...
To Meet A Stone
…
Marceline, I'm coming to get you, girl
We're flying so high, catch a ride on Lady Unicorn
Marceline, I know you're not real in this dimension, I mean
…
\|/
Aunt Petunia never showed Hari a single picture of her parents, let alone of her grandparents. The first time she’d gotten to look at her family—not the Mirror of Erised debacle, that was a fantasy created by the anguished and fervent longing of an orphaned child cut off from her people—she wept. During the summer before her fifth year, for her birthday, Sirius provided the old photographs of Euphemia and Fleamont Potter. Euphemia, who hailed from Greece, with her unblemished umber skin and cascade of jet coils, her brown eyes alight with joy. Fleamont with his own coppery complexion standing beside her, his thick inky strands long enough that they stopped at his chin, a length that would have scandalized Aunt Petunia.
Her father, James, got the best of them, the most beautiful mellowing of their shades, some darkest-amber hue between copper and umber that made his flesh glow with a pleasant undertone, his own hair cut shorter than his fathers but left unbound during his school days up until his sixth year, each of his carefully manicured locs only just starting to flourish at his death. Lily stood out like ivory next to the vibrant glow of their melanin in the one family photo that contained all of them together, her equally pale Irish Muggle parents—each with hair as red as hers, a red so dark that it could look black in certain lights, shining like spilled blood in the rays of the sun—also wrangled into the frame. The lot of them only met once some time before the wedding, long before Hari’s birth or the utterance of the Prophecy that prompted Voldemort to act. Hari traced over each beaming face reverently, laughing and crying in turns at their antics, at the fond expressions and gestures of affection.
Dragonpox stole the life from Fleamont and Euphemia, advanced in age even for magicfolk. Roisin and Kieran Evans, meanwhile, died just before Lily’s final year at Hogwarts when a few budding Death Eaters followed them home from King’s Cross. Luckily for Lily—or perhaps unluckily, as the hope of the Death Eaters was to kill them both—her friend Mary Macdonald had decided to spend the first few weeks of the summer holidays with her, and so the two bravely fought against the two Death Eaters who confronted them. They could not, however, fend off the third who snuck around them. The precious thirty seconds it took the ambushed Muggleborn witches to subdue their opponents, the third unseen foe had cast two silent dark severing curses, neatly slitting her parents’ throats and leaving them to bleed out behind her almost instantly. A furious Lily wheeled about like an avenging angel to strike him down before he could hex her and Mary, but the worst damage had been done and Roisin and Kieran lay dying. Lily had never been the same after the incident, more determined to oppose Voldemort than ever and her family’s slaughter an alarming wake-up call to other Muggleborns. No matter how magically powerful or gifted in dueling, having vulnerable Muggle relatives meant easy targets for Death Eaters. It was a hard-learned lesson for Voldemort’s opposition, but one that would save lives. It led to the Dursleys going into hiding before Hari’s own departure from Privet Drive, after all.
The gruesome way most of her family died simply prompted Hari to fight harder, to learn more, to push herself. She practiced dueling until she could manage wandless and non-verbal casting while in motion, acquired new spells with a fervor that at times worried Hermione , forced herself to endure those unfortunate Occlumency sessions with Snape, took bloody swordplay lessons to be able to truly use Gryffindor’s blade. She scoured the Black library and the carefully stored contents of the former Potter library, absorbing information from any book she touched like the Earth’s most determined sponge hellbent on eliminating not only the greatest threat to her world, but also the person who stole the most from her. She branched out from Parseltongue and English, learning Greek and Hindi to devour some of the initially inaccessible texts. She signed up for Muggle self-defense classes and became an animagus—a peregrine falcon—as well, literally pursuing every advantage she could get. By the end of the Second Wizarding War, Hari—Harveste Nepeta Potter-Black, The Girl Who Lived became Harveste the Great, the Woman Who Conquered—posed an incredible threat to anyone who stood against her, even before she truly became the Master of Death in every sense of the word.
The Hallows bonded with her.
As soon as she held all three on her person—the Stone inlaid on a new ring transfigured from the shell of the golden snitch, the Cloak at her shoulders, the Wand held between her tawny fingers—they fused with her. If she closed her eyes, she could see the pathways of their energy underneath her skin, faint veins of black interwoven between muscle and bone and blood vessels, burrowed too deeply to safely extract them without possibly crippling or killing her.
Quasi-sentient and thrumming with power, their consciousnesses curled against hers like a contented cat, her magic riddled through with their magic down to her core, to her soul. Visibly , lines of spiraling tattoos—for what else could she call them—in a language she couldn’t decipher spread across her skin, up and down her arms, over her front and back, around the delicate curve of her neck— everywhere.
To cover the markings, she took to wearing gloves and long-sleeved shirts paired with full-length pants or flowing skirts, or dresses that ended at her ankles, the rest of her leg covered by her dragon-hide boots. She rarely bothered with her armor, mostly putting it on for show. She hardly needed it when she could no longer die, something she had the displeasure of learning during an assassination attempt when some idiot threw a Killing Curse her way. It splashed off of her harmlessly like stray raindrops. Then she experimented—starving herself for weeks at a time, drinking poison, letting venomous animals bite her, not catching herself when she fell, letting spells she could easily dodge touch her. None of it, absolutely none of it, had an effect on her.
Hari simply couldn’t be killed, and, as she found out four years later, she simply didn’t age. It wasn’t noticeable yet physically, but she’d checked her official age through magical means, and, well….She’d not aged a day since the date of the Battle of Hogwarts, consequently the same day when the Hallows fused with her, to the date.
Terrified at first that the magical engravings would be permanently visible, Hari felt palpable relief when they faded over the course of a month to trace the surface of her skin like old scars, only to feel frustration, horror, then resigned acceptance to have them resurface again during the first assassination attempt. The entire network of tattoos marching across the canvas of her skin lit up like a firework display, darkening to black once more and glowing softly, the markings of the Hallows taking a nerve-wracking several hours to fade again, though the glowing itself mercifully lasted only a few moments. It happened the same way every time something should have killed her—a stray bullet, a stray spell, missing a step at the top of the stairs and getting a broken neck for her troubles. All in all, Hari was never more thankful than during that painful breaking-in period of being the Master of Death—whatever the fuck that meant besides accidental immortality and invulnerability—for inheriting her mother and paternal grandmother’s ressesive genes for green eyes and red hair, for the most infamous physical souvenir of the first time Voldemort tried offing her, or for the very true fact that she really did have extensive war scarring—injuries and torture scars alike. In the end, the lie was hardly a lie at all.
At present, clad in Muggle skinny jeans and a t-shirt underneath a green robe that matched her eyes, Hari leaned against the back of her chair as she sat at the desk of her office-slash-library in her tent, a luxurious expanded model with more rooms than the one she stayed in with Ron and Hermione. Once he knew her intentions to go on vacation, Kreature disappeared for all of a quarter of an hour with a small sack of gold tucked away in the folds of his pillowcase—no longer grungy or washed out, but blue and clean with the Black and Potter crests emblazoned on the shoulder. He reappeared with the tent in hand, having only gotten her the best at a steal. Then he helped her expand and customize it so that the inside resembled a ‘respectable’ cottage ‘fit for the heir of the House of Black’, as Kreature put it. Their magic wove together in harmony, further stabilizing the structure and binding protective wards to it. Afterward, Kreature helped her pack. The old crotchety elf might have moved fully to Hogwarts, but he still cared for her in his own way.
Really, she had next to nothing that hadn’t already been added to her wristlet, which she’d both used the Extension Charm on to enlarge and charmed its strap not to break, as well as making the entire thing Impervious and Fireproof. She needed the precautions, seeing as it held nearly everything she owned: her old school trunk; her clothing, all neatly packed into a travel wardrobe for wizards; a travel bookcase to which she could enclose and strap down all of her books, including any she inherited from the Potter and Black libraries; her tent, when she wasn’t using it; and a carefully arranged and sealed potions case filled to the brim with supplies, kept separate so the more delicate or volatile things wouldn’t be set off accidentally. Meanwhile, hanging from a thick chain of silver around her neck were several shrunken items that looked like necklace charms: a mokeskin pouch housing the entirety of the gold and precious gemstones from both of her family vaults, which she now had to empty after the Gringotts fiasco; her Firebolt; a case of field medical supplies for emergency healing; the sheathed sword of Gryffindor; her wristlet, at times, when she got tired of carrying it or wanted to keep it closer to her person than she could if she stored it in her rob pocket; and other useful odds and ends she might need to grab immediately. Her trusty phoenix and holly wand that she repaired sat in a holster strapped to her wrist, though she hardly needed it now. Between her own persistence in training during the war and fusing with the Elder Wand, she could cast wandlessly and nonverbally with ease.
Ever since she’d fused with the Hallows and become deathless, she noticed other changes aside from the odd markings and the bloody glowing that encouraged her to stay within the walls of her new, mobile, vacation home. With a bit of experimenting, she discovered that she inherited their abilities, able to turn invisible at will and speak to the dead. She quickly learned that the Tale of the Three Brothers had not lied. After three hours, her parents and godfather experienced extreme discomfort being in the world of the living. If they remained longer than that, it would eventually transition into pain. As a result, Hari tasked herself with testing the limits of her power, trying to lengthen their time or lessen their pain to no avail. It took her several weeks to realize that she could try going to the Spirit World to see them.
Today would be her first attempt. She’d had breakfast, and was now steeling herself to try. Not wanting to potentially accidentally blow up her home or worse, she heaved herself onto her feet, out of the tent, and into the clearing outside. With a negligent flick of her wrist, the tent took itself down, folded itself neatly, and sprang into her hand. She shoved it into her wristlet, then shrunk the dainty purse and added the charm to her necklace. The habits and paranoia from the war, the kind that would make Moody proud (or at least nod in grim approval) meant that she’d already thrown up powerful protective wards to keep others out of her space, but she added more layers, interweaving the spells until she’d outlined boundaries to contain any of her own errant magic, thereby protecting the area from any sudden spikes or implosions that came from her experiments. Then Hari dropped to the ground, sitting with her legs crossed and closing her eyes.
Clearing her mind had never come easy to her. It was one reason that Hari had struggled with Occlumency. Unlike Snape, she didn’t possess a natural aptitude for it and so had to work harder to Occlude. Now, however, she’d found an effective means of clearing her mind in focusing on her breath as she went through the smooth motions of Kalaripayattu, either physically or in her mind’s eye, all the while drawing in breath at a count of seven, holding it at a count of seven, then exhaling at a count of seven. The fact that her father and his family had practiced it only made her treasure the knowledge even more. Not only did the flowing dance of it soothe her mind, but without constant plots or Voldemort involved, she found that she could clear her mind that much faster and bring things into sharper focus. She mentally ran fluidly through different exercises, her breath even and calm, until her thoughts stilled like the surface of a lake. Then, to protect her mind while she tried to Spirit-Walk, she seamlessly switched to bringing up her Occlumency barrier— flight . The same dizzying speeds, dives, and tricks that exhilarated Hari quite literally threw off most intruders with nauseating efficiency, as most couldn’t even think to attempt to follow her without developing an immediate sense of vertigo and nausea. It made it a fairly effective defense.
So while one part of her mind focused on her breath and another focused on her barrier, Hari focused on feeling weightless, on latching into the Resurrection Stone’s power, now her power, and pushing instead of pulling. For several long moments there was only the in and out of her breath like the gentle flow of the tides to and from the shore, which only made Hari try harder, putting more force and concentration behind her effort accompanied by a larger flare of magic. She pressed onward, chasing the familiar connection she felt between her and her parents, Sirius, and Remus, then the resistance in the connection Hari sought after, the one she fed energy into in the reverse, gave way, bearing her along. She squeezed her eyes shut tight against the mildly disorienting sensation of lightheadedness and dissociation, and when it vanished and the tugging stopped, she opened her eyes.
Hari found herself sitting in the same clearing, but the cast of the light had changed, somehow softer, overlaid with eggshell blues and dove grays and lavender. She got to her feet hesitantly, feeling for the threads that connected her to the souls she was essentially Reverse Summoning herself toward. Once she felt them, she set off in that direction, noting as she went along that at some point the forest changed subtly until she walked in another forest altogether. Every once in a while she would send out a light, steady pulse of energy, drawing herself closer and closer to her parents, godfather, and former professor. The utter silence unnerved her after a while, but what unnerved her more was the prickling sensation on the back of her neck.
Someone was following her, or at the very least watching her and tracking her progress. Either way, much like being followed or watched in the physical world, being followed or watched in the Spirit World couldn’t possibly bode well for her. She sped up slightly, trying to put distance between herself and the presence, but to her frustration she could feel it closing the distance between them. Swearing, Hari broke into a run, checking her mental shields and materializing spiritual armor. She pulled up short, however, when the presence suddenly appeared in front of her in the form of a deceptively small orangey-pink wisp emanating a much larger presence.
Hari stopped just shy of running into it, skipping several paces backwards. She slipped into a defensive crouch, ready to be drawn into battle, but startled when she realized the Hallows seemed, of all things, excited, thrumming underneath her skin—or, perhaps, agitated. Before she could investigate the sensation further, however, a voice emerged from the wisp.
“Such sacrifice.” The words came out wonderingly, reverently, giddily.
Well—that wasn’t an odd thing to say when you first saw someone. Not at all.
“Who are you?” Hari called as she edged another step away from the strange being.
“It is who you are that is far more interesting, Sacrifice Incarnate.”
Hari had no idea what the bloody hell it was talking about, and told it as much. That only made it smile—if an indistinct and amorphous being of light and magic power, pulsing with energy, could smile.
“You are Sacrifice Made Flesh.”
Hari grit her teeth. “But what does that mean.”
“Are you not a being of Death and Rebirth?”
Hari blinked, then her eyes narrowed. “You’re talking about being the Master of Death, aren’t you?”
“No, more than that. You have lost so much that you love, and yet still you gave yourself. Your entire life was borne from a sacrifice, has been a sacrifice. Three times at least you gave yourself for others, and the last was the ultimate thing to give—your life, your soul, for theirs, as your mother once did for you. Her sacrifice still sings in your blood, and you have become a Being of Sacrifice.”
Finally, with that explanation, its earlier words made sense. Not just the Master of Death, then, but more to this being. But—
“Who are you? What are you? “You never said.”
“Unlike my kindred I have no aliases or containers. I am the Soul Stone.”
“Should that...mean something?” Hari’s uncertainly and confusion resounded loudly in her ears, apparently garnering a pleasantly surprised reaction from the being. The curious aura the so-called ‘Soul Stone’ gave off reminded her of what it felt like not to be immediately recognized and swarmed when she ventured out of the wilderness for supplies.
“To many, but not to you,” the Soul Stone purred. “One who knows True Sacrifice. Your entire being is a Sacrifice Made Manifest, sacrifice after sacrifice layered together. You are a vision of true beauty . ”
The conversation had taken an unforeseen turn, one that made Hari a tad bit uncomfortable no matter the truth of it all. “Erm…. thanks, I guess?”
The wisp elongated, its shimmery body vaguely humanoid in shape but completely featureless. “Which is to say, you are perhaps the single entity who has found me without seeking, without a desire to use my power, and yet are singularly the most worthy.”
“Like when I found the Philosopher’s Stone,” Hari mused aloud. “Only someone who wanted to find it but not use it could retrieve it. I wanted it solely to keep it out of Voldemort’s hands, but he would have used it out of greed and his own selfish desire for more power.”
“So you understand.” The being was directly in front of her now— and when had it gotten that close? —extending a dazzling hand. Orange and pink making peach bloomed, a beautiful mellowing swirl of the colors. It was rather lovely, Hari thought absently even as she regarded it warily. She stiffened when its fingers, oddly cool despite how brightly it shone, touched her cheek lightly, followed by it closing the distance between them until its face hovered only a hair’s-breadth from her own.
“I do,” Hari breathed, her brain malfunctioning, Hari.exe not working. How the fuck should she respond to its strange behavior? Its reaction to her threw her for a loop, mental voices that sounded suspiciously like Hermione and Ginny advising caution. And yet there was a sort of magnetism, impossible to ignore, between her and the entity, of like meeting like and appreciating what it saw. The Soul Stone was resonating with her, its energy deeply compatible with her own patchwork of Hari and Hallow.
“For the first time,” the Stone told her, “I want to give instead of take, to share instead of receive.”
The markings that decorated her skin heated, rising to the surface. The Hallows, quasi-sentient at the least, pulsed within her. A slightly dazed Hari allowed the Stone to tilt her face upward and press a lipless mouth—did it even have a mouth?—against hers.
The effect was almost instantaneous. Hari felt it merging with her much like the Hallows had, melting against her, into her, pouring its power and essence into her so that their energy intertwined to the molecular level, between blood and muscle and bone. The Hallows inside of her rejoiced, stretching to accommodate, dancing in welcome. For some reason Hari expected pain. Though none came, it still brought her to her knees, made her head spin. As she curled over on herself, hunching her shoulders and fighting the wave of nausea that wanted to crash over her, she felt a hook behind her navel not unlike travel by Portkey, but more like a rubber band snapping back to position. The sensation of traveling a great distance overtook her paired with an almost overwhelming vertigo and dissociation, a great rushing around her as magic and something else—the Stone, she reminded herself faintly, the Stone’s energy—surrounded her, an energy both so like her and the Hallows and so not , something compatible with their marbled mosaic of witch and Hallow.
Then, darkness.
\|/
Hari awoke on a barren wasteland, very much no longer in the Spirit World. Perhaps worst of all, though, besides the low pulsing of discomfort in her limbs and the tenderness of her skin, was the ghastly face staring down at her. A tall being in a dark cloak, skin literally the bright red of fresh blood welling from a wound and stretched tight over bony features, hovered near her, not close enough to touch or be touched, but close enough that she could see the creases on the thin leathery skin, could see that like Voldemort it had no nose, could see thin, bloodless lips and the pronounced ridge of its brow. Hari forced herself not to shout, pushing herself up slowly on wobbling limbs. She felt both far weaker and far stronger than normal, as if energy to run for miles courses through her and yet somehow inexplicably fatigued. “Fucking Potter Luck,” Hari groaned, finally able to ease herself into a sitting position that kept the strange hooded being in her sights. “And who the fuck are you?” She had no desire to have two otherworldly beings trying to kiss her and merge with her in one day. Between the Stone and the Hallows, she’d had quite enough, thank you.
Even as she noted a rumble of amusement not her own, the hooded figure spoke. “I am the guardian of the Stone.”
The conclusion as to which Stone came easily enough. “The Soul Stone?”
The figure shrouded in shadow brought hands hidden by its voluminous sleeves together in front of its torso, looking like a dark parody of a monk. “Yes. Do you seek it?”
Hari could have burst into hysterical laughter. ‘Did she seek it?’ The bloody thing decided to kiss her and join its essence with hers. If she couldn’t find it, there was a damn problem. Again she felt the silent amusement of a consciousness not her own, making her realize that the Stone’s consciousness had not gone dormant when it merged with her.
“No, I don’t seek it.” She braced her hand against the ragged outcropping of rock at her side, stumbling to her feet. “Itfoundme.”
She lifted her head to look at the Stone’s guardian. As she did, she felt something rise to the surface just briefly, something that had the man (at least she thought it was a man) give a barely perceptible shudder as understanding took hold. “I see.”
“Where are we and how can we leave?”
We . She would always be ‘we’ now. Even without the Soul Stone she would always be ‘we’, technically. The Hallows were alive, so to speak, quasi-sentient or perhaps even sentient in their own right. She would never, ever be a singular being again, not with four other occupants of her body. Four hitchhikers she thought pointedly. Four objections followed, but she ignored them in favor of staring into the overshadowed skeletal features of the Stone’s guardian.
“You are on Vormir, a world of desolate wasteland, and the sixth planet in the Helgentar system. None come here and yet it sits at the very center of celestial existence within the universe.”
“So what you’re saying is that there’s no life on this planet besides us, that no one visits, and that there isn’t a way on or off this bloody hellhole?”
The man bowed his head in agreement. “Not by ship.”
Hari sighed. “I suppose that means leaving under my own power then.” She grinned viciously at him, eyes twinkling with black humor. “Well, seeing as I can’t die, I’ll just try Apparating to Earth. Making an Apparition jump to another solar system would be too much for a normal person, but seeing as I have extra help, it should end well, don’t you think?”
Before he could respond, she made herself invisible and pictured the square by Big Ben, the first landmark she was sure—or at least hoped—would be available. She didn’t, after all, know if there were any magicals in this new world since the Stone apparently took her to another planet, if not another dimension. Pushing that haunting possibility and all of its implications aside, she twisted and vanished in a controlled burst of magical energy and displacement of air, Disapparating on the spot. The usual crushing sensation magnified a hundred-fold as Hari literally hurtled through leagues of space, crossing a second unfathomable distance as she drowned in now all-encompassing vertigo and dissociation.
The precious seconds it took her to travel to her homeworld—to a version of it—left her feeling completely knackered as her Disapparition from Vormir deposited her in the courtyard at the foot of Big Ben with all the noise of a thousand thunderous cannonball shots or volcanic eruption. Her magic arched crazily around her, breaking any nearby glass not already shattered by the nearly deafening sonic boom and snapping a tree in half even as it also left the ground churned. Hari groaned, rolled over, and vomited after lying dazed and winded for several long moments, not feeling that nauseated since she first Apparated. She might have wobbled when the Stone yanked them out of the Spirit Realm onto Vormir, but now her limbs fairly shook, a weakness in them unfamiliar to her.
Apparently Apparating through space proved difficult even for someone like her.
She knew she couldn’t stay there. Not with her sitting in the obvious point of origin for the waves of devastation around her. She forced her aching, trembling limbs to bear her weight, just barely managing to hold onto her invisibility as she drug herself from the scene. Worried about being too near anything odd that happened, Hari struggled to transform into her animagus form. It took far more time and effort to achieve, but when she had, she flew, even as black spots started to dot her vision, toward the top of the closet building, aware she likely wouldn’t make it to the open belfry at the top of the clock tower. She barely made it to the nearby rooftop, just shy of crashing as she touched down, stumbled, and through sheer force of will transformed into a woman again.
It was all she could do to crawl so that she lay on the lee side of one of the chimneys and out of sight from passerby below, where she promptly passed out from exhaustion.
\|/
To be continued...