them over the subject of Voldemort’s Horcruxes, trading over drinks all of the philosophical, practical, and logical arguments they had for why the objects had been such a terrible idea as well as insults to Voldemort’s name. It had been terribly therapeutic. 

Unfortunately, Mordo’s devotion to upholding natural law led to a flexibility problem. He couldn’t seem to decide how he felt about Harry’s status as a Phoenix host, whether he approved or disapproved of training and sheltering him. The Phoenix Force was supposed to be a reality-warping entity that primarily expressed its power through psionics. It had never in living memory bonded with a magic-wielding host, which was why mastering it was so complicated. According to all conventional wisdom, Harry was an aberration, an anomalous knot in the weave. Mordo didn’t like that and had made no secret of his opinion. 

Given his own limited knowledge and inexperience in interdimensional or cosmic matters, as well as what he’d learned about the Dark Phoenix, Harry couldn’t say Mordo’s reservations were unjustified. Even so, Mordo understood that he was a person and made an effort to treat him like one. Harry could not say the same about Master Kaecilius, who seemed to see the Phoenix and nothing else. 

A widower from Denmark who claimed to have come to Kamar-Taj in hopes of finding meaning in the loss of his wife and child, Kaecilius was eerily proud and remorselessly aggressive. He’d been on an extended assignment in the Amazon jungle when Harry first arrived at the compound. In the weeks since his return, he’d taken an unnerving interest in Harry’s development, insisting on serving as his martial arts instructor whenever possible and putting him through his paces with such punishing exactitude that their sparring matches felt more like fights to the death than training exercises. 

Like right now. 

Harry swept his left hand upward, silently casting a Shield Charm. The jet of orange light from Kaecilius splashed against it with a burst of sparks, causing the invisible barrier to ripple with fiery gold light. The pressure of the curse, whatever it was, forced Harry to take half a step back and brace himself with one foot, but he managed to flick his other hand in Kaecilius’s direction. 

The gesture caused a section of cobblestone courtyard several meters in front of him to explode unnaturally in a single direction, spraying Kaecilius with pebbles and dirt.

He blocked the rain of debris with a shield of concentric mandalas, which then burst in a flare of arcane sigils that turned the largest chunks into snarling black panthers. The big cats, five in total, fanned out in a pack formation that betrayed their artificial nature—real leopards were solitary hunters—while Kaecilius backed away with new mandalas in hand. 

With another flick of his right hand, Harry unleashed a Multi-Point Stunning Hex, each jet of fiery light erupting from a different finger. One of them struck a panther and knocked it out, but Kaecilius avoided the rest by diving sideways through a portal he opened to his left. The panther pack likewise leaped aside with unnatural speed and closed in. 

Harry apparated to the spot Kaecilius had vacated, just in time to see the patch of cobblestone he’d been standing on explode in a fountain of superheated rock. If that curse had hit home, he’d have lost his leg. 

Merlin’s pants , Harry thought. This is sparring, not a death match! He sent forth a bloom of fire, not hot enough to cause lethal damage, but enough to keep Kaecilius in the infirmary for the next week. Knowing Kaecilius would not be pinned for long by such a simple attack, Harry immediately flicked his fingers, switching from fire to a powerful Curse of the Bogies. The curse, concealed by the flames, shattered Kaecilius’s mandala shield, but dissipated in the process. 

Harry was prevented from following through by the panther pack, which leaped at him with their claws extended. With a thought, he slammed them straight down into the ground with bone-snapping force. 

Kaecilius used the distraction to conjure a miniature blizzard, which Harry initially blocked with a Shield Charm. As ice began to build up along the hazy barrier, he shoved out with his will and twisted, fashioning the mass of snow-laden wind into a white tornado that he hurled toward Kaecilius. 

Harry expected the older man to blast through the thing with brute force and prepared to open a portal to redirect the counter, whatever form it took, hoping to distract Kaecilius and leave him open to a flank attack. Instead, Kaecilius transfigured the ice tornado into a barrage of finger-length ice shards, each sharper than a sewing needle, that flew at Harry with blistering speed. 

Aggressive . 

If Harry wanted Kaecilius dead, he’d have simply powered through the ice shards with a large fire blast that would have kept going until it incinerated the other man. Kaecilius probably expected him to do that. Instead, he transfigured them into bubbles and slashed at the air with two fingers. The gesture left an arc of flames in its wake that rushed toward Kaecilius’s legs, forcing him to leap straight up. From midair, Kaecilius used another mandala to block Harry’s follow-up hex, then conjured a swarm of pursuing black swords and spears. 

Harry tried to redirect them with telekinesis, but found, to his surprise, that his mental feelers slipped off them as if he were trying to grasp a flobberworm with hands covered in grease. Kaecilius had conjured objects imbued with anti-psionic properties in the heat of combat using nothing more than standard eldritch ichor—Harry would have sensed it if he borrowed extradimensional power to enhance the spell—an understated but extremely impressive feat. 

And very unfortunate. Were it not for the reflexes drilled into him by thousands of hours of training and lived experience, Harry would have failed to react in time and become the world’s largest hedgehog. As it was, he barely managed to catch the swarm of weapons with a Momentum Reversal Hex that burst from his open palm like a grenade blast. They froze in midair for a fraction of a second, then flew hilts-first back the way they’d come. 

Kaecilius opened a gateway in their path, but Harry had expected that and opened a gateway of his own, predicting the correct position to place it by watching Kaecilius’s gaze. A few meters to his right, the swarm of bladed weapons emerged from Kaecilius’s portal and vanished into his own, which spat them out towards their conjurer’s right side. 

To his credit, Kaecilius reacted to Harry’s trick without missing a beat, stopping the conjured weapons before they could touch him with a mandala shield from his right hand while the left projected another that he hurled like a buzzsaw. 

Channeling a Finite spell through his fingers, Harry chopped at the mandala, shattering it into harmless sparks. He was raising his other hand to let loose a Full Body Bind Curse when the Ancient One’s voice called out “Stop.” 

Both men froze. Harry glanced at the Ancient One without moving his head. Her face was deceptively impassive, but there was a coldness in her eyes that matched her somber black robes. 

“Master Kaecilius,” she said, her voice harder than Harry had ever heard it. “Restrain yourself. My ability to undo any permanent damage through the Eye of Agamotto does not give you the license to use lethal force in a training exercise, particularly without the consent of your sparring partner.” 

Kaecilius didn’t look remotely abashed. “Ancient One, with all due respect, I believe that the Phoenix Host must be pushed to his limits and beyond if he is to do… whatever he is meant to do. Coddling him will only harm him in the long run.” 

“Coddling?” Harry said, more confused than upset. 

The look he got from the other man was all contempt. “You are talented, Phoenix Host, but you lack discipline. If you are to succeed, you must push yourself to the breaking point, as I have done. Instead, you seek the easy way out. You are weak! ” 

A memory flashed through Harry’s mind. A different man, a different context, but the same accusation, and from someone who didn’t even have the excuse of “teaching” him for nearly five years. He knew Kaecilius was deliberately goading him, but at that moment, he didn’t care. With a complicated sequence of finger gestures, he summoned the Mirror Dimension, pulling himself, the Ancient One, and Kaecilius into it. 

“You think I’m weak, Master Kaecilius?” Harry said, his voice deadly calm. “You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but you seem to think that my restraint is a bad thing. Would you rather I cut loose with the full power of the Phoenix Force and reduce everything around me to atoms?” 

“It is your right, Host.” Kaecilius never used Harry’s name, always referring to him as some variant of his title. “And one day, it will be your responsibility. Yet you hesitate to seize that power for yourself. Your fear will get people killed.” 

How many times had Harry heard the refrain? Hesitation gets people killed. Power means nothing if you don’t use it . Such platitudes, though grounded in sound logic, were the mantras of cowards. Weak people who thought themselves strong always looked for excuses to destroy threats, real or imagined, only to plead for leniency and restraint when they found themselves at the mercy of greater powers.

Kaecilius earnestly believed some of what he was saying, but there was a calculation in his eyes that said he knew his accusations were baseless. He wanted Harry to cut loose. Why? Surely the man didn’t want him to become a Dark Phoenix? 

No , Harry realized with chagrin. He wants me to show that I’m at high risk of becoming a Dark Phoenix. Then he’d have justification to call for me to be killed. That, or he’s genuinely stupid enough to think the best use of my power is conquest . 

Stupid people didn’t get very far at institutions like Kamar-Taj. Then again, intelligence and wisdom weren’t the same thing. 

Harry glanced at the Ancient One, who offered the tiniest shrug but said nothing. He was on his own, then. Two steps from chaos . “You want me to show you my power, Kaecilius? Fine. Here it is.” He brought his hands together and unleashed a column of brilliant yellow flames a full meter thick.

Kaecilius had no time to redirect the attack with a portal; the flames rushed toward him with such ferocious speed that he barely managed to form a mandala between them and his body. The flames sprayed out and around the shield, instantly reducing the cobblestones around it to blackened, molten lumps.

As much as Harry disliked the man, Kaecilius was right about one thing: he was afraid of his power. Very, very afraid.

He knew it was hypocritical of him, given what his aims were, but it was the truth.

Chapter Text

December 2002

The Ancient One’s private study in the highest tower of Kamar-Taj was a wonderful place to do research, and to sulk when said research led her in unproductive circles.

A smaller, windowless version of her audience chamber a level below, the room was furnished with a Victorian style executive desk that looked distinctly out of place next to the Tibetan meditation maze that covered most of the available floor space. A tall but narrow bookcase stood against a wall to the right of her desk, opposite a tiered wooden altar crowned by a small gong. The other tiers sprouted incense sticks, jugs of water, and boxes of acupuncture needles; everything a guru would need to lose him or herself in deep, deliberate thought. It was designed to be an oasis, deliberately isolating the occupant from the distractions of the outside world.

A place where the Sorcerer Supreme could find inner peace.

The Ancient One didn’t feel particularly peaceful at the moment. For the umpteenth time, she silently cursed the lack of information about the last time the Phoenix Force had appeared in the Nine Realms. After combing through her personal archives, the journals of dead sorcerers, and the notes of her predecessors, she had little more than a skeletal timeline.

It was far easier to trace the effects of the Phoenix Host’s actions than the details of her life. She’d done great good for many years, from healing old wounds to ending wars, only to disappear from known space. When she returned, it was as an emotionally self-destructing, murderous shadow of her former self. No one had ever found evidence of what had triggered the woman’s transformation into a Dark Phoenix. Regardless, her acts were well known.

Appearing in Shi’ar space, the Dark Phoenix had cut a bloody swathe through several inhabited systems, eventually devouring an entire star, then vanished. A few weeks later, a repeat performance occurred in contested Kree/Xandarian space. After consulting the Eye of Agamotto, the Sorcerer Supreme at the time had allied herself with Odin, Hela, and a few other notably powerful beings to confront the Dark Phoenix as it approached Alfheim.

The battle that elapsed then had shaken all of Yggdrasil like branches in a storm. It had cost the lives of the Sorcerer Supreme and the elven king of Alfheim, but in the end, the Dark Phoenix had been killed. Regrettably, the energy ripples from that battle had triggered a cascade of natural disasters across the Nine Realms; it was no coincidence that the year of the Dark Phoenix had also been the year of the birth of Christ.

Not there was any direct connection between the Abrahamic faiths and the Phoenix Force. Yahweh was a known quantity to the Masters of the Mystic Arts, and he wasn’t what his followers imagined him to be.

The Ancient One was at the end of her rope. No amount of scholarly research could fill in the gaps in her knowledge, and that scared her. Harry Potter was more than a host of the Phoenix. He was a wizard with intimate personal ties to death itself, a figure of prophecy who had killed an inhuman monster of a sorcerer, the heir to an entire magical culture. If he became a Dark Phoenix, she doubted he could be stopped by anything less than the combined power of all six Infinity Stones.

Whatever force or being responsible for driving the last Phoenix Host into darkness was almost certainly still out there. And until the Ancient One understood what the threat was, its mere existence put Harry at risk. She could not tolerate a mystery like that remaining unsolved.

There was still one vein of information left for her to tap: the witnesses. Everyone who’d participated in the battle and survived to tell the tale was biologically immortal and, as far as she knew, still alive. She’d already sent Odin a request for his and Hela’s account, though she knew better than to think they’d respond quickly. Asgardians had such a warped view of time…

Well, I’m hardly any different in that regard , the Ancient One reminded herself. Between the life-extending magic she’d been stealing from the Dark Dimension, the various time loops she’d participated in, the many battles where she’d slowed time around her, her occasional trips to different points on the timestream, and the countless possible futures she’d lived through via the Eye of Agamotto, she probably had as warped a perspective on temporal passage as a human could possibly have.

Impulsively, she transfigured one wall of her study into a mirror and examined her reflection. Without her robes, she wouldn’t have looked much like the centuries-old warrior-sage-sorceress she was. Her gray eyes were dark and abyssal in the soft lighting of her study, and aside from her slim eyebrows, she was as hairless as a cancer patient on chemotherapy. Her baldness was a deliberate choice inspired by an incident where a monster had clamped its jaws on her braid and nearly scalped her.

The Ancient One had survived many brushes with death in her long life; such was the nature of her position. As Sorcerer Supreme, she was destined to throw herself into danger on behalf of complete strangers over and over again, and to lose many dear friends as the years passed. It was a weight she’d chosen to carry because to do anything less would have doomed the world. A heavy burden on her spirit, but it was her burden, and if she were somehow sent back to the moment when she took it up, she would have made the same choice without hesitation.

That decision had sent her into mortal danger and horrible tragedy countless times. Beneath her robes and hidden by a glamor on the back of her head, the scars of those of battles to the death. Behind her eyes, a soul that had given away part of its own identity for extended life.

Had that sacrifice truly been worthwhile? She had thought so at the time. Harry Potter had sniffed out her hypocrisy as soon as they’d met. He’d summarized the logic of her actions better than he’d known.

To preserve the garden, the groundskeeper must spend much time with his hands buried in dirt . It was an obscure saying of a past Sorcerer Supreme, but the meaning was clear enough. After following that wisdom for so long, the Ancient One had begun to wonder; was she tracking dirt into the home, that place that was meant to always be a pristine sanctuary?

She wasn’t blind to the inner darkness of her students. She knew that Kaecilius, Lucian Aster, and others like them had the potential for great evil, but then, so did all of her students. But had she underestimated the risks of teaching them the Mystic Arts? Had she softened so much as to let compassion blind her to the obvious? Kaecilius’s fascination with Harry and the Phoenix wasn’t unique, but it was unusual, even disturbing, in its intensity.

Her train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door to her chamber. Transfiguring her mirror into a window that exposed the view of Kamar-Taj and its surroundings, she called, “Enter.”

The sliding doors disappeared into the walls, revealing Karl Mordo. He strode in and shut them behind him, then turned. His movements weren’t urgent, but they were too brusque to be casual. “We received a letter addressed to you from someone calling themselves Daedalus,” he said without preamble. “The man on mail duty expedited its security screening when he saw the seal and asked me to hand it to you personally.”

Curious, the Ancient One met her second in the middle of the study and accepted the letter from his calloused hand. She recognized the envelope as the very same she’d encased her original correspondence in, but it had a new wax seal emblazoned with a characteristic pattern of overlapping circles and elegantly curving lines. Celestial circuitry. Turning it over, she saw her own handwriting and, visible only to her eyes, the traces of the enchantment she’d used to ensure the letter found its way to the intended recipient.

“Thank you, Master Mordo,” she said. “I will inform you if I need any assistance.”

Recognizing the dismissal for what it was, Mordo left without prying. There was a chance he’d deduced the meaning of the new seal on the letter, but that was of little consequence. As her second, he would need to know everything she learned from her investigations at some point. For now, though, he would have to be patient with her, as he had been so many times in the decade they’d known each other.

Sitting behind her desk, the Ancient One turned the window she’d created earlier back into a solid wall, then tapped the letter with a small black knife imbued with a powerful opening spell. The wax seal popped off the yellowed envelope paper. When nothing else happened, she set the knife back in its drawer and pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope. It was the same paper where she’d written her original letter, but a new message had been written on the back side in a precise, blockish hand she’d seen only twice before.

Old One,

We were aware of the return of the Fiery One, but we had no details prior to your correspondence with us. I have spoken with Healer, and she has agreed that we need to discuss the matter face to face. Per your request, I will collect my family’s written testimonies about the Dark One and bring them to our meeting. I have also contacted our friend upstairs, and if we are fortunate, he will arrange for the Butcher to join us as well.

Though we went into retirement at the end of the last war, we all agreed long ago to come out of the woodwork and do our part again should the need arise. This situation qualifies.

We find your proposal to meet at the Crash Site during the next full moon acceptable and will make the necessary preparations.

Regards,

Daedalus

The Ancient One read and reread the letter, connecting the coded references it contained to what she knew about the sender and his associates. Once she had both the contents and the meaning committed to memory, she incinerated the letter and its envelope both with a burst of green Flames of the Faltine.

The Ancient One didn’t exactly feel lighter, but she was satisfied. Progress. It was slow progress, but it was better than nothing. “Better than nothing,” wasn’t a good standard to live by, but for now, it would have to be enough.

April 2003

The breeze that ruffled Harry’s hair was laden with moisture, heat, and the occasional dead leaf. Each breath through his nose brought with it a variety of scents—salt, plant life, fish oil—not all of them fresh. The smell of life was also the smell of decay. With no solid ground to stand on, he’d had to cast an Aguadurum charm on his boots so that he could walk on the surface of the water. Aside from his breathing, the lapping of the waves against the web-like networks of roots that supported the trees, and the occasional cry of some exotic bird, all was quiet.

In many respects, the mangrove forest looked like any other, but several key details betrayed its true nature. The trees were gigantic, their uppermost branches hanging over a hundred meters above the surface of the water. The water snaking its way through the maze of passages between them was the dark blue of the deep ocean rather than the teals and greens of a shallow, brackish channel. The leaves that shaded it, though green as any healthy Earth plant, were shot through with veins of bloody crimson that pulsed ever so slightly in a steady, unceasing rhythm.

Like a giant’s heartbeat.

From Harry’s perspective, the mangrove forest felt even more alien than it looked. If Kamar-Taj’s magic was a foreign language, the whispers of this place were inhuman. He felt the wariness of the water and the trees when he passed by, as if they desired to cringe away from his presence. He sensed his own body’s aversion to the air he breathed, a constant, heavy tugging. It wasn’t malevolent so much as reflexive. The stuff of this reality and his own body had no desire to share space, even for the short time necessary to complete his task.

But of course, that was the whole point.

As Harry rounded a tall cluster of roots, he sensed a malevolent shadow in the water behind him. With its size and power, to say nothing of the cold hostility it radiated, he was surprised he hadn’t sensed its presence earlier. It flowed toward him with shocking speed, ignoring the surge of panic he tried to drive into its mind with his telepathy. And flow was exactly the right word to describe it.

Harry apparated to the top of the nearest root, facing the way he’d come, just in time to see the water where he’d been standing erupt like a volcano. Tendrils of blue, green, and white froth shot skyward, braiding themselves into a single, massive, grotesque imitation of a merman. A crown of liquid horns topped a main of rapids that substituted for hair, which in turn splashed down over his ever-shifting chest, torso, and vaguely fishlike tail. His arms and torso sprouted huge spikes and plates of armor that churned as he reached for Harry with hands so large they could have used a horse as a stress toy.

Water demon , Harry thought. Not a demon that lives in water; a demon made of actual water . He’d read about them in preparation for this expedition, but that was completely different from actually encountering one. Even without active telepathy, one look at its huge, swirling, disturbingly human face gave him a glimpse of its thoughts. It wanted to drown him, to drag his body so deep under the surface his eardrums and the capillaries in his eyes burst from the pressure, to crush him to bloody pulp with its liquid muscles and dissolve his remains into organic compounds for daring to invade the patch of mangrove forest it had claimed for itself.

How cute.

With a swipe of his arm and a mentally recited incantation, Harry sent a bolt of yellow-white light into the water demon’s palm. Its entire hand and forearm burst into a cloud of minuscule droplets under the force of his Drought Charm, like mist from a sprinkler in the wind. The creature recoiled with a shriek that sounded like a combination of a dying elephant and a plunger unclogging a toilet. Harry’s second charm blew a massive hole in its chest, leaving a gaping void where its liquid pectoral had been.

Harry was disappointed with himself. The fact that he could do this much damage to a water demon with an incantation intended to vanish puddles was proof of how far he’d come and how much he’d changed. The fact that the water demon hadn’t been instantly vaporized by the spell was a sign of how far he still had to go.

The demon’s swirling face retracted with an odd sucking sound, as if it were taking a deep breath. Its humanoid head morphed into something resembling a bearded shark, and water surged up from the brackish channel below, giving it the surplus it needed to regenerate the mass Harry had blasted away.

Oh, no you don’t. Harry stabbed the air with two fingers of each hand, sending twin jets of light into the descending head and vaporizing it, along with a sizable chunk of its chest. His passive psychic feelers detected a surge of motion behind him, and he pivoted, swinging his right hand around to send another Drought Charm up into the giant, spiny fish’s tail of water that was trying to smash him from behind.

As his spell annihilated the tail, Harry turned back to face the demon’s humanoid upper torso. With the same motion he’d used to destroy its head, he sent another pair of twin spells into the base of the demon’s tail. The sudden loss of its lower body severed its connection to the only source of water it had to regenerate from.

Behind him, he sensed the remains of its destroyed tail splash down, a liquid puppet with its strings cut. Before the remainder of its humanoid body could do the same, Harry caught it with telekinesis, sculpting the living water against its will into a swirling sphere. He crushed it until it was completely pressurized in his grip, then gathered his energies to deliver one last, overpowered charm. The water demon’s malevolent consciousness faded as the sphere vanished in a flash of golden light.

Harry scanned his surroundings with his thoughts. The commotion had scared away other wildlife, including local demons. He would have to restart his hunt from the beginning. Irritated, he used his telekinesis to smooth the waters stirred into chaos by the fight, then leaped from the root he was standing on to another sprouting from a neighboring tree.

Ten minutes later, Harry found the trail of the quarry he’d come here to take. The task was almost frighteningly easy, even by his standards. Magic and psychic powers were useful sensory tools on their own. Together, they expanded his perceptions to a degree few could imagine.

Common wisdom held that the human body had five senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste—but in truth, the human brain kept track of many subtler things most people never thought about: the space the body occupied in a given environment, the position of limbs and the state of the muscles, the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream, the perception of up and down.  Even the Earth’s magnetic poles registered to human senses, if only barely.

As a wizard, Harry had a natural ability to sense deep truths about reality itself and the nature of objects or places he focused on. It wasn’t sight or sound, but it was analogous to both. He “saw” the auras and traces of the quasi-living energies that were magic, “heard” the voices of his surroundings and the vibrations that signaled their uniqueness. 

With the right spells, Harry could sharpen any of these senses beyond their natural limits, or expand their scope to take in frequencies and stimuli his body wasn’t built to detect. The psionics he derived from the Phoenix Force expanded his sensory envelope even further. Telekinesis alone allowed him to “feel” his surroundings without touching them, showing him exactly where everything around him was at all times. Telepathy was essentially a softer, more wide-reaching form of Legilimency, the enveloping hand instead of the stabbing sword. He could passively sense the thoughts and feelings of people around him, actively dive into their heads and view their memories, and manipulate minds even when he couldn’t see them.

More, the combination of telepathy and magic opened the doorway to other psychic abilities that blurred the lines between the two: clairvoyance, psychometry, precognition, dowsing. These psychic perceptions were highly limited in scope, yet reliable so long as he didn’t push them beyond their natural envelope. Put them all together, and there was very little that could hide from him. Sure enough, it took him less than an hour to find what he’d originally come here to hunt.

Resting in a channel beneath two enormous mangrove islands, the creature resembled a crocodile: the largest crocodile he’d ever seen. Its jaws alone were at least twenty feet long and studded with protruding teeth the size of Harry’s forearm. It was covered in greenish-black scales, and its slit-pupiled eyes shone sulfurous yellow. Though its lower body was concealed by the dark waters, Harry knew it had six stubby legs and a long, paddle-like tail powerful enough to snap the huge tree roots around it as easily as if they were matchsticks.

The giant not-crocodile was, fittingly, a cold spot to Harry’s senses, taking energy and thoughts in rather than emitting them. It was also the latest on his list of quarry. Since his arrival in this dimensional reality, he’d hunted in dense forests, open grasslands, and arid deserts. Once this kill was complete, he’d move on to the waves of an inland sea. In each biome, he’d claimed the lives of a variety of creatures, sharpening his powers and abilities by hunting the same kinds of monsters a Master of the Mystic Arts was expected to deal with.

To make the exercise as challenging as possible, Harry was forbidden from using direct telekinetic or telepathic attacks against his prey, which happened to be creatures with immense strength, resilience, and resistance to curses. It was almost as if he were hunting dragons from his home reality. But this wasn’t sport; this was a survival ritual. A true hunter did what he did out of necessity, taking no satisfaction from it other than the assurance that he was helping his community. A hunter treated his prey with solemn respect, showing it the only mercy his duty allowed by striking fast and true. The cleaner the kill, the better.

Harry wished he could harvest the creatures he was killing for potion ingredients, but it was impossible. The same alien energies that made it so uncomfortable for him to exist in this reality permeated the bodies of the native wildlife, rendering them toxic to humans and other lifeforms from Earth. Instead, the parts would be used to create and fuel enchanted relics, allowing sorcerers to channel extradimensional powers without making unsavory bargains with demons and other beings.

He’d been surprised to learn such things were necessary for their type of magic, and even more surprised to learn that they couldn’t passively maintain the enchantments on their strongholds—wards against eavesdropping, infiltration, and other forms of attack had to be periodically recast, unlike the self-sustaining protective spells used and taught at Hogwarts.

Harry studied the super-croc, trying to decide how best to take it down. His transfiguration wasn’t yet back to its pre-Phoenix levels, so conjured weapons were off the table. In this environment, the only objects he had to work with were trees and water. He supposed he could transfigure wood from the former into a spear, but he didn’t want to damage the forest if he could avoid it. Besides, the hunts were about more than replenishing Kamar-Taj’s supply of specialized weapons and relics. This was also a chance to practice unconventional uses of magic. The more creative his methods, the better.

He considered wrapping the croc’s head in water to drown it, then dismissed the idea. The croc could certainly hold its breath much longer than he could, and drowning hardly qualified as a merciful way to die. Most curses he knew were unlikely to achieve a quick kill on such a large, magic-resistant target, not unless he got a lucky shot straight into its eye and down its optic nerve. Fire? A big, bombastic blast of burning energy would annihilate many of the precious body parts and fluids he was supposed to collect. He supposed he could focus the flames into a more concentrated energy stream to burn straight through its brain, but that would be too easy. He needed to innovate instead of spamming the obvious tricks.

After a moment, Harry settled on good old-fashioned loophole abuse. He wasn’t supposed to directly grip, push, or pull his prey with telekinesis, but there were no rules about manipulating the target’s immediate surroundings.

Step one. Taking a deep breath, Harry dredged up his memories of a type of magic he almost never used, magic he barely understood even before bonding with the Phoenix, magic that he had simultaneously admired more than the Patronus Charm and feared more than the Unforgivable Curses.

Channeling magic through his voice box, Harry began to sing. His voice was soft and low, but it echoed with the power he laced into it. The lullaby he wove was not English, nor Latin, nor Sanskrit, nor any of the other standard spellcrafting languages. Instead, he sang a particular, obscure dialect of old Norse that had never been deciphered by muggles. It was a blended tongue born from the interactions between the ancient people of Scandinavia and the alien beings they’d deified, and that gave it power.

The nameless dialect had existed in his old world and possessed the same properties there, which had implications for the nature of the multiverse that Harry had no desire to explore. All that mattered was that the language, old and mysterious, was inherently tied to ancient magic. It invoked forces no other sorceries could summon and wove them into enchantments that could affect reality on a deeper, more fundamental level than any ordinary charm or transfiguration.

This was the language the founders of Hogwarts had used to construct and fortify the castle, the language Dumbledore had used to cast the Bond of Blood Charm, the language that Voldemort and others like him had used to split their souls and bind the pieces to Horcruxes.

Harry had no intention of doing anything so drastic here. He just needed a way to circumvent the ancient, enchantment-repelling power that nature had granted the creature before him. He sang of rest; so simple a thing, yet so difficult to find, and more difficult still to cling to.

Harry sang of relaxation, of sleep, of respite, of numbness. The ancient words felt awkward, but as he kept singing, they began to come with increasing ease. His voice slowly, steadily gained volume and strength, the flow of sorcerous words growing smoother. He projected the song toward the crocodile-like creature, watching intently as he focused his energies upon it with every bit of concentration he could muster.

He could not say how long he sang, or how many repetitions of the verses he went through. At first, the creature didn’t react. Then, the lid of its golden eyes began to droop. It resisted the song the way an offended infant would resist the rocking lullaby of a frazzled parent, but Harry was a stubborn bastard when he wanted something, and right now, he wanted the damned not-crocodile whose proper name he hadn’t bothered to memorize to sleep .

Finally, the eyes closed completely and didn’t open again. Harry kept singing for another verse to be absolutely sure, then let his voice trail off. When he stopped, he felt himself sag on his tree branch, his muscles as limp and useless as jelly. His throat was raw and sore, and he felt like he couldn’t get enough air. He’d never been known for his singing, and the oppressively alien air of this place hadn’t helped.

If Harry were being honest with himself, he hadn’t expected his gambit to work. But it had, and that was the important thing. He waited for another minute, both to let himself recover from the effort of channeling so much ancient magic and to wait for any signs that his prey would wake. It didn’t, even when he hit it on the back with a snowball he fashioned from the water below. It simply floated in the dark water, drifting slightly in the current.

Now or never . Extending his hands, Harry reached out with his thoughts, wrapping not around the croc creature itself, but the air and water that surrounded it. He gripped it as firmly as he could, but his feelers constantly slipped and let molecules through, like dry sand spilling from his fist. His telekinesis wasn’t precise enough for this task. Not yet. He’d have to supplement his efforts with a charm.

No, not a charm , he thought. The way I’m using it, this is a curse, pure and simple .

Fast as a snake striking, Harry spread his arms wide and cried, “ Aufervo! ”

It happened in a fraction of a millisecond. Every single molecule of air and water within a hundred feet of the croc creature fled from it suddenly and violently. The waters caved back into place with crashing force, sending huge waves out into the giant mangroves. Displaced air buffeted Harry so badly he nearly fell from his perch. For a single, infinitely brief moment, the creature hung in a void as empty as deep space.

His perceptions sped up to match the alacrity of his magic, Harry saw in slow motion the croc-creature’s body inflating as blood boiled in its veins and its lungs ruptured from the loss of pressure. A few old, dead scales, loosened in preparation for shedding, snapped off its hide like coins scattered from a dropped money bag.

Then the spell ended. Air and water rushed in to fill the void, even more violently then they’d fled to open it. The atmosphere sealed itself with a deep, echoing pop , and a fountain sprayed up around the croc creature’s body, catching it as gravity dragged it down.

Harry marveled silently at what he’d done. The Clearing Charm was designed to telekinetically banish physical objects from the target area to create an empty space. It was a household spell with few uses in dueling. He had found a new use for the incarnation. He’d removed everything the charm’s magic could touch, leaving only an organic lifeform in the center of a bubble of hard vacuum. He’d innovated a form of explosive magic more insidious than any seen or heard of before.

Appropriate for a cosmic trauma surgeon , he thought, slightly hysterically. He had promised himself that he would do whatever it took to master the Phoenix and the powers it granted him. Hunting magical creatures in alien realities was merely part of the process. He wasn’t about to stop because he was afraid of what lay at the of his chosen path.

Knowing that local wildlife and demons would be attracted to his kill, Harry leaped down from his perch and landed lightly on the water beside the carcass. A few hand gestures later, and they were both in the Mirror Dimension.

Even here, the alien reality balked at him. If anything, the less tangible nature of the Mirror Dimension made the hostile whispers louder and clearer. Together, they harmonized into a low moan. It reminded Harry of the hiss of food dropped into a vat of hot oil.

Ignoring the discomfort, he rewove the Mirror Dimension around him and cast a couple of charms. When he was finished, the croc-creature’s carcass lay atop a slab of room temperature, unmeltable ice that floated atop the expanded waterway between the giant mangroves. Satisfied, he pulled a long, enchanted knife from a sheath strapped to his belt and took a deep breath to prepare himself for the grisly next step: butchering his prize.

Having spent his adolescence chopping and measuring a variety of animal parts for potion ingredients, he was hardly squeamish, but as he’d discovered since his hunts began, there was quite a difference between handling organs already excised from the body and extracting them fresh. He cast a Bubble-Head Charm to shield himself from the smell, then got to work.

May 2004

Andromeda Tonks sipped her tea as she watched the horizon from the deck of her cottage. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds, casting the house and the lands around it in shadow. A breeze rose out of nowhere and filled the air with an unseasonable chill that reminded her of dementors.

Even in these dreary conditions, the estate was beautiful. A three-bedroom cottage that mixed the old, Victorian style of architecture favored by wizardkind with modern materials and design sensibilities. Andromeda and Harry had built it together on a stretch of partially wooded moor near the shore of a small, round lake. The back porch faced the lake, and it had quickly become Andromeda’s favorite place to sit with her afternoon tea.

Ten meters away, near the water’s edge, Harry and Teddy were playing a slow game of catch , floating a ball of gold light back and forth between them. Teddy, whose hair was its customary shade of electric blue today, had been fascinated with the radiant sphere from the moment Harry placed it in his little six-year-old hands. It took the little boy several fumbling attempts to master the trick of holding the light, which Harry had patiently coached him through. Her grandson’s godfather really was an excellent teacher.

Teddy’s obvious joy was reflected by Harry’s soft smile. The sight was at such odds with Harry’s usual attitude these days it gave Andromeda whiplash. As his new Phoenix powers had grown, the man had been forced to exercise ever greater control over himself and his emotions. The change had been subtle, but steady.

He meditated every day like his life depended on it and constantly pushed himself to hone his magic and develop new ways of using his abilities. In three years, he’d not only recovered most of his former powers, but gained new ones that would have impressed Dumbledore himself. While he still wore glasses, they were no longer a necessity, as he had learned how to sharpen his vision at will. The unhealing scars he’d accumulated fighting the dark arts had softened and begun to fade. Even without magic, his skin seemed to glow with health.

But for all that, Andromeda doubted Harry was happy.

Stoicism had never been his style in the past—not outside life or death scenarios, anyway—but he’d grown into the practice over time until it became his natural habit. He rarely laughed. He no longer cried or raged. He no longer sought one-night stands or dates, so far as she could determine. He didn’t even have any drinking buddies; he was growing more withdrawn by the day. There was a gravitas to his movements that hadn’t been there before, a grim confidence she’d seen in Aurors who’d seen more than their share of tragedy.

It was the look of a person who’d been thwarted too many times and would not handle it well if they failed again.

After a while, Harry ended his and Teddy’s game. With a flick of his hand, he transfigured the little ball of light they were playing with into a border collie, which Teddy eagerly started playing with. Joining Andromeda on the porch, Harry conjured a teacup of his own and poured from the pot she’d prepared without actually touching it.

Andromeda shook her head. “Do you ever do anything with your hands anymore?”

Harry shrugged. “Only when I’m hiding what I am from muggles. I use my hands for other things now, as you may recall.” Even Harry’s speech had changed. He almost always spoke in a monotone now, rarely allowing any emotion into his words.

“Honestly,” she huffed. “You’re worse than Dora on her seventeenth birthday. She tried to do everything by magic the second she woke up. Blew up my favorite teapot and put it back together just to prove she could and ended up putting the spout on backwards, nearly blew up the whole house.”

Harry snorted softly. Once upon a time, he’d have laughed openly at such a story. Andromeda couldn’t tell if it was grief, his new meditative practice to control his new powers, or a bad memory from a mission with the Masters of the Mystic Arts that had killed his ability to emote. She suspected the second, or possibly a combination of all three.

“I promise I won’t blow up the house,” Harry said, sipping his tea.

“That’s not the point. You’re setting a poor example for Teddy.”

“Come on, Andi, let me have my fun. I can’t get away with these shenanigans at Kamar-Taj or the Sanctums, you know.”

Andromeda sighed. “Fine. Be that way.” She set her empty teacup down on the table between them. “What kind of monster did the Ancient One send you after this time?” 

She was morbidly fascinated with the creatures and entities the Masters of the Mystic Arts fought. Much as she would have preferred Harry not involve himself with their activities, she couldn’t help but ask about them whenever he was willing to talk. So far, he’d taken down a variety of minor demons, a corrupted water dragon that could fly despite its lack of wings, a giant of living stone, a dinosaur-like creature that could emit intense heat and flames, horse-shaped monster that generated lethal thunderstorms around it, and a tentacled interdimensional beast called an abilisk. And those were just the ones he’d told her about.

Harry’s lips thinned before he answered. “The Jersey Devil.”

Andromeda frowned.  “That sounds… vaguely familiar. Where have I heard that name before?”

“It’s an American legend. The one from our world was a dark wizard’s experiment gone wrong that went around eating babies.”

“Ah. And this one?”

“Almost exactly the same thing. A dark creature that appears in the Pine Barrens, drinks from a cursed lake called the Blue Hole, and terrorizes the locals. Nasty thing, eats kids. Every time it’s killed, a new one shows up to replace it. Each one has slightly different weaknesses from the previous ones, so it’s a right trick figuring out how to kill it.”

Andromeda’s frown deepened. “And there’s no method of preventing this… resurrection?”

Harry sipped his tea and blew out his breath, igniting it like dragon breath and swirling the resulting gout of fire with a finger. “Practitioners from all over the world have been trying to do that for centuries. The Ancient One was hoping my bond with the Phoenix would give me some insight.”

“Did it?”

“No.” Harry took a big gulp of hot tea. A normal person, even a powerful wizard, would have blistered their tongue and throat, but he didn’t seem bothered at all.

Andromeda doubted he even felt it. “How long before its replacement shows up?”

Harry shrugged. “Depends. Years, maybe even decades if we’re lucky. Weeks or months if we’re not.”

“So, with your luck,” Andromeda said dryly, “tomorrow?”

A twitch of the lips. The slightest quirk of an eyebrow. “Even if it does, someone else gets to deal with it. The Ancient One herself wouldn’t ask me to leave Teddy alone unless the world was ending.”

“Shall I prepare another emergency survival trunk, then?”

Now Harry did chuckle. A minor victory, achieved by striking at his fondness for gallows humor. “I doubt our luck runs that bad,” he said. “So if you’re looking for excuses not to go on vacation, you’ll have to try harder.”

“I’m not thick enough to decline a chance for leisure,” Andromeda said dryly. “Merlin knows I don’t get enough of it these days.” And neither do you , she added silently.

They knew each other well enough that Harry didn’t need Legilimency to know what she was thinking, but he wisely refrained from speaking to it.

A couple of hours later, the two of them prepared dinner together. Teddy had changed his hair and eyes to match Harry’s and adopted a puppy-like expression to ask for an extra helping of dessert, but Andromeda put her foot down. Harry would have plenty of time to spoil the boy after she was gone. Teddy was due to wake up at the crack of dawn for school on the morrow, so he said a slightly hesitant goodbye before allowing himself to be ushered to bed.

An hour after that, Andromeda stood in the foyer, clutching the handle of a magically expanded carry-on bag in one hand, a small purse hanging from her opposite shoulder. Harry leaned against the wall opposite her. He played with a blob of water by twisting it into various shapes of increasing complexity with minute twitches of his fingers: a bird taking flight, a three-dimensional star with a dozen points, a horned serpent winding around itself, a three-headed man with four arms that each clutched a liquid sword, a spiderweb.

Andromeda shook her head. “Do you ever stop practicing?”

Harry shrugged as he shaped his water blob into the snarling-faced, snake-haired head of a gorgon.

“Not really. And I can’t afford to either. I owe it to everyone we lost to make sure that I never let this world down.”

“And you don’t think you’re letting yourself down?” Andromeda asked softly. “You may have an obligation to the world, but you also have an obligation to yourself. You are allowed to—what’s the phrase—take a pause for the cause.”

“Am I?” Harry asked. The gorgon head became a human figure, naked save for the ropes binding its wrists and ankles together. The liquid mannequin stretched unnaturally so that its hands and feet touched behind its back, forming a near-perfect loop of contorted limbs, almost like a bracelet. The figure’s face looked vaguely familiar, and it seemed to be crying.

“Yes, you are,” Andromeda said a bit sharply. “And I know you know that.”

Harry gave a ghost of his old, crooked smile. The horrible water sculpture melted into a stream of liquid that snaked upward into his mouth. He swallowed it and said, “I know, Andi. I do. But…”

Andromeda took a step toward him, but he held up a hand to stop her. He never did that before the Phoenix.

“Until I master this power, I’m a danger to everyone around me. Even Teddy.”

“So, you’re making yourself less of a danger by training to become more deadly?”

A laugh, a guffaw really, escaped from Harry’s mouth. “Well, when you put it like that…” He continued to giggle for a long moment until the wall paintings and rugs decorating the room began to rattle and twitch. Once he had control of himself, he said, “The goal of the training is to attain mastery of the self. And this power is a part of me. Even if I somehow severed my bond with the Phoenix Force right now, it wouldn’t undo the changes I’ve undergone. It changed my magic, changed me . I’m just trying to make the most of it.”

Andromeda hesitated. He had a point, especially considering the side effects of his outburst. “As long as you remember your humanity…”

Harry’s expression hardened. “I’ll never forget.”

She nodded slowly. “Very well.” Turning away, she opened the front door and strode outside, dragging her bag behind her. The wards on the cottage made it impossible to open a portal inside, and while the sling ring gifted to her by the Ancient One was keyed into the scheme of protective enchantments, that only meant that she could open portals to and from the grounds.

She examined herself one last time, taking her outfit and belongings in with a long downward glance. It felt strange to go out in a muggle skirt and blouse that made her look even more like the grandmother she was, but the cut of the clothes was admittedly more comfortable than her old wizarding robes. Turning, she saw Harry watching her from the front door, backlit by the foyer chandelier. She could barely make out his shadowed face.

“You will take a vacation of your own one day, Harry Potter,” Andromeda said. “Even if I have to drag you into it by the ear. Understand?”

He nodded. “Yes, Andi.”

“Good.” She turned away and raised her free hand, where her sling ring rested. She was used to apparition, but the convenience of the ring was too great to pass up. A swirl of her fingers, and a circular gateway of orange-gold sparks appeared before her, like a ring of fire. On the other side, daylight revealed the twilit Bavarian town of Schwangau, overlooked by the castle she knew was called Neutschwanstein.

“Goodbye, Andi,” Harry called from behind her. “Enjoy your trip.”

She turned back just long enough to reply in kind before forcing herself to step through into crisp mountain air. They’ll be alright , she reminded herself as the gateway fizzled shut behind her. Taking her eyes off her grandson for a while wouldn’t end with him being murdered by her own sister. That war, at least, was over and done with.

Chapter Text

“My Lord,” said a soft, almost mellifluous voice.

Thanos did not open his eyes immediately. Ebony Maw knew better than to interrupt his meditations unless absolutely necessary, but his wizened child had been away from Sanctuary for several weeks. He would not have returned without the prize he’d been tasked with retrieving.

“You have the creature.”

“Here, Sire. It is my honor to humbly present it to you. Let it propel you closer to your inevitable final victory, as all that your eye falls upon must.”

Maw’s grandstanding and heraldic proclamations could be gratifying or irritating, depending on the circumstances. On the one hand, the countless beings Thanos had culled from the universe were necessary sacrifices for the greater good, and therefore innocent of any wrongdoing. They deserved what reassurance they could get before their inevitable end. But when there was no audience outside the Black Order itself to preach to, irritation won out. Then again, Maw’s record spoke for itself; he had earned the right to be irritating. A little irritating.

Thanos opened his eyes and contemplated the Sanctuary. The asteroid field was not a natural formation, but rather a megastructure created and held together by gravitic tractor beams. It formed a massive ring, complete with an artificial atmosphere, around a lonely, undersized gas giant. The rocks themselves, riddled with mines, factories, hydroponic farms, and other facilities, were the remains of the system’s destroyed planets, moons, and dwarf planets. A new life, forged from the inevitable necessity of death.

Long ago, this solar system, located in the heart of a nebula that was constantly birthing new stars, had been the birthplace of the Chitauri civilization. Masters of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and cybernetics, they had created a highly stratified society with castes of engineers, warriors, and living warcraft, each so distinct as to practically be its own species. Their bionic hive mind was not so all-consuming as to reduce its members to non-sentient drones, but neither could any of the reptilian cyborgs exist independently of the collective.

But where other species that adopted such societal structures did so to give the ruling class greater control over the masses whose labor sustained them, the Chitauri had devoted everything they had to warfare. The non-warrior castes existed only to serve the soldiers and their endless thirst for conquest, which suited Thanos’s purposes just fine.

He turned his throne around and looked down upon his greatest servant.

Maw stood proudly in the center of the audience platform below, his black tunic hanging as still as death from his narrow shoulders. Beside him floated a spherical cage of translucent blue energy, sparkling like a bubble made of tiny stars. It was just large enough to contain a being of comparable stature to Thanos himself, and it held something black and shapeless that undulated and stretched seemingly at random. The prisoner looked more like a hole in the fabric of reality than a living creature.

Thanos frowned. “I expected it to be larger.”

Maw was unphased. “It is, in its true form. I was forced to cut away much of its constituent matter to capture it. It will regain its strength quickly once released from containment.

Thanos nodded. “Other, bring me the Scepter. And summon my two younger daughters.”

The Other, a silent figure waiting in the shadows behind Maw, lowered the steeple he’d made of his pale, seven-fingered hands and bowed. When he turned and left, he did not appear to walk so much as slide along the ground, as smooth as an avian gliding on a thermal.

Maw levitated the cage holding his prize to the center of the black stone platform and moved to stand near Thanos’s left. Neither of them spoke; Maw’s mission report could wait.

In the distance, a Leviathan roared. The Other returned a moment later with the Scepter.

Thanos extended a hand as the Other approached, summoning the Scepter to his palm through the connection he’d forged with it on taking control of the Chitauri. As it touched his skin, the golden rod and its wicked blade expanded into a spear-like form appropriate to his stature. Getting to his feet, he stepped down from his floating throne and approached the cage of solid light that held his newest acquisition.

It would have been better to adopt such a being as one of his children, making it a full member of the Black Order, but alas, that wasn’t possible. Normal symbiotes were simply too innocent, too reliant on their hosts to tell them who they were, and spectacularly unstable to boot. A superior specimen such as this would be even less trustworthy. Fortunately, he didn’t need the creature’s genuine loyalty, only its cooperation, and the Scepter was more than enough to guarantee that.

A tiny hole opened in the energy cage as the Scepter’s tip neared, and the Symbiote darted for it with such speed a lesser being wouldn’t have seen it move. The black, fluid mass slammed into the tip of the spear just as it began to glow blue. The force of the impact surprised Thanos, even knowing what the creature was, and he braced his feet against the ground. Blue light flowed down the Scepter’s blade and danced through the living darkness, causing it to recoil. The cage dissolved, dropping it to the ground. Thanos watched, impassive, as the light faded, impregnating the thrashing Symbiote and, to his mild surprise, turning its solid darkness blue-black.

Interesting.

“Father,” said a female voice.

Thanos looked up, locked eyes with the speaker, and smiled.

One of Harry’s favorite things about magic as practiced by the Ancient One and her disciples was the sling ring portals he’d learned to recreate. They afforded all the convenience of apparition without the discomfort or distance limitations, which he took full advantage of when he wanted to treat himself, as he was doing now by having a solo picnic in the isolated heart of the Himalayas while he waited for the Ancient One’s contact. He had portaled to Lebanon and purchased fresh manoushe from a hole-in-the-wall bakery Mordo introduced him to. The folded, pizza-like flatbread—this one topped with olive oil, zaatar, and cheese—was supposed to be a breakfast food, but the time difference meant that his picnic was more of a brunch.

Popping the last bite of manoushe into his mouth, he cleansed his hands and mouth with a Scourgify and got to his feet, vanishing the cushion and blanket he’d been sitting on. Sauntering to a shelf-like boulder protruding from the shrub-covered ridge, he sat upon it in a cross-legged meditation posture and let his gaze soften as he stared into space. He was grateful for the view of the valley; though he’d long since grown used to meditating, the ascetic practice of staring at a blank wall for hours at a time, days on end, had pushed the limits of his sanity.

He estimated that perhaps a quarter-hour had passed when he sensed a surge of buzzing energy. Turning his head, he saw out of the corner of his eye a bubble of cerulean light collapsing inward to reveal the figure of a tall man dressed in a khaki business suit. He had pale skin and ash-blonde hair, but his most striking feature was his eyes. Or rather, his lack of them; where his eyes should have been, there was only smooth, unblemished skin with no trace of eye sockets underneath.

Harry didn’t blink. He’d been told what to expect, and he’d seen stranger things in any case. Getting to his feet, he extended his hand. “You must be Gordon,” he said.

“The one and only,” the eyeless man said, shaking Harry’s hand as easily as any ordinary man would have. Eyeless he was, but blind, he was not. He was relatively young, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, but he carried himself in a way that made him seem older. “You’re the one the Ancient One assigned to help us?”

Harry nodded. “She wouldn’t say why, except that my particular talents would be helpful.”

“Let’s hope so,” Gordon said. “I’ll take you to Afterlife.”

Had Harry not already known the name of the sanctuary for Inhumans, he might have taken the statement as a threat. As it was, he rolled his eyes—and he’d thought wizards had bizarrely dramatic naming conventions—and took Gordon’s proffered hand once more. The eyeless Inhuman’s teleportation was unlike any form of instant transport Harry had experienced. A wall of blue light expanded from Gordon’s body, enveloping the two of them with a sensation like static electricity. Instinctively, Harry knew that the moment the barrier stopped expanding, it would become as impenetrable as the fabric of spacetime itself, but only for the brief time Gordon could sustain it before it collapsed and sent him to his destination.

When the light and static released him, Harry found himself looking down on a new valley. He knew this place was also in the Himalayas, straddling the border between Nepal and Chinese Tibet, but the altitude was much lower, permitting the growth of lush trees and shrubbery. Scattered among the vegetation was a collection of Chinese-style buildings painted deep black and bright scarlet, connected by gently winding footpads of cobblestone smoothed by the passage of countless feet. Flowers bloomed among statues of lions and serpentine dragons.

Gordon led the way down the winding paths, which felt more like garden trails than the village streets they were, to a large building that reminded Harry of the structures that crowned the uppermost tier of Kamar-Taj.

Jiaying greeted him inside. An attractive, relatively tall woman of Han Chinese descent, she looked somewhere in her mid-thirties, but Harry knew from his mission briefing that she’d been alive for at least 200 years thanks to volunteers from the Inhuman community she led; volunteers who willingly sacrificed themselves to her life-draining abilities. In exchange, she functioned as an Elder for the Inhumans; her primary role was to ensure the safety of Afterlife, though she occasionally taught Inhumans who had undergone Terrigenesis to control their powers.

What, Harry wondered, could injure a life-draining regenerator badly enough to leave scars like that? Distinctive though it was, the lightning bolt on his forehead was the remnant of a single injury, and a small one at that. Jiaying’s face resembled Bill after he’d been mauled by Fenrir Greyback.

“You must be Master Potter,” she said politely.

He inclined his head slightly. “At your service. I hear you need me to find someone?”

“Yes. Sit down, please, and let me tell you about the Belyakovs.”

Not once during their conversation did Harry pick up a lie from Jiaying, and yet the longer they talked, the less he liked her. On the surface, she seemed like a caring, matriarchal figure who would do anything for her people. Harry could respect that, expected it, even, given her age and position. What bothered him was how… cold Jiaying seemed. The way she spoke, her body language, the micro-tells that only someone with his psionic senses could detect, told him she was concerned with Inhumans… and only Inhumans. She wasn’t worried about innocents getting hurt or killed by the Belyakovs; she was worried their actions would expose her little sanctuary to the wider world.

“Do you have something that belongs to either of the Belyakovs?” Harry asked. “A keepsake, a piece of clothing? It’ll make it easier for me to track them.”

“They left some stuff behind here in Afterlife before they fled,” Gordon said. He’d been standing quietly off to one side like a bodyguard. “I’ll get it for you.”

“Thank you,” Harry said.

As Gordon vanished in a cavitation bubble of blue light, Harry turned back to Jiaying. “Can I ask you something personal?”

Jiaying narrowed her eyes. “I can’t stop you from asking me anything, but whether I answer your question is another matter.”

Her frosty tone rolled off Harry. “Is the person who gave you those scars still alive?”

Jiaying’s head snapped back in authentic surprise. “How do you know it wasn’t an accident or an animal attack?”

“I know how your regeneration works. The kind of injuries required to inflict permanent scars on someone with your powers would have to be… horrific. And deliberate. And chances are, that person was specifically after your immortality.”

“And?”

“And I have a vested interest in making sure whoever is responsible can’t hurt anyone else. I have… issues with psychotic would-be immortals.”

Jiaying pressed her lips together. “What makes you think I know anything about this hypothetical immortality thief?”

“A hunch,” Harry admitted. “And no offense, but your reaction confirmed my theory. I don’t expect you to confide in me; your trauma is your own. Just tell me who I need to hunt down.”

She hesitated, but not for long. “Someone called him Reinhardt when I was in his… care. These days, he calls himself Daniel Whitehall. He’s a scientist with some kind of covert paramilitary group. He’s almost impossible to track, he’s obsessed with superhumans, and he’s a monster who leaves trails of bodies in his wake. That’s all I know.”

A hazy, pain-blurred image flowed to the top of Jiaying’s thoughts, pinging like a blip on a radar screen even without direct telepathic contact.

Harry nodded. “Thank you.”

Gordon flashed back into the room, now burdened with a gray plastic bin he had to have pulled from a storage building elsewhere in Afterlife.

With a gesture of his left hand, Harry gently summoned the bin from Gordon’s arms and set it to float in front of him. Getting to his feet, he riffled through the contents of the bin—various items of women’s clothing, a bottle of red nail polish, a slender belt—without touching any of it, searching for something that resonated with emotional energy. Finally, he settled on a worn, child-sized scarf embroidered with butterflies. Crooking a finger, he pulled the scarf from the bin and wrapped it around itself like a scroll.

“ Avensegium,” he incanted with another wave of his hand. The scarf twitched feebly in response to the charm, but hovered unsupported in the air when he released it from his direct control.

“Is that enough?” Jiaying asked, clearly skeptical.

“Enough to find them? Yes. Enough to instantly open a portal to their location from anywhere in the world? Not so much.”

“That’s a lot better than we’ve got,” Gordon muttered.

“Be careful,” Jiaying cautioned. “If Katya has undergone terrigenesis, there’s no telling how powerful she is, or what the transformation has done to her mental state. Terrigenesis is hard enough on adults, never mind a little girl.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Harry assured, opening a portal back to his mountaintop picnic spot.

“Master Potter?” Jiaying said as he lifted his foot to step through.

He swung his head around to look at her.

“Good luck.” Another hazy image pinged from the top of her mind: a cold, utterly emotionless voice, speaking softly through a veil of anguished numbness that rendered the words unintelligible. A vague sense that something vital was missing.

Harry nodded in acknowledgment and departed through the portal.

From atop his mountain, Harry recast the Seeking Charm on Katya Belyakov’s scarf, then followed it up with a variant of the Point Me spell. The combination caused the scarf to unroll itself in the direction of his quarry, undulating once fully unfurled as if to emphasize the point.

Satisfied, Harry Disillusioned the scarf and released it from his telekinetic grip without undoing his tracking spells. It shot off into the west like a bullet, too fast and too well-camouflaged for ordinary sensors to detect. He tracked it with his thoughts for a while, then took off in pursuit, using telekinetic levitation to fly at speeds that threatened to break the sound barrier. After an hour of soaring west, Harry accelerated to catch up with the scarf and caught it in his hand. Taking a gamble, he opened a portal to an isolated stretch of beach on the Caspian Sea. The scarf darted through as soon as he released it, waited for him on the other side until he stepped through after it, then shot southward once the gateway closed.

Repeating the process, he narrowed the location of Katya Belyakoff to the Middle East, then the Persian Gulf, and, finally, Bahrain. Harry hovered high in the sky under a Disillusionment Charm, staring down at the island in confusion. Why in the name of Morgana’s bastard children would the Belyakovs come to Bahrain, of all places?  

A question for later, he decided. Stowing the scarf in his personal pocket dimension, he apparated to a point only a few meters above the surface of the Persian Gulf. His ears would have popped with the sudden change in air pressure if not for the charms anchored to the phoenix pendant that had once been his wand, which passively maintained a thin layer of atmosphere around his body at just the right pressure, heat, and composition to keep him alive, if not necessarily comfortable, no matter where he went. Still Disillusioned, he cast several additional layers of concealment spells on himself: Technus Obscuro to hide him from cameras and scanning technology, Ignorium to psionically discourage people from noticing his presence, Eradomise to erase his DNA, fingerprints, and other traces of his passage, and Silencio to silence his footsteps and breathing.

Apparating once more, this time to the flat rooftop of a high-rise apartment overlooking the gulf, he summoned the scarf again, taking care to keep it within his envelope of stealth spells, and cast the Tracking Charm once more. This time, the scarf flew off at a much more sedate pace. He followed it through the streets of Bahrain, heedless of the oppressive midday heat, until he found himself hovering over the umbrella-covered outdoor seating area of a street-side cafe.

Settling on a rooftop, he stowed the scarf and reached out with his thoughts, searching for the mind that felt most like the residue he’d been tracking. To his surprise, the presence he sought wasn’t contained within a single body like a normal mind, nor did it bloom out from its root like a flower the way a telepath’s mind would. Instead, the impression he got was of a spiderweb. Nearly three dozen people were part of the web, all of them in great pain, and at its heart was a mind so tormented and confused it made him sick to his stomach.

Was that Katya’s power? Parasitic telepathy?

He got his answer when he sensed another mind join the web. Looking down, he saw the dark-haired little girl dart away from a man in the street; a man whose mind had become an extension of the girl herself. He probed deeper.

If it were possible to use legilimency on a dementor, it would probably feel like this. The mindscape he waded through was a dark, ugly place, filled with shards of memories and torn flesh, held together by spellotape and a constant influx of exquisite agony. Every step was a journey through an entire world of a living puppet’s anguish, and through it all, a little girl’s voice chanted the endless refrain: “Give me your pain.”

Give me your pain. Give me your pain.

GIVE ME YOUR PAIN.  

Harry yanked himself free with a gasp, heart pounding.

Katya had indeed gone through the mists, and her mind had shattered under the pressure. The faults along which she’d broken were natural gaps common for children her age, gaps that could only be filled by lived experience, and her subconscious self had reassembled the pieces into an imperfect imitation of the original. Cursed with the ability to shape the perceptions and feelings of those she touched, she was hopelessly addicted to the pain of her thralls. Pain was the glue she used to hold the pieces of herself together because it was the last sensation her untransformed self had experienced. Emotional or physical, it didn’t matter; the only thing that mattered was anguish and where she could get it. The people she enslaved weren’t minions to her so much as livestock.

The addiction, born the moment she acquired her powers, exacerbated the initial damage her transformation had caused to her youthful brain. As she got older, her mind would warp and twist even further, much like how a chunk of shrapnel would ruin any muscle tissue that healed around it.

Harry tried to imagine a scenario where Katya could be rehabilitated, but he couldn’t. No one that young and unstable could hope to overcome such an esoteric addiction, and she was too dangerous to be allowed to go free. Take away her powers, and she’d experience a crash and withdrawal every bit as severe as that of a meth addict coming down from an overdose. Worse, her Inhuman biology would rebel at the loss of the abilities it was designed to provide, making her life a permanent misery even if she recovered.

There would be no happy ending for her.

Harry scanned the street again, avoiding the minds of those trapped in Katya’s agonizing web when he identified them. What he found was a squadron of SHIELD agents preparing to negotiate with Eva Belyakov. He probed one of them a little deeper and felt his heart sink at what he found. Somehow, SHIELD had caught wind of Eva’s enhanced strength and believed her to be on the run from gangsters. They knew nothing about Inhumans or Katya’s insidious powers. Their intentions weren’t hostile— quite the opposite—but if Harry allowed them to proceed as planned, someone was going to die.

Well, he thought, I was going to have to introduce myself to this lot at some point anyway. Now’s as good a time as any to make an impression .

The thought had barely crossed his mind when Eva—puppeteered by Katya—kicked a table hard enough to send it flying sky-high. Harry redirected its trajectory to keep it from landing on a crowd of pedestrians in a neighboring street, and as he did so, he caught sight of a figure on the rooftop across from him. It was a man, tall and handsome with a white streak in his dark hair, and he was staring directly at Harry.

So startled was he by the stranger’s apparent ability to see through his stealth spells that Harry momentarily forgot about his mission and the commotion in the street. He watched the man warily, hands twitching with the instinctive urge to cast a flurry of incapacitating spells even as he scanned his surroundings for more watchers. He found none, which would have worried him more had he not found the stranger’s presence right where it was supposed to be.

Had the man just appeared and instantly seen through Harry’s cloaking?

Abruptly, the watcher vanished in a flicker of gold. His mind very nearly vanished from Harry’s awareness too, shrinking to the size of a mote of dust. It was an advanced mind-concealing technique, the kind only an experienced telepath could perform; had Harry not already been aware of the man’s presence, he would not have been able to find him while he employed it. As it was, Harry had to focus just to track the presence as it retreated across its rooftop and down into the maze of alleyways separating the buildings.

Harry considered pursuing, but not for long. He had a mission here, and the stranger, though alarming, wasn’t a threat to that mission. Not yet, anyway. The man didn’t seem to be one of Katya’s thralls, at least, but if he was, Harry would deal with him eventually.

Scanning the street again, Harry felt the SHIELD strike team preparing to storm the building Katya’s thralls had retreated into. That could not be allowed. He apparated to the top of Katya’s building and slapped the roof with one hand, using the maneuver to deliver a powerful variant of the Colloportus charm. 

For an instant, a faint amber haze, barely visible in the glare of the sun, enveloped the entire building. Then, every window and exterior door of the structure locked itself with a squelch of magic, sealing themselves so tightly shut that no handheld tool, be it key or lock pick, crowbar or battering ram, could open them. Someone on street level swore, but otherwise, there was no bystander reaction.

He considered scouting the building with his astral body, but with a stranger who could pierce his stealth spells and hide from telepathy wandering around, he decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Instead, he used a Homenum Revelio to pinpoint the exact locations of everyone in the building. Finding the upper levels mostly empty, he sauntered to the roof access door, blasted it open with his thoughts, and hurled it down the stairs beyond, deliberately making as much noise as possible.

As he descended the staircase beyond, he dispelled all of his stealth charms save the Evidence Eraser and replaced them with an Identity Obfuscation Charm, a spell he himself had created by combining the principles behind the Obfuscation Charm of his old world with the disguise spells the Masters of the Mystic Arts used to conceal their identities. His scar vanished, his green eyes turned pale blue, his thick black hair thinned and lightened to brown, his jawline lowered and jutted a couple of millimeters, and the angle of his eyebrows steepened. Individually, the changes did little to disguise him, but together, they made him unrecognizable.

At the bottom of the stairwell, he found a dingy room stuffed with dusty wooden crates, piles of ancient furniture, and myriad pieces of junk that had found their way to this place from who knew where. The broken roof access door looked as at home among the rubbish as a pillow on a bed.

A door at the far end of the room burst open, and three men, all of them thralls, charged in with pistols and knives in hand. The narrowness of the door frame forced them to enter single file, so Harry grabbed them one by one with his thoughts as they entered and suspended them near the wall dividing the storage room from the rest of the building. Once he had all three floating helplessly in place, he transfigured their weapons into rag dolls and knocked them out with Stunning Spells.

Moving quickly, he made his way out of the abandoned top-floor apartment and floated down the stairwell. Skipping the empty level immediately below, he found four thralls armed with pistols rushing up the stairs. He waited for them to catch sight of him and begin to bring their weapons to bear, then apparated to a landing behind and below them.

His first gesture turned the guns into water pistols better suited to a day at the pool than a shootout. His second dragged the thralls over railings and down the stairs to the landing in front of him. His third Stunned the lot of them.

Sensing motion below, Harry pivoted to look down the stairs leading to the next level and softened the landing with a Cushioning Charm. He allowed the trio of armed men to race up the stairs toward him, stopping their bullets with a Shield Charm, then telekinetically shoved them down into the Cushioned area and Stunned them.

Turning once more, Harry entered another disused apartment and dealt with the pair of thralls who tried to ambush him from the kitchen as easily as he had their fellows. The main room resembled the dusty storage space he’d found above, but with multiple empty doorways leading in and out, as well as several exposed pipes and wires. The faded red walls gave the place the feel of a giant predator holding its massive jaws open, waiting for unsuspecting prey to wander in.

Katya Belyakov cowered behind a pile of stacked chairs, looking for all the world like a terrified hostage. She was certainly scared and confused, but from this close, he could feel her bonds with her thralls. It was a sickening sensation. She was cultivating her puppets like a farmer did his crops, remorselessly forcing them to experience unending psychic torment and gorging herself on their pain.

What would happen if her livestock grew stale? Would she let them go, or would she slaughter them and devour the anguish of their death spasms?

Four thralls, three men and a woman, all of them unarmed, stood between Harry and the girl. He easily immobilized them when they charged him with bare fists, but they were merely the distraction. Against a regular opponent with no psychic senses and poor situational awareness, the ploy might have worked. Against Harry, it was a joke. Behind him and to his left, Eva Belyakov froze midway through her attempt to brain him with a tall stand lap. 

He didn’t push her and the other thralls away or shield himself; he simply willed his attackers to be still, and they were. He relaxed his telekinetic grip, just enough to let Eva attempt to break free, as a means of gauging her strength. She was truly superhuman, he found, but far inferior to someone like Captain America, whom the history books claimed could bench press battle tanks at his peak.

Sensing the rest of Katya’s thralls rushing up the stairs toward the filthy apartment, Harry swung Eva around him and hurled her into a corner of the room. At the same time, he swept the other four thralls into a heap opposite her before Stunning the lot of them. Instead of turning to face their reinforcements, he transfigured every doorway leading into the room into a stretch of solid wall.

By then, Eva had sprung to her feet, her quick recovery no doubt enabled by her Inhuman gifts, but Harry suspended her in the air in front of him, keeping her limbs splayed so she couldn’t reach for any weapons hidden on her person. She glared at him, and Harry felt Katya’s gaze boring into him through both her own eyes and those of her captive mother. After a moment, he hit Eva with a Full Body Bind powerful enough to immobilize a dragon and shoved her off toward the left wall.

Katya hadn’t moved from her hiding spot behind the stacked chairs, nor did her expression change when Harry looked into her dark, abyss-like eyes. She was afraid of him, but her hunger compelled her more than fear. Hunger was her highest motive, to the near-total exclusion of all other considerations; a hunger for pain.

“Are you going to hurt me?” Katya asked in accented English.

The question made something deep inside Harry break. It wasn’t his heart, he thought, for only two people in this world held his heart, but the situation was every bit as tragic as the story of Merope Gaunt and her son. The difference was that Riddle had chosen to become what he became, whereas Katya had been made into what she was by her mother’s recklessness. He would never murder a little girl, but he couldn’t help wondering whether death would be preferable to what had already been done to her.

He lowered himself to his knees. “I didn’t come here to harm you,” he said. That much, at least, was completely true; he’d hoped to find the Belyakovs before Katya went through the mists and retrieve the crystals peacefully. But now, he understood that that had been a futile hope, a spark of optimism doomed to be extinguished by the tides of life before it could ever ignite.

“I’m scared,” Katya said.

“I understand,” Harry assured her, trying not to make himself sick. Why hadn’t she tried to take control of him yet? Why, for that matter, had she let the SHIELD agents go free?

“I want to get away from here.”

“You can. But not if you keep trying to hide.”

She hesitated. “Mother?”

“She’s fine.”

Katya slowly stepped out from behind the chairs. “I want—,” she swallowed her words and approached him. “Can you get us out of here?”

“Of course.”

A pounding began on the walls where the doorways had been. Muffled voices cried, “Give me your pain.”

“You… erased the doors?” Katya stumbled over the words, unable to articulate what she’d seen. Cautiously, she reached for him with a small hand. “Can you take me away from here? Without doors?”

“I can.”

Her expression flickered with something dark. He could sense her building anticipation, her impatience. “Take my hand. Please. Take me away from here.”

She still hadn’t attempted to breach his mind.

By the time he understood what she was doing, she’d already touched him. Harry felt her presence envelop his own instantly, sucking him into her web in a ghastly marriage of the Imperius Curse and a dementor’s rattling breaths.

The tide of sensations she summoned met an impenetrable wall on the edges of his mind.

She frowned. “Give me your pain,” she said, her tone more confused than demanding.

“No.”

Katya’s face spasmed with frustration, and then anger. “Give me your pain,” she spat. “Give me your pain!”

Harry shook his head. “You don’t want my pain, Katya Belyakov. It would burn you to ashes.”

“I want it!” Katya snarled. Then her expression changed. “I like their pain,” she all but pleaded. “I want your pain. I want all the pain. Give me your pain!”

Harry rose to his full height. Even after she stopped touching him, the psychic connection lingered. He could feel her reaching furiously for his mind and growing more panicked as she realized that while she could touch the walls that defended it, she could not breach them. He regarded her with a kind of blank sadness, the only emotion he could muster in this moment, until she began to back away from him, her eyes widening in terrified realization.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He meant it, and he let her feel as much. Then he reached into her mind, found the knot of psychic energy that was the heart of her bonds with her thralls, and sliced through it like a sword through the Gordian Knot.

Katya Belyakov stiffened. Her mouth moved wordlessly, and she screamed. The thralls outside screamed too, only to fall abruptly silent.

Harry felt them fall where they stood, but did not dare divert his attention to helping them. The task before him was too delicate to allow the slightest distraction and too important to allow any mistakes.

Soothing the edges of the psychic wound he’d created as best he could, he wrapped his consciousness around Katya’s and contracted it, gently but firmly forcing the stray tendrils of her mind to return to their source. Once she was fully isolated within her own skull, he narrowed his attention to the parts of her mind that specifically governed her powers and shut them down. Numbed by the shock of losing her thralls, the girl felt none of what he was doing, but for him, it was torture, the mental equivalent of wading through a lake of boiling water to plug up the hot springs that fed it by hand.

To ensure Katya’s subconscious self couldn’t undo his efforts in the distant future, he placed blocks on the connections between those areas and the rest of her brain, designing them like filters to restrict the flow of information between neurons without causing permanent damage.

When it was done, he gently lowered the half-conscious child to the floor. Her unsteady breathing evened out, and when Harry gave her a gentle telepathic suggestion, she fell asleep.

Harry knelt beside her for a long while. He found no triumph in what he’d done. This was damage control, not victory. Katya was alive, but she’d never fully recover; at best, she’d likely spend the rest of her life feeling confused and incomplete, unable to repair a mind that had broken in the most fundamental way when it was still actively growing.

What’s done is done, he thought. The only way from here is forward . Standing up once more, he took a moment to check on the former thralls, who had collapsed after he severed their connection to Katya. Some had been knocked unconscious by psionic blowback, but most were in a fugue state as they struggled to recover from what they had endured. Touching each of their minds, as well as those he’d Stunned, he incanted, “ Obliviate .”

Though he accepted the necessity of modifying memories in the name of secrecy, Harry had never liked it. A person’s mind was their ultimate sanctuary, and their memories, good or bad, were part of their identity. In this case, however, he felt that memory erasure would actually be a mercy. He certainly wished he could erase his own memory of experiencing the Cruciatus Curse. As it was, he didn’t want any of Katya’s victims to remember that their suffering had been caused by a little girl.

Any of them except Eva.

When he finished his spell, he turned his attention fully to the woman. She remained where he’d left her, immobilized by the Full Body Bind, unable to do anything but breathe and roll her eyes in their sockets. She lay propped against the wall in a way that allowed her to see the room rather than on her stomach, which meant she’d been looking at her daughter the moment Harry struck. He conjured a floor pallet in a corner of the room and levitated Katya onto it, then freed Eva from the Body-Bind.

The woman fell limply onto her stomach, but almost immediately she scrambled to her feet, using the wall to steady herself. “What… what did you do?”

“What needed to be done,” Harry said with as much compassion as he could manage. It wasn’t much, all things considered. “Your daughter will live, no thanks to you, but she’ll never use her Inhuman powers again.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what reaction to expect—confusion, fear for Katya’s life, relief that the torment was over—but he was unprepared for what he got.

“You had no right,” Eva snarled.

Harry stared, uncomprehending. “Excuse me?”

“She had a gift, and you took it away from her. You took what made her special!” 

“You can’t be serious.”

“That power is her birthright. She can use it as she wishes.”

“To cause endless pain? No one has that right. You were under her thrall too, in case you forgot. Are you telling me you wanted her to torture you for the rest of your life?”

“She is my daughter!” Eva shrieked, looking utterly mad. “I gave her what she deserved. What everyone like us deserves.”

“You’re a deluded fool,” Harry said flatly.

She lunged for him, hands curled into claws, as if intent on tearing his throat out.

“ Mimblewimble !”

Eva tripped over her own feet, clawing at her throat as the Tongue-Tying Curse did its work.

Harry could empathize, having experienced the spell for himself when Mad-Eye placed it on Number 12 Grimmauld Place, but he couldn’t find it in himself to pity her. Any time Eva attempted to speak about Inhumans—or anything directly related to them, including the existence and location of Afterlife—her tongue would curl grotesquely in on itself as it was doing now, making it impossible for her to share the information verbally.

He kept going, casting a variant of the Illegibilus Charm that would render any text she wrote or typed on the subject incomprehensible, even to a computer, as well as a version of the Eradomise Charm that would spoil any samples of her DNA that were ever subjected to analysis. He finished with a comparatively simple Tracking Charm.

Eva glared up at him from the floor. “What are you?” she demanded.

“You mean it’s not obvious, yet?” Harry asked, putting on a veneer of callous sardonicism. “I’m a wizard.”

“Wizard? No,” she spat. “You are a monster.”

“Join the club; we’ve got jackets.”

Swearing, Eva tried to swing at him with a length of broken pipe she’d found on the floor. Harry froze her in place before her improvised weapon cleared her head height.

He lowered his face to hers and grew serious again. “Given all the harm you’ve caused and your inability to recognize the wrongness of your actions, I can’t allow you to walk free. But I can promise no further harm will come to your daughter. Nor will I allow you to suffer cruel or unusual punishment for what you did while under her thrall.”

“Fuck you.” And she spat at him.

It took a surprising amount of his self-control not to transfigure the woman into a marsupial. “Alright. If that’s the way you want to play it.”

With a twitch of his fingers, Harry hurled Eva into a wall hard enough to break the bones of an ordinary human; with her enhanced attributes, the impact merely stunned her. Next, he bound her wrists and ankles with conjured magic cuffs strong enough to restrain an angry dragon. Finally, he hurled her out a window to her left, shattering it, and she bounced off the wall of a neighboring building before plummeting three stories to the street. He slowed her fall just enough to prevent serious injury, but let her land hard enough to get knocked out.

The team of SHIELD agents that had been attempting without success to breach the magically locked building shouted in surprise and disbelief. Harry monitored them with his thoughts while they hastened to get the woman out of the open, then gently summoned Katya’s sleeping form to his side. He tried Summoning Terrigen crystals, just in case the Belyakovs had extras stashed away, but his spell found none within five miles. Taking a final look around, he reversed the transfiguration that had turned the doorways into solid walls and undid the Locking Charm he’d placed on the building’s exterior apertures.

He considered untransfiguring the weapons of the former thralls he’d subdued, but decided to leave them be. He didn’t want SHIELD to know how powerful he truly was—not yet—but leaving a few hints about his capabilities would capture their interest and make them hesitate to try bullying him when he inevitably crossed paths with them in the future.

For his last trick, Harry conjured a variant tarot card of his own design—his literal calling card—and dropped it on the floor. Then, he opened a portal and stepped through, levitating Katya through after him on her pallet. He laid her gently behind SHIELD’s perimeter in the shade of a building, cast a Tracking Charm as well as the same version of the Eradomise Charm he’d used on her mother, and conjured a trauma blanket to lay on her chest. He waited nearby under his stealth envelope for SHIELD to find her before flying away.

A second portal took him back to the mountain ridge where he’d met Gordon. There, he pulled a notebook and quill out of nowhere to write a brief report on his mission and the spells he used to ensure Eva Belyakov could not betray her fellow Inhumans to the authorities. Once he was finished, he duplicated the report and sent the copy—charmed into a paper aeroplane like the Ministry of Magic’s interdepartmental memos—through a hand-sized portal to Kamar-Taj’s mail room. He added a postscript to the original offering to magically beef up security at Afterlife, then enchanted it the same way and sent it through another portal to Jiaying’s receiving room.

The encounter with the Belyakovs could have gone much worse, he knew, but he didn’t feel like talking about it regardless. More importantly, the stranger who’d spied him through the stealth package was still unaccounted for, and Harry did not dare leave the situation in Bahrain unattended while that was the case. He disapparated with a particularly loud, attention-drawing crack .

Melinda May’s face was blank as she gazed through the one-way mirror into the interrogation room, but inwardly she was seething. It was one thing to reassure shell-shocked agents that they’d done everything they could and shouldn’t beat themselves up after a mission went wrong. It was quite another to be the agent in need of reassurance, even if the greatest injury was to her pride.

Over thirty people had been mentally compromised and tortured by a hostile Enhanced to the point that many had been reduced to gibbering wrecks, and SHIELD had utterly failed to manage the situation. Instead, another, unidentified Enhanced had swooped in from nowhere and done the impossible, leaving a pile of questions in his wake. Melinda had seen the aftermath of the unknown’s assault on the decayed apartment, but she still had difficulty believing it. And yet, the evidence was all there.

Tragically, the one person who hadn’t been saved was the little girl, Katya, who had suffered a complete psychological breakdown. Confused and weak, she rarely spoke after waking, and when she did, she would ask for pain or mutter gibberish to herself. Whenever she touched someone, she would flinch away from the contact and begin to cry as if burned. Twice, she’d been caught attempting self harm and attacked the pediatricians assigned to her care when they tried to stop her. It was as if she’d responded to the same mental manipulation that traumatized the gangsters by becoming addicted to pain itself.

It had taken all the self-control Melinda had to restrain herself from punching Eva Belyakov’s teeth out for that.

But the strangest part of this entire fiasco was Eva herself, not to mention her capture. She had been restrained by cuffs made from an unidentifiable metal—cuffs SHIELD had been unable to remove for study—and defenestrated. As strong and tough as she was, she should have displayed much more serious injuries after her fall than a few bruises. Weirder still was what was happening in the interrogation room.

“How did you take control of all those people?” Phil was asking, his voice steely beneath his usual calm. “And why the obsession with pain?”

Belyakov glowered silently.

“Cooperating won’t earn you your freedom back, but it might help us help your daughter,” Phil added. “Assuming you actually give a damn.”

Belyakov clenched her fists and jerked in place, clearly trying to free herself and perhaps take a swipe at Phil, but her bonds held her fast, stuck to the interrogation table by an electromagnet.

“You know nothing,” she snarled.

“Then explain.”

“I don’t know how that power works. Every one o—,” Belyakov cut off abruptly, gagging and shaking in place with a groan. Her cuffed hands writhed as if she wanted to reach upward, and she threw her head back.

Melinda glimpsed the woman’s open mouth and thought she saw the bottom of her tongue.

The fit ended after a few seconds, and Belyakov slumped down in her seat, breathing hard.

Melinda opened fists she hadn’t realized she was clenching. During the first interrogation the previous day, Belyakov had refused to say a word for nearly two hours. Later, when Phil revealed her daughter’s condition, Belyakov had ranted and cursed in both English and Ukrainian for a hot minute before having the first fit. When asked why she’d gone to Bahrain, her response had been cut off by a second fit. Today, she’d offered to volunteer information about the enhanced who subdued her, only to have yet another fit when she attempted to provide specifics.

“Do you have an explanation for why,” Phil gestured vaguely, “ that keeps happening?”

Belyakov hesitated. “I… I can only guess.”

“Then guess.”

“I—ugh!” Belyakov threw her head back again, gagging yet again.

Melinda leaned forward, studying the woman’s open mouth. The woman was… tongue-tied? Literally?

Phil kept trying, but after a third tongue-tying fit, Belyakov refused to speak any longer, and he gave up.

“We might be dealing with some kind of brainwashing,” Phil said afterward when he and Melinda were alone in a conference room.

Melinda thought about it. “I don’t buy it. The details don’t add up.”

Phil eyed her. “Go on.”

She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “I don’t think her behavior matches the symptoms we’ve seen of being brainwashed. She doesn’t like us, but she is willing to answer some of our questions. She tries to answer, and she can’t. No rote responses, no interrogation training, no conditioned behaviors. She just has a reflexive physical reaction that prevents her from speaking certain information. Does that sound like forced conditioning to you?”

“When you put it like that, no. Maybe they gave her a brain implant? If her brain activity matches certain behaviors they don’t want her exhibiting, boom.”

“Who is ‘they?’” Melinda asked. “The people who gave her powers, or the unknown who took her down?”

“They might not be mutually exclusive.”

“True, but if there’s a control implant, there’s no way it doesn’t double as a tracker,” Melinda pointed out. “They’d have found her long before we did, unless she found a way to disable it. Only, how could she disable the tracker without frying the whole thing? Besides, what kind of implant can read brain activity with enough accuracy to recognize what you’re trying to talk about and gag you, but not prevent you from escaping captivity?”

“Maybe there are multiple implants with separate functions? Or maybe she was able to modify the programming, somehow.”

“Or someone else modified the programming for her. Some combination of all these things is as good an explanation as any we have at the moment.”

Phil nodded thoughtfully. “I think it’s safe to assume our mystery enhanced is responsible for the tongue tying, if not for inserting the control implants. He doesn’t want to be found, so he makes it impossible for the only witness who remembers him, or her, to talk about it. But that doesn’t really explain the how. That’s some awfully specific programming, and to accomplish it so quickly with equipment they can carry into battle…well. And why stop her from discussing the source of her powers? If he’s with the people she’s running from, he could have taken her out of our hands and back to them just as easily. Instead, he gags her and hands her over to us.”

Melinda nodded in agreement. “Something doesn’t add up.”

“Then you’ve got an Enhanced to catch,” a basal voice rang out.

Melinda and Phil turned to find tall, dark-skinned, one-eyes man’s man Director Nick Fury himself striding toward them, his black trench coat fluttering around his legs. Neither Melinda nor Phil had noticed his arrival until he announced himself, a testament to how deeply engrossed they’d been in their discussion and how quietly Fury could move when he wished.

“Fury,” Phil greeted.

“Director,” said Melinda.

“I’ve seen some weird stuff the last couple of years,” Fury continued. “But this is something else. We’ve got a potential matter manipulator here.”

Melinda and Phil exchanged looks.

“We saw the aftermath in that building,” Melinda said slowly. “It’s still hard to believe that someone turned all those guns into toys.”

“I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself,” Fury said. “But Ms. Belyakov’s puppets are gangsters with body counts. There’s literally no reason for people like that to go into battle with toys and dolls. Somebody turned their weapons into jokes.”

“Unless the other Enhanced is just that fast and swapped out whatever they were holding before they knew what was happening before knocking them out,” Phil mused. 

“The amount of speed you’d need to pull that off…” Melinda said. She shook her head. “The evidence trail would have been obvious. At the very least, we’d have heard them running around.”

“Not necessarily,” Fury said thoughtfully, “but if this is Speedy Gonzalez, why waste time switching the live weapons for duds? Better to just take them and drop ‘em somewhere out of reach.”

“I don’t actually think this is a speedster,” Phil cut in before Melinda could respond. “But I’d almost prefer that to the alternative.”

“You and me both,” Fury said darkly.

“He left us a calling card,” Phil added, withdrawing a plastic baggie containing a rectangle of stiff paper from an inner pocket of his jacket. “Literally.”

The card in question resembled a piece from a fancy tarot deck. The back featured a gold stars-and-sigils pattern arranged in mandalas on a greenish-black field. Phil gave Melinda and Fury a moment to look at it, then placed it face up on the polished wooden conference table so they could see the artwork.

The unlabeled image depicted the front silhouette of a man holding a sword—composed of an outline of bluish-white spirals—point down in both hands, as if the blade were made of water. The silhouette was outlined by stylized amber and scarlet flames that swirled into the shapes of birds flying out from behind him before fading into whorls of black and purple smoke.

“Phoenix imagery?” Melinda guessed.

Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Fury stiffen, but she could have been imagining it.

“That’s my guess,” Phil said. “Maybe our matter manipulator associates his transformations with death and rebirth. Not that that explains the backing.” He turned toward Fury. “Forensics already dusted it and found nothing. No fingerprints, no DNA, no telltale stains. No leads. We can’t even identify the materials. More evidence for matter manipulation.”

“And all of our witnesses either don’t remember what happened or physically can’t tell us what they know,” Melinda added. “We’re chasing a ghost.”

Fury sat down and crossed one leg over the other. “I don’t think we have to chase him down. Rescuing the victims, leaving behind evidence of his powers, a literal calling card.” He counted each point on his fingers. “He doesn’t want to be caught, but he does want us to know he’s out there.”

Melinda frowned. “To what end?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

Phil returned the baggie with the calling card to his pocket. “Whoever this guy is, we’ll need bait to draw him out.”

“Or her,” Melinda amended.

“Or her.”

Fury’s expression darkened. “There is bait out there. Big, dangerous bait. That’s what I came here to brief you on.” He pulled out a flash drive and plugged it into the socket built into the head of the conference table. He spent a moment fiddling with the inlaid keyboard and trackpad beside it, and a shaky audiovisual recording appeared on the TV screen mounted to the opposite wall of the room.

Melinda’s mouth fell open.

The camera that captured the footage must have had a poor frame rate, because the images were blurred like an old movie. Even so, the monstrous green shape was impossible to miss, as was the destruction it was causing as it rampaged. The caption identified the location as the nuclear research division of Culver University in Virginia, and below it, a timestamp declared the footage had been captured at 1:21 PM on July 2 (complete with a redundant ‘2005’), less than a day before the Bahrain incident.

By the time Fury finished explaining what, or rather who, they were looking at, Melinda found herself longing for a beach vacation. Tahiti was nice this time of year, or so she’d heard.

“Please tell me Barton’s coming along for this one,” Phil breathed when it was over.

Fury shook his head. “Not yet. I’ve got him following a lead on a Black Widow.”

Dead silence punctuated this pronouncement.

“Pull the other one, sir,” Phil said. “I suppose we’ve found Captain America’s body, too?”

Fury actually chuckled. “Nah, just one of his contemporaries.”

Melinda raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see how dragging a World War II vet out of retirement helps us.”

Fury’s one eye gleamed. “This vet isn’t retired, and he has particular… gifts . If we need to eliminate the jolly green giant, we’ll need those gifts. Until then, your mission is strictly observation and damage control. Do not engage, no matter what. Clear?”

“Crystal,” Phil said.

For three days, Harry had scoured Bahrain and the immediate surroundings for signs of the stranger, and for three days, he found nothing. The astral plane and the Mirror Dimension made it easier to investigate without being noticed by the authorities, but none of his tracking spells netted him anything useful. Powerful entities only left behind traces of the power they actually used in the areas they visited; a telepath concealing their presence would leave nothing. The land itself would remember the presence of a powerful being, but that was no help because such memories were too vague to determine when that being was in the area or how long they stayed. For all Harry knew, he was merely reading Bahrain’s natural memory of his own presence.

Frustrated, Harry portaled back to Kamar-Taj. He lingered only for the time it took to shower, eat, and borrow a few books from the library, but before he left, the Ancient One asked to see him in her office.

“I understand the watcher in Bahrain has you vexed,” she said over a cup of tea.

“Vexed,” Harry mused. “That’s true enough.”

“Well, your watcher is known to me, if not to the rest of our order.”

“What.”

She levitated a sealed letter to him with her free hand. “He sent me this with instructions to give it to you. Please don’t start any fights if you choose to meet with him.”

Harry plucked the letter out of the air. “This isn’t a magical being, is it?”

“Not exactly, though it really is up for interpretation. Much like the Infinity Stones.”

Harry blinked. “Right. Thanks, that really helps. I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about this not-so-stranger of yours?”

She smiled at him in that knowing way she had, a smile that often accompanied some carefully planned ploy to push him into a learning experience. “His secrets aren’t mine to tell, but he is no danger to our order or to your family. He is more afraid of you than you are of him.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

“Aren’t you?”

Harry paused to reconsider the question. “Not of him, exactly. More like what he represents. He didn’t do anything to me, but he did scare me. I mean, I thought I’d made myself completely undetectable, but he saw me anyway. That was more than a little alarming.” 

“Understandable. Have you considered that you surprised him in the same way?”

“Of course.” He paused to reflect. “Merlin’s beard, is this how SHIELD feels about me, now?”

The Ancient One smiled. “Something like that. Speaking of SHIELD, they’re in a quiet uproar over you and your powers.”

“That was the idea. Better to let them get to know me and build trust now instead of barging into a crisis where we need to work together and bullying them into cooperating.”

“True. Many of the Masters, however, are rather upset with you for not covering your tracks. Kaecilius and Hamir especially disapprove of your exposing magic to the wider world, even indirectly.”

“Kaecilius is never happy with me,” Harry pointed out, sitting on a chair he drew from nowhere. “And Master Hamir?”

“He is concerned that you could expose the magical community to the likes of the KGB and its Red Room. Fully trained Masters of the Mystic Arts are equipped to protect themselves, but the apprentices and untrained or amateur practitioners of the world will be vulnerable.”

“Ah.” He leaned back into his seat. He liked Master Hamir, and he could understand the old sorcerer’s concerns; the same concerns were what ultimately prompted the International Confederation of Wizards to enact the Statute of Secrecy. “He does understand that I can’t hide forever, right?”

“He does, as do many others. He just doesn’t like it.”

Harry shook his head. “I grew up in a world of magical secrets. I have a godson to protect; do you think I’m not just as concerned as Hamir is?”

“You know I don’t.”

“I’ll be careful,” Harry promised. “And if the worst happens because of my actions, I’ll take full responsibility and be held accountable.”

“Yes,” the Ancient One agreed quietly. “You will.”

As Harry left, he studied the sealed letter she’d handed him, wondering how many other mysterious, possibly immortal friends the Sorcerers Supreme had amassed over the centuries and what role they played in her plans for him.

An hour and a portal later, Harry sat in his favorite chair on the porch of Andromeda’s cottage, reading and rereading the letter. Once he’d fully memorized its contents, he burned it in his hand, reducing the paper to ash and then to fine dust that he scattered into the afternoon air. This matter, at least, could afford to wait.

“You don’t look happy,” Andromeda said from her seat to his right.

“I’m never happy,” he muttered.

She snorted mirthlessly. “You don’t say.” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “What are you going to do now?”

Harry hesitated. He hadn’t told her much about what happened in Bahrain, nor had he explained the contents of the letter passed along by the Ancient One. “I’m not sure yet. I was thinking about hunting down a scientist—and I use that term loosely—responsible for a string of crimes against metahumans.”

“Is that what we’re calling them, now?”

“Well, I think it sounds better than enhanced individuals, which is the official term most governments use. Anyway, I heard something about a monster appearing out of nowhere and tearing up a big name university in the States. Both need to be taken care of, but I’m still working out my next move.”

Andi sipped her tea. “That ought to be simple enough to figure out. Which situation is more urgent? That is, which one is the most likely to cause a catastrophe if left unchecked?”

“We both know the answer to that.”

“Well, there you go. I don’t know why you needed my advice.”

“Who says I did?”

“Me.” She smiled in self amusement. “When do you head out?”

“Tomorrow morning. No sense in waiting for something to go wrong.”

“Will you take Teddy to school for me before you head out?”

Harry relaxed for what felt like the first time all day. “Of course.”

The museum building had been beautiful. Three storeys tall with a facade of glass and smooth, pale concrete, it housed a moderately impressive collection of artwork from the last century in elegant galleries designed to resemble the interior of some futuristic palace. Extending to one side of the main structure was a tall, single storey gallery that wrapped around a luxuriant garden. Now, it was a husk. The garden and its surrounding wing had been gutted by fire, and most of the windows and light fixtures had shattered. The main facade was cracked and shedding flakes of blackened stone.

Wong resisted the urge to wrinkle his nose against the stench of death as he picked his way through the silent corridors. He’d made sure to place an illusion spell around the place to deter mundane authorities from investigating, but the evidence of magic at work was everywhere and would need to be erased before he left.

Some of the corpses lay in positions that suggested they’d died before they understood what was happening, while others had clearly been fleeing. Some had been slashed or crushed with such violence that their blood splattered halfway up the walls. Some were covered in numerous tiny scorch holes that suggested they’d been pierced by sprays of superheated shrapnel, while others bore the telltale marks of lightning strikes. A few had sunk up to their faces into the marble floors or drowned under waterfalls of temporarily liquified stone as they tried to pass through doorways. Several hung pinned against the walls by the antique swords, spears, and knives that impaled them.

The epicenter of the massacre was a shredded oil painting hanging from a freestanding gallery wall on the uppermost storey. As wide as Wong was tall and half again as high, it had been slashed so savagely that the wooden backing behind the canvas had splintered where the cutting implement scratched it. The wall and floor around it bore a burn mark shaped like a starburst, but the explosion hadn’t damaged the painting itself or its frame. The corpses surrounding it, though, were unblemished save for their heads, which had been twisted backwards atop their necks.

Wong had made sure to surround the building with an illusion ward that would deter any non-magical investigators from entering, so he had plenty of time to study the place with both his mystic and mundane abilities. When he realized what the painting had contained—what was now in the hands of whoever perpetrated the mass murder—he did something he thought he would never do after quitting his horrible job at Target; he swore. In three different languages.