A whole new world
The day started out like any other for young Harry. He was jarred awake in his cupboard by a heavy pounding on the door.
“Get up boy! It’s time for our breakfast!” His uncle Vernon bellowed, as he stomped away.
Groaning from the awkward sleeping angle, that he really should be used to by now, Harry pulled his stunted 6 year old body up, and quickly escaped his cupboard to the confines of the kitchen. There, his aunt frog marched him to the front of the grill, to start a hasty made fry up for his relatives.
One would be mistaken that he was merely helping his aunt, as part of his chores, like in any normal household where a child would be taught how to cook. Alas, this was the Dursley residence, where no matter how hard they forced their normalcy, they were anything but.
For starters, Vernon was a very large man with greying blond hair and walrus-esque moustache. He was very quick to temper, usually leaving him red faced for hours at the slightest inconveniences.
Harry’s aunt, Petunia, was a stick thin woman, also with greying blond hair, and had a very long neck with a horse like face.
Their 6 year old son Dudley, was almost a carbon copy of his father but with a pig like nose.
This family, in all their efforts to appear normal, hated anything unusual or “freaky”. Science fiction shows were banned from the TV, books of any kind of fantasy where torn apart or burnt if they made it past the front door and if the word magic was even so much as mentioned, his relatives would have a furious meltdown. All this freakishness included their nephew, with his untameable black hair and lightning bolt scar on his forehead. He was the physical embodiment of freakishness, in their eyes.
His relatives would constantly make it their mission to remind him how freaky he was. If anything went wrong, it was instantly his fault. A sale fell through for his uncle at work? “It’s the freak’s fault!”. The TV stopped working while his aunt was watching her favourite drama series? “The damn freak’s fault!”. His teacher’s hair turns blue or he somehow ends up on the roof when running from Dudley and his gang? “When we get home, freak, you’re going to wish your were never born!”
Whilst Harry was cooking, he began to wonder to himself why his life was the way it was. He couldn’t think of anything he had done to deserve his treatment. His parents had died in a car crash and he was left on his aunt’s doorstep. Surely someone else would have gladly raised him? Was there not a single person or family member out there that would love or appreciate him for him?
Unfortunately, being deep in his musings, Harry had let some of the food burn. A sharp smack to the side of his head nearly sent him tumbling.
“You’ve burnt my poor Duddikins breakfast! What’s my poor boy going to eat now?!” Petunia screeched, as she began fretting about the food. “Get out and ready for school! I don’t want to see you until we leave!”
Harry quickly made his way back to his cupboard to grab his school clothes and walked quickly up the stairs to get dressed, being shoved roughly by Dudley as he passed him on the landing.
“Of course all the hot water is gone too” Harry grumbled to himself, as he quickly showered in freezing water.
Things passed quickly from there until lunch, where he was chased down and beaten up by Dudley and his gang. Harry hunting was always going to be their favourite game to play. Harry was then berated by his teacher for starting fights and, after school, Petunia, was handed a note about Harry’s behaviour. Once they were home, Harry was roughly shoved into his cupboard again and told, under no circumstances, was he allowed to leave unless he was told to.
As he sat in total darkness, Harry began to contemplate his life once more. “I hate them” he thought. “Nothing I ever do will be good enough. I will always just be a freaky slave to them. I want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.” Harry had forced himself not to cry in front of his relatives. It always seemed to make them more mad at him. But in this moment, hidden in his cupboard, the tears came unabated.
For what seemed like hours he sat in his cupboard, silently crying, until he was jolted back into reality by a thick hand, wrapping around his throat.
“THINK YOU CAN START FIGHTS, DO YOU?!” his uncle roared in his face. “THINK YOU CAN EVEN TRY AND HURT MY DUDDERS?! I’LL TEACH YOU, YOU UNGRATEFUL SHIT!”
Pain blossomed from his temple, where his glasses where smashed from the heavy blow his uncle dealt. White exploded into his vision as he was stomped in the stomach whilst laying dazed from the first attack.
“I need to get away” he thought desperately, as his uncle continued to rain heavy blows into his scrawny body. His body was starting to tingle, either from pain or from adrenaline, he didn’t know. All he knew, in his desperation, was that he needed to get away. Away from the pain in his life. Somewhere safe.
As his uncle began to tire, he stood up from his dominating position above the raven haired boy. Readying one final stomp, Harry felt something intangible in him snap. The tingling feeling in his body began to flow out of him, pooling around him, like a river of thick black shadows.
“STOP THAT! STOP THIS FREAKISHNESS RIGHT NOW, BOY!” Vernon commanded, his voice quivering towards the end. Almost like he was, afraid?
But Harry couldn’t stop, he had no control over what was happening with the flow of shadows. With a final mental scream, “I NEED TO ESCAPE!” The shadows seemed to liquefy, rapidly engulfing the boy until he was fully submerged, and evaporating from the living room of his uncle’s home, leaving only a small pool of blood, and a broken pair of glasses, in its wake.
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Black. That’s all there was, for as far as his eyes could see. Thick, inky black, that felt like syrup, lapping against his skin. It shouldn’t have been possible to breathe and yet, he was breathing easier than he had in years. Even with the absence of light, he could see his body. Which was strange, because he didn’t have his glasses, and he was always nearly blind without them. His body was aching from all the damage his uncle had done to him, but it felt, soothed somewhat. Like he had already healed from some of the worst of it. He was still covered in bruises and cuts, but he could feel his ribs and arm shift slowly. Like the bones were, ever so carefully, being put back into place.
Hours seemed to pass as he fell, but his bruises and cuts remained. He could feel the exhaustion from both himself and the blackness around him. That was odd. Why could he feel what the black was feeling? It wasn’t part of him, was it? It couldn’t be. He wasn’t even sure where it had come from.
His body suddenly lurched, as if he was being turned to fall feet first, and started to pick up pace. There was a small white light, getting bigger from below him. He must be near the end of whatever this blackness was, maybe it was a weird tunnel? As the light got bigger and brighter, he speed up even faster, until finally, he shot out of the blackness and into the light. A startled yelp escaped him as he shot out, much faster than he was expecting, and crashed into something rigid, toppling it over.
There was a muffled groan next to him, when he realised he had crashed into a person. A very tall, thin person, wearing a pinstripe suit and gloves, and a hat that was laying on the ground near him. As he rushed to get up and check the person, he realised how much his body still ached and how exhausted he truly felt, now that he could feel the weight of his body again. He let out a small groan as his body protested his movement. Realising he couldn’t really move just yet, he settled with slowly turning his head to the person he crashed into. “I’m really sorry about that” he croaked, like talking was almost too much for him in this state. Still, he soldiered on. “Are you ok? Please get up”
Another groan left the person, man he assumed from the voice, and he saw the man move his arms to push himself up. He couldn’t see the man’s head but his hat, and what looked like a fuzzy wig had been knocked down alley they appeared to be in. Slowly, the man pulled himself into a kneeling position and lifted his head to look around. Harry still couldn’t see the man’s face, but the back of his head was bald and shockingly white. Very white. “Are you ok sir?” Harry asked again, hoping to get a response. He didn’t mean to hurt him, he didn’t even have control of where he was going!
“Hmm? Oh yes, quite fine. Nothing broken at least.” The man finally replied, with a smooth Irish accent. The man finally turned to look at Harry, and the world seemed to freeze around him. A skull. The man’s head was a skull. No eyes, no nose, no lips or skin of any kind was on his head. Harry’s eyes widened as he looked over the man. He could see how truly thin the man was, now that he was fully focused on him. He could even see more white peaking out between the cuffs of the man’s suit and gloves.
“You’re a skeleton” he gasped, as he realised he was holding his breath. Panic started to set in, as now instead of holding his breath, he started to breathe rapidly. “I didn’t do that, did I? Did the blackness hit you? Oh god! I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed. He was starting to get lightheaded and the man, the skull was just staring at him!
“Oh! No, no, this wasn’t you” the man finally said, with a bit of amusement in his voice. “Calm down kid. I’ve been like this a long time. Longer than I had skin, so no, this wasn’t you. Are you ok? You came flying out of that portal after all” the skeleton asked.
Harry finally snapped out of panicked staring at the man-skeleton-thing, to realise he was still quite sore. “I don’t know. One minute I was being beaten by my uncle, the next thing I know, I’m falling through a black place, and THEN, I crash into a skeleton! Am I dreaming? My dreams have never been this weird before” Harry rambled.
“Your uncle beat you?” the skeleton said. When he finally registered what the man said, his mouth clamped shut. He had never told anyone what happened at the Dursley’s house. It was his punishment for being a freak.
After a few uncomfortable moments, the man seemed to realise that Harry wasn’t going to talk. “Alright then, how about we get you to a doctor to check over those wounds. You look like you’ve been through hell, kid.” The man said, he tone leaving no room for argument. Harry’s head still felt incredibly light and darkness was starting to seep into his vision. “Yeah” Harry said, breathlessly. “I think I’m going to sleep on the way” he said. The last thing he heard, before he gave into the darkness was a soft “yeah, sure kid” and his body being gently lifted, as if the man was afraid he would break at the softest touch.
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Skulduggery wasn’t sure what to make of the small child sleeping in the back off his car. He seemed like a normal child at first. Maybe a bit small and thin but Skulduggery hadn’t been around children in more than a hundred years. Hell, he didn’t know anything about the kid. Not his name, or age. Only that he was British, judging from the accent. But then he had picked up the child to bring him to his car. Then he felt the magic hidden within the child. Necromancy. This kid was a damn necromancer, and he wasn’t sure what to do with that information. He wasn’t even supposed to feel someone’s magic in the first place. Either the boy; was incredibly, stupidly powerful or, he had been experimented on since around the time he was born.
He wasn’t sure which he preferred, in all honesty.
Either way, the kid needed to see a doctor. Both to heal him, and so that he could get some answers. That’s why he was heading towards the Hibernian, to meet with an very old acquaintance and see if he can’t check off at least one of those things. Hopefully, he won’t get shouted at too much for this. It’s not like it was even his fault. This time. Shuffling from the back seat alerted Skulduggery to the now, very much awake child.
He could just about hear the soft “oh god, this is all real” coming from under the child’s breath, and had to suppress a snort.
“Talking skeletons not common for you?” he said sarcastically.
“What, and they are here?” the kid shot back, equally as sarcastically. Good. That means this kid will be anything but boring.
“Oh yeah, there’s a small village of us about 20 miles back” he deadpanned.
A small quiet moment passed. He was worried he might have offended the kid just when things were getting good.
“You’re messing with me, aren’t you?” the kid asked, quietly.
“Of course not! We’re right next to the village of octopus people!”
“Are they all as much of an arse as you are?” the kid responded, clearly not expecting himself too. Skulduggery couldn’t help himself but let out a sharp laugh. This kid was snarky. It was great. He hadn’t had this much witty banter since the last time he had seen Gordon!
“Yeah, I kind of am. I never got your name, kid”
“Harry Potter, sir.”
“Is that what your parents named you?”
“I guess so. It’s what the teachers told me my name was in the register.” He filed that worrying bit of info away for later.
“You might want to think up a name for yourself soon though kid. Names have power and all that. You don’t want some sorcerer finding out your given name before you’ve taken one for yourself.”
“Sorcerer? But, magic isn’t real. It can’t be”
“And why can’t it? How else would I be up, walking and talking? And the name’s Skulduggery Pleasant, since you asked so nicely”
The kid -Harry- flushed, clearly embarrassed that he did not, in fact, ask.
“W-well, my relatives did. They said magic is too freaky...to be real. Do you think they knew about magic? And wanted to keep me away from it?” Oh, this kid was sharp.
“Now those, are excellent questions. If something was denied that strongly, it stands to reason they had something to hide, don’t you think?” Skulduggery could see the wheels turning in the kid’s head, as he mulled over this new insight.
“Do you think, that I might be, magic then? If they tried to hide it from me?” Harry asked, timidly. Ah, he was finally there then.
“Without a doubt.”
“Could you, maybe, teach me?” the kid asked, hesitantly, but his emerald eyes were shining brightly. Like an annoyingly adorable puppy when it’s happy to see you.
“Maybe, we need to get you checked out first. And we just got here.” He said, as he pulled up to the derelict, old Hibernian cinema.
“I thought you said we were seeing a doctor? Why are we at a run down cinema?”
“First lesson with magic. Nothing is ever as it seems. Second lesson in magic, never tell anyone your name until you have taken one for yourself. Many sorcerers will use it to control you.”
“How can a name be used to control you?” Skulduggery tilted his head, if he had eyebrows, one would be raised right now. “Right, magic.”
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They made their way through the abandoned cinema and into one of the viewing screens. As they approached the screen, a projector in the overhead booth turned on, showing a pristine white building with the front door open.
Harry wasn’t really sure what was going on anymore. Magic was real and they were meeting a doctor in a cinema. Mr Pleasant had said that with magic, nothing was as it seems. That was, until, Mr Pleasant walked up to the screen and through the open door that certainly wasn’t there before the projector came on. It took him a few moments to shake out of his stupor and run up to the screen, pausing only to raise his hand and push at where the screen was supposed to be. He could really love magic, if it kept being this cool.
Harry shook himself from his awe, as to not be left behind by Mr Pleasant. He didn’t want to get lost in a place like this, no matter how cool it was. He caught up to the walking skeleton quickly and they continued through the corridors until they came across a small, slightly hunched older man. The man’s face quickly morphed into a frown when he saw the pair and Harry was tried his best not to hide behind Mr Pleasant.
“What trouble have you brought me this time?” the old man snapped at Skulduggery, making Harry flinch back a little.
“Why don’t you introduce yourself, trouble?” Skulduggery responded with some humour in his voice.
“H-hello, Doctor. I’m, um, not supposed to tell you my name. I haven’t chosen a name yet.” Harry said meekly.
The older man’s face seemed to soften when he looked at Harry, relaxing Harry a little. At least the old man wasn’t mad at him.
“Make sure you take your time picking your name. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with something lame, like this bag of bones here” the older man said kindly, making Mr Pleasant scoff slightly. “My name is Kenspecle Grouse. I don’t have the mundane certificates to be called a doctor” the man said.
Harry tilted his head slightly, thinking that through. “But, you heal people right?” The man nodded. “Then you’re a doctor. Because you really don’t look like a nurse.” Dr Grouse blinked a few times, before out a deep belly laugh.
“Well, you certainly aren’t wrong. Now, I assume this bonehead brought you here to seen to those wounds?”
“And a full scan” Mr Pleasant cut in. “Need to see if anything is going on internally or with his magic”
Dr Grouse nodded. “Right, well follow me down to the lab.” He turned and walked away, quicker than his apparent age would suggest.
Dr Grouse brought them to a sterile white room with metal tables with equipment neatly arranged throughout the room. He pulled out a short metal rod with strange symbols etched in to it and instructed Harry to stand in the centre of the room. “Now, I'm just going to wave this around you and it’s going to give me a mental image of your organs and skeleton to see if there are any issues. After that, I’ll need you to hold something to test your magic and we will go from there ok?” Harry nodded and tried to stay as still as possible for Dr Grouse. As the doctor waved the rod around him, Harry felt an almost intangible slime slowly cover his body, from head to toe, before it quickly reversed its path, and flowed back into the rod.
“Is that meant to feel so slimy?” Harry asked, causing the doctor’s eyes to widen. Harry panicked, worried he had said something wrong. “Sorry, it’s just that, you didn’t say anything about it feeling slimy and I wanted to make sure I hadn’t done something wrong”
“You could feel it?” the doctor said, almost flabbergasted. “That shouldn’t be possible.” The doctor stared at Harry, before physically shaking himself and looked back to the rod. “Well, we will look into that later. You will be happy to know that you’re perfectly fit and healthy on the inside, but it looks like you were very recently healed internally. Before that, you really weren’t in a good way, so I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Oh! That might have been the blackness thing I feel in before I crashed into Mr Pleasant”
“The blackness?”
Skulduggery piped up at this. “He came flying out of a shadow walking portal. But it was different to the normal type. It was giving off massive magic readings. The sanctuary picked up readings of it roughly 4 hours before the portal opened and they sent me there to check it out”
Dr Grouse stroked his chin in silence for a few minutes, taking it in. “Maybe we will get our answer when reading his magic”
Dr Grouse then pulled out a small, clear crystal orb, no bigger than a tennis ball. “Now, this is a magic reader. This will tell us which discipline of magic you learn toward and how much you’re capable of using.”
“Is that one of your inventions?” Mr Pleasant asked, as he inspected the orb.
“Sort of. Miss Sorrows lent an incredibly rare book with only a few pages being legible. The few things that could be read gave instructions on how to build a few things. She asked me to make one of these in exchange. I couldn’t resist building one for myself so here we are.”
Just a Dr Grouse was handing Harry the orb, he seemed to remember something. “Oh ,yes. To activate it, you simply need to hold and think the word ‘activate’. After that it should take a second before glowing different colours depending on your magic.”
Finally taking the orb, Harry gently cupped it with one hand facing up and thought “activate.” There was a beat where nothing happened, before the orb started rapidly flicking between all colours possible colours imaginable. The flickering seemed to speed up as the orb vibrated rapidly, and cracks started to form. Suddenly, all the vibrating and flickering stop for a second, until the crystal gently floated out of Harry’s hand and split apart into hundreds of smaller crystals, floating gently around Harry. Everyone watched as the small shards started to glow every possible colour and expanded onto different sizes. Some colours were larger than others, some where the same size, a few were only the size of a small pebble, but the biggest was easily as big as Harry himself!
“Incredible” Harry heard Doctor Grouse mutter softly. “That's not supposed to happen with sorcerers. It was supposed to cycle through a small range of colours in different intensities. This, this is unfounded. And look at this!” He exclaimed, pointing at the huge, deep black rock. “The size must be your potential for each branch of magic out there. You can learn some of every magic out there. Maybe not a lot, in some cases but still! My boy, you are something very special indeed.” The last part was spoken with a fondness Harry hadn’t heard before in his life. It took every ounce of control not to choke up.
“So what does this mean? And what does each colour represent? “Mr Pleasant asked from behind Harry. He was staring directly at the biggest crystal, unmoving.
“Honestly, a lot of these I have no idea. For example, I have no idea what cyan could be, nor that hot pink over there. But these” pointing at the collection of fist sized crystals. They were nearly double the size of the original crystal. “These are elemental magic, but more than your basic; earth, fire, air and water. There’s lightning and ice here too. And then the other 4, well, I’m not a hundred percent sure on all of them, but this one is transfiguration. Changing one thing into another. A very rare branch to see nowadays.” The doctor seemed to be vibrating with glee. He then rushed to the biggest pile full of tiny crystals, roughly the size of a peanut. “I can see; wall walking, mind magic, sensory magic and teleportation magic! And that’s just a few!”
“But what about this one?” Harry asked, hand on the giant, deep black crystal. Doctor Grouse seemed to hesitate for a moment. He didn’t look as excited about this one, which made a pit form in Harry’s stomach.
“Now, not every magic is looked at favourably. Some have bad connotations in regard to either how they work, who wielded them in the past or simply for what they do.” Doctor Grouse started softly, like he was trying to make sure he didn’t scare Harry. “The one magic, that has the worst reputation, for all these reasons, is Necromancy. Death magic. It is dark in nature, getting stronger when surrounded by death and absorbing life energy from the recently deceased. You, my boy, have the greatest aptitude for necromancy this world has seen in nearly 200 years.” Doctor Grouse looked Harry in the eye and continued. “This, does not make you evil. This aptitude does not make you a bad person. People will look at you with distrust but that is not your fault and has nothing to do with you as a person. You can only be judged by the actions you take.”
Harry was taken aback by the kindness in the old man’s voice. Unable to speak, he swallowed and nodded. Desperate to change the subject, Harry asked “so what does this make me? You said that this” waving his arms at the crystals, “doesn’t happen for sorcerers.”
If Doctor Grouse noticed the change in subject, he didn’t show it. Harry was grateful for that. “Well, this all comes back to that book I was loaned. It was written nearly a thousand years ago by a travelling magical. It wasn’t until his book was uncovered that anyone found out he wasn’t your typical traveller. No this man came from a different dimension. Now that isn’t unheard of. There is a branch of magic called ‘shunting’ which ‘shunts’ the user from one dimension to another. Incredibly rare but not impossible. No, the truly strange thing about this man was his magic. In his book, he claimed to be a wizard, from another dimension, by the name of Merlin.” Doctor Grouse stopped for a moment, tapping his chin. “Of course, no-one believed this man honestly existed. But you have just changed that. Your potential can mean only one thing.”
Mr Pleasant leaned in close so only Harry could hear him. “You’re a wizard, Harry.”