Harry Potter and the Elvish Magic

Harry Potter and the Elvish Magic

Chapter Ten: Borscht and K-2

"Gobbledygook is composed entirely of disyllabic words," Professor Aberforth said the next day. "Fortunately for us, that means that one of the ways you can check if you´re speaking it correctly is to see if you´re only using words with two syllables." Professor Aberforth spent most of the rest of the lesson teaching them how to produce the correct sounds to speak Gobbledygook. Fortunately, the sounds weren´t much different from human languages. The main difference lay with the inflections. Professor Aberforth then proceeded to compare Gobbledygook with Russian and !Xú.

In Ancient Runes, Professor Sprecher had them begin Sanskrit. For the first time in the class, they began to learn curses and hexes, because there were many Indian witches and wizards, and over the years they had developed many spells which hadn´t been developed in Europe at all. Harry was glad to learn them, because most of them were quite obscure and many were very inventive and hard to counteract.

Harry concentrated on his studies for the rest of the day, until dinner, when the entire student population got a huge shock.

"Good evening," Dumbledore said, smiling, as soon as they had all arrived. "Tonight´s meal requires a small amount of explanation. Our House-elves have decided to experiment with meals from other cultures, and we will be the subject of those experiments. Tonight we will be having only one course to our dinner, and it will be Russian food. May I, courtesy of the Hogwarts House-elves, present... Borscht." He sat down as vats of a thick, glutinous liquid appeared in front of them. Having no other choice, the students began eating it, and many of them actually liked it.

***

"Harry Potter!" Dobby squealed after dinner. "Harry Potter! Professor Dumbledore is asking me to take you and Miss Granger and Mr. Wheezy to his office once you is finished eating!" They followed Dobby up through the corridors to the gargoyle, which leapt aside.

"Good-bye, Harry Potter, Miss Granger and Mr. Wheezy!" Dobby squealed. "Dobby is glad to have met you again!"

"We´re glad, too, Dobby!" Hermione said, as he scurried away. They hurried up the stairs, wondering what it was Dumbledore wanted.

***

In the Andromeda Galaxy, in the year 2410

The Elvish Settlement

Harry looked shocked. His daughter, Molly, was equally bewildered. Although she was only 10, she thought on the level of some adults.

"How could they have reached out that far?" Harry said, bewildered at the magical message which had just reached them. "I mean, it´s wonderful that they want you to join, and I think that you´re probably ready, but how did they reach us?"

"Who knows?" asked Molly. "Do they always do something like this?"

"Yes," said Harry, "although I thought, when we left Earth, that we´d never see them again."

"You´re not answering my question, Dad," she said, "or at least not the one that I meant to ask. Why did they contact us? And how did they know that you insisted that I learn all sorts of Earthly languages?" The message was addressed to Molly, and parts of it were in different languages, including Elvish, English, German, Russian, French, Spanish and Welsh.

"Whenever the Order invites you to join them, they somehow contact you, and they somehow know quite a lot about you" Harry said. "When they called me, they did it when I was fifteen, and they had Professor Dumbledore, who was a member, call Ron, your mother and I to his office..."

***

Over 400 years earlier

"Hello, Harry, Ron, Hermione," Dumbledore said. "I haven´t had you in here for a long time."

"When long is a relative term," Harry offered in return. Dumbledore chuckled.

"Anyway," he said, "although I´m glad to exchange humorous, witty remarks with you, there´s another reason I called you here. Tell me, what do you know about Neuschwanstein?"

"It´s a castle in Bavaria," Hermione said. "It was built on the orders of King Ludwig II, and it was criticized by many architects of the time because rather than being a practical castle, it´s themed along what are often termed `fairy-tale´ lines. It incorporates many elements from Wagner´s operas, and today is a huge tourist attraction as well as a Bavarian icon."

"Very good," said Dumbledore, "but do you know anything about Altschwanstein?"

"Is it the evil older sister of Neuschwanstein?" Harry asked.

"Not evil," Dumbledore said, chuckling, "no, certainly not evil. Eventually, Elves increased in number so much that Dargoth could no longer act as their headquarters, and they felt that it was time to move. Dargoth was used for over fifteen thousand years, you know, and it was beginning to wear out. The elves, along with the dwarves and some werewolves, decided that they would build a castle high in the Bavarian Alps to serve as their new center of command, and so they did. King Ludwig II managed to catch a glimpse of it at one point, and he decided to build a castle exactly like it. He was the only Muggle ever to have seen it, so other people thought he was crazy when he talked about a castle on the very top of a mountain. The castle he built, was, of course, Neuschwanstein. It´s purely coincidence that their names are so similar.

"I feel that it would be best for the three of you to spend these Christmas holidays at Altschwanstein. I will be there, and so will Snuffles. It will be an opportunity for you to learn many things which will help you later on." Harry felt a sudden rush of excitement. Not only would they be able to see Sirius, but they would be able to go to a castle which looked exactly like Neuschwanstein! It sounded terribly exciting.

"Would you like to go?" asked Dumbledore.

"Yes," said Harry.

"Definitely," Hermione added.

"Wouldn´t miss it," Ron concluded.

"Good," said Dumbledore cheerfully. "Now, please don´t tell anyone about this, and if they ask, why don´t you say that you´ll be spending the holidays at the Grangers´ house."

"Professor," said Hermione, "what will my parents do when they think I´m coming home for Christmas and I don´t show up?"

"I have spoken with your parents, and they will know what to do if anyone asks them, which will probably not happen, because they are becoming increasingly hard to find," Dumbledore said. "Due to increased Death Eater activity, we have been forced to put them into greater hiding." Hermione´s expression grew increasingly grim.

***

"Today," said Professor Grubbly-Plank, "we will start what we will be learning about mountain climbing. This week´s lessons will all lead up to Saturday night, which you will all be spending on a Time Orb version of either Mount Everest or K-2." Harry shivered slightly. Their Saturday night sessions in various parts of the world were becoming more and more dangerous, although fortunately each time they were more and more prepared.

The week flew by, and nothing out of the ordinary happened except for that both Professor McGonagall and Professor Snape were incredibly cheerful. Harry managed to congratulate her on the marriage, but he had too many deeply entrenched feelings about Snape to do more than notice that he was actually somewhat nice, and didn´t take any points off Gryffindor for an entire week. Harry was also distracted because he was looking forward to visiting a version of K-2. Professor Grubbly-Plank had informed them on Wednesday which mountain they would be visiting in their Time Orbs. She had allowed them to study some things abut the geography of their respective mountains beforehand. However, the biggest shocker was on Friday.

"All magical people, by their very nature, are far more immune to their environment than the average Muggle," she said at the beginning of class. "Therefore, although you will not be allowed to sustain any injury beyond minor bruises and very, very small, uninfected cuts, you will not be having any climbing gear, oxygen masks, or clothing."

"WHAT?" most of the class gasped.

"What I just said," she said sweetly. "Did anyone have trouble hearing? Sometimes, it is rather noisy in here."

"Excuse me, Professor," Hermione said, "but I think that most people were shocked that not only will we be without any form of artificial aid, such as climbing gear, as well as suffering brain damage from oxygen deprivation, but we´ll also get frostbite!" Even Harry knew how she was partially wrong, but he allowed the Professor to correct her.

"You´re Muggle-born, and we haven´t covered this yet," Professor Grubbly-Plank said kindly, "so I don´t expect you to know that witches and wizards can´t get frostbite because the magic inside them warms their bodies. The same applies to all other magical creatures. How do you think Santa Clause and all the other elves live up at the North Pole?" Hermione blushed furiously at not knowing something that everyone else did.

"I can understand your concern," Professor Grubbly-Plank continued. "However, you needn´t worry. You´ve only had a week´s worth of training, and there´s no way that I´m letting you go into the Himalayas with just that. You´re going into a simulation of them. It´s not as cold in the simulation, you´ll fall very slowly if you lose your balance because of charms which are in the simulation, and there are no crevasses in the glaciers for you to fall into. Also, there are no falling rocks or avalanches.

"Surely you remember from your previous Time Orb sessions that many of them didn´t have people in them. This is the sort of thing you´re going into tomorrow night. Because you´ll each be on your own, you won´t be indecently exposed to other people. We need to toughen you up, and give you practice in becoming immune to the cold. One session you´ll be having soon will be in a version of the Sahara dessert. The reason we have these sessions is, to some measure, to prepare you for the real world without exposing you to as many of the hazards. Any questions?" Harry felt much, much better.

***

That evening, he was coming back from the library when he thought he saw something out the window. He whirled around, and saw that it was merely the reflection of the castle on the lake. His attention was diverted, however, to a sudden, excruciating pain. His arms had gone out when he had whirled, and one hand had gotten slashed on the sword held by a nearby suit of armor. The suit of armor apologized, and offered to take him to the hospital wing, but Harry said he could get there himself. He set off through the corridors as the armor began cleaning its sword.

Harry really didn´t want to go to the hospital wing, but the slash on his hand was quite deep and welling up with blood. Apparently Elves felt pain more keenly than the average human, too, because he really needed to grit his teeth to keep going. Harry glared at his hand.

Heal, he thought hopelessly. C´mon, heal. It was already healing abnormally fast; if he had thought about, he would have noticed. However, his cut suddenly glowed yellow and was no more as the skin knitted together rapidly, and the pain vanished. Harry stared at his hand in awe. Wow, he thought. There wasn´t even any blood where the cut had been. He wondered exactly how much he could heal by himself. However, the feeling of euphoria he began to feel was rapidly replaced by some anxiety as he realized that this was likely to be something that Elves did spontaneously when injured, and that it would not be good if anyone saw what he was doing. However, Harry turned back to the library.

In the Guide to Magical Creatures and Their Capabilities, Harry found a section which particularly fascinated him.

"However, one of the most astonishing Elvish abilities," he read,

"is the ability of regeneration. This ability is undoubtedly extremely useful for Elves, who live for millennia. Elves, at will, can spontaneously heal or regenerate nearly any part of their bodies. Some Elves, for one reason or another, have waited to regenerate body parts for several years before doing so, and have done so with complete success. Therefore, there seems to be little correlation between time between injury or removal and repair or regeneration and the effectiveness of the regeneration. This does not apply, however, to nervous tissue. Elves who do not regenerate nervous tissue very soon after injury will suffer from the same effects of injury as ordinary people would, and must seek other forms of treatment. Elvish medicine is quite proficient at healing injuries, and nervous tissue can be artificially repaired or regenerated. Some Elves have been known to regenerate more than half of their brains, and regain neural pathways which were previously lost. It is thought that this mysterious ability of regeneration is in part the source of the typically vast Elvish memories.

As to why this ability evolved, I can not say and be certain of my accuracy, but I postulate that Elves, despite the fact that their bodies and minds are far beyond those of normal humans, are human themselves, and therefore their bodies will begin to break down over their lifetimes. Ordinary humans suffer bodily breakdowns in old age, and because Elves live thousands of years longer than ordinary humans, they would therefore need a method of fixing their bodies when they deteriorate. This would also explain why Elves, for most of their lives, appear physically to be between the ages of twenty and forty. Because much of aging beyond somewhere between the ages of twenty and forty consists of decay, Elves probably repair or completely regenerate their bodies as they grow older. That would also explain why Elves typically do not lost brain volume, unlike ordinary humans, because their neural connections are regenerated."

Harry sat back in his chair for a while, thinking, before setting off to bed.

***

The next day was rather strange for Harry. Their session for the night was going to be by far their most ambitious and most exciting yet. They weren´t going somewhere close by, but somewhere which for most of them held a certain fascination: the Himalayas, home to many of the highest mountains in the world. Of course, the tallest mountain in the world wasn´t in the Himalayas at all, but no one seemed to care.

"But, really," said Hermione, as she and Harry walked through the hallways together to their next class, "why are people so excited about going to Mount Everest? It´s really not incredibly tall, but it´s on a high plateau, so it´s the highest. While I suppose that that is somewhat impressive, and it probably does have the thinnest air up at the top, Mauna Kea is a bit taller."

"But most of Mauna Kea is underwater," Harry said, "so people don´t see it all the time." Hermione snorted.

"That´s a problem with a lot of us these days," she said. "We only consider things that are within our own narrow sphere of existence. That´s why in the Ministry and in so many Muggle governments, there´s so much infighting and so little being done. Everyone thinks only about herself or himself, and no one thinks about other people´s needs and desires. Don´t you agree?"

"Yes," said Harry, "although I wasn´t really listening to what you were saying, because I was mentally congratulating myself on steering you away from grousing over how people perceive the heights of mountains towards actually talking about something worthwhile."

"I was not grousing!" snapped Hermione.

"Yes, you were," said Harry, beginning to grin. "You look like a grouse, anyway."

"What?" Hermione shrieked. "You!" He darted off down the corridor and nimbly shot up the nearest staircase. He stopped dead at the top. Hermione stopped right behind him. They could both plainly hear Mrs. Norris and Filch coming along the hallway.

"Who´s been running this time, my sweet?" Filch muttered. "Don´t worry, we´ll catch ´em. Maybe Dumbledore´ll let us hang ´em up by the ears this time." He cackled evilly. Harry and Hermione ran silently back down the staircase, and Hermione opened the door to an unused classroom. They snuck in, and Harry put a Locking Charm on the door. To their relief they heard Filch and Mrs. Norris hurry by, both being so noisy that any students would have the good sense to get out of the way. Harry and Hermione went on their way.

***

"I´d like to explain the purpose of this expedition," Dumbledore said that evening, while they were gathered out by Hagrid´s, ready to go into the Time Orbs. "The whole idea is to accustom your magic to maintaining your bodily homeostasis. It is not to embarrass you, or to have you get used to freezing temperatures. This session in the Time Orbs will be one of several which will ensure that you will be able to survive even the worst of conditions. You will be extremely closely monitored during the session, and pulled out immediately if you have any problems." Suddenly a voice spoke into his head. As always, Harry, Ron and Hermione, I will be monitoring you, so you may use all of your abilities. All three looked up at Dumbledore, who, for about a nanosecond, made eye contact. Harry was impressed. He wasn´t surprised that Dumbledore was capable of telepathy, but telepathy was quite difficult.

"Yes, Miss Brown?" Dumbledore said, as Lavender had raised a hand.

"If people are monitoring us, and we don´t have any clothes on..." she trailed off, turning extremely red.

"An excellent question," Dumbledore said. "When I say we, meaning the teachers, ghosts and house-elves, will be monitoring you, we won´t actually be seeing you. We will be mentally sensing what you are doing and what is going on around you, but we won´t actually be seeing you. It´s a version of telepathy, except for we know everything that´s going on around you. Is everyone ready?" Everyone nodded.

"Right, then," Dumbledore said, and he raised his wand, along with Professor Grubbly-Plank. The Time Orbs flew out towards them, and Harry was suddenly engulfed in a white mist...

He was standing on a sheet of ice. He was stark naked, and the wind howled past him. He could feel the cold quite keenly, but he could also feel the energy within him, keeping him warm and keeping the snowflakes, which were shooting by in the howling wind, from stinging him in the eyes. They briefly diverted themselves around him, or shot between his fingers, or between his legs. Although his glasses were also gone, he could somehow see with great clarity. The ice was burning cold beneath his feet, but it didn´t deaden them at all. Rather, he felt extremely alive, and very vigorous. He supposed that it was probably due to the intense neural stimulation he was receiving.

Even though he could have spent the night on the ice sheet, he decided that he would rather get out of the cold. He squinted, and could see some rocks off in the distance, and a slope of rock, snow and ice continuing upwards. He decided to see if he could find shelter within the rocks. He lifted a foot off the ground, and promptly fell over.

He landed sitting down, but fortunately the ice was quite smooth, so he wasn´t really hurt. Still, he began sliding across the ice sheet, going where the wind was blowing him, towards the rocks he had seen earlier. Hello, he thought, as he came up close to them. He put out a foot, and stopped himself as he reached the first rocks. He put a hand on one of them. Thankfully, it was stable, and he used it to get up.

From then on, he learned how to walk on ice. He didn´t fall over again for at least fifteen minutes, until he slipped one more time, and putting out his hands, landed on his hands and the balls of his feet. Before he could realize what was happening, he slipped again and landed flat on his stomach. Fortunately, he was now on snow, so he was cushioned excellently, but he still had a problem, because he had tumbled over the edge of a cliff.

Harry concentrated as the air rushed by him, and he suddenly changed direction and shot back up, the wind whistling under his arms as he went back up towards where he had fallen from. He decided to go farther in from the cliff edge so he wouldn´t be likely to fall again. He landed among some rocks, and cut his toe on one of them as he landed.

Harry twisted his leg so that he could see his toe where it was cut, and concentrated. Suddenly, the cut glowed yellow, and healed immediately. Harry looked around, the snow rushing by him, and wondered what he would do as shelter for the night. He knew that he ought to find at least some shelter, and set about looking for something he could use. Although there was quite a lot of snow around, most of it was being blown off the mountain relatively quickly by the roaring winds. There wasn´t much packed down, so Harry quickly ruled out building an igloo, which they had learned how to do in Physical Studies by Muggle methods and in Charms and Transfiguration by various magical methods. He wasn´t sure he could have performed the necessary spells without his wand, anyway, and he didn´t have the few tools needed to make one in the Muggle fashion.

Harry realized that the biggest problem he was facing was the wind. Although it presented no major obstacle because of his magic, it would prevent him from sleeping, which he wanted to do. Harry looked around, and realized that although the rocks weren´t being blown about by the wind, many of them weren´t anchored down by anything other than friction and gravity. He wondered if he would be able to move them around to provide a crude sort of shelter. Most of them were much, much bigger than he was.

Harry walked towards one of the rocks, put his hands upon it, braced himself, and heaved upwards. The muscles in his arms, legs and back rippled as the rock left the ground. Harry was amazed. It wasn´t even difficult to lift the rock. He carried it over to a small flat place which was slightly less windy due to the mountain´s bulk protecting it, and set it down precisely where he wanted it. He repeated the process with several other rocks, until he had formed a small, rough ring of stone. He then climbed inside, and found it to be much less windy. He wasn´t tired yet, however, so he climbed back out and picked up a rock bigger than any of the others he had carried. He walked closer to the edge of the cliff, looked carefully to make sure that there was nothing below, and hurled the rock up with all his strength over the edge of the cliff. It shot up into the air, until it was so high that he had difficulty discerning it from the clouds overhead, and then it plunged downward. Faster and faster it went, until it shot down back past him, and sped up even more until it crashed into the mountainside below, completely disintegrating. Harry shivered slightly, and went back into his ring of stone, lay down on the ice, which fortunately he wasn´t chilled by, and finally went to sleep.

***

The next morning, they were brought back out of the Time Orbs, and ended up exactly as they had left. Harry noticed some people starting in the middle of sentences because they had been talking just as they had been sent into the Time Orbs. Other people had been asleep when they had been called back, and so fell over because their muscles had lost their tonicity in slumber.

Harry went back into the castle with Hermione and Ron, and they all changed their clothes, because they still were wearing the ones they´d had on yesterday. They went down to breakfast quickly, and they all ate a lot. They tended to do that on Sunday mornings, after they had had an overnight session with Professor Grubbly-Plank.

***

Quidditch practice that afternoon was made more difficult by the pouring rain which had started shortly after lunch. Even so, they started and practiced hard. Hermione had them enchant their brooms, robes, and glasses if they had them to repel water, using the charm she´d used on Harry´s glasses during third year. This made it much easier, because although it was still difficult to see things farther away, at close range vision was virtually unaffected.

However, they couldn´t enchant the Quidditch balls without running the risk of having them malfunction, because they were already infused with a myriad of enchantments to enable them to function properly. Therefore, the Quidditch balls became very, very wet. They weren´t hurt by it, but it made it a lot harder to manipulate them, especially at high speeds while flying, because they became rather slippery. Harry and the Creevey brothers weren´t affected by this very much. In the case of Colin and Dennis, it was because they were hitting the Bludgers so hard that the wetness left them unaffected. Also, the Bludgers were moving so fast that they didn´t get very wet. Most of the water was simply blown off them. The same applied to the Snitch. Harry wasn´t even affected by the Snitch´s wetness, because at the moment he didn´t need to come into contact with it, only find it. Then, when he tried to catch it, he would be in trouble.

However, the Chasers and Keeper were having a great deal of trouble. Not only did they need to hold the Quaffle for relatively long periods of time, but the Quaffle was the largest ball and so got hit by the most raindrops, and it moved much more slowly than the other three balls did, so more of the water stayed on it. Hermione, Ginny and Neville were flying bent over to keep it from getting too wet, and they managed to slow the progression of its wetting. However, finally, when Hermione stretched out a hand to catch it, it slipped through her fingers and plummeted downwards. She shot down after it, going easily as fast as any Seeker. Harry watched her go, his heart in his mouth. What if she crashed? She might very easily die. He was going to shoot down after her and catch her when she pulled out of the dive gracefully and naturally, the Quaffle now firmly in her grasp.

Harry let out the breath he´d involuntarily been holding, and suddenly saw the Snitch, hovering over a puddle close by where she´d caught the Quaffle, although the puddle was a good twenty feet lower than where she´d pulled up. Harry lanced through the air, his broom sharply arcing downwards, and he suddenly increased his speed by a factor of ten. He didn´t speed up so much as going from, at one moment, going at about 10 miles an hour to, at the next, going at well over 100. This was supposed to be beyond the capabilities of his Firebolt, so he was probably subconsciously using his own magic to speed up his broom.

He roared downwards, the edges of the Quidditch field scrambling out of his field of vision, and began leveling off so that he was aimed right at the Snitch. It dropped a bit lower, so that it was perhaps a centimeter above the surface of the water, and Harry dipped down. His hand shot out, grabbed the Snitch, and shot back in, but not before it made contact with the puddle, sending two great plumes of muddy water high into the air. Harry shot back up, and declared the practice concluded.

***

That evening, in a room in the library, Harry began practicing with the Curse of

Destruction he´d read about in Magic. Surprisingly, it wasn´t Dark Magic, and it wasn´t hard. Harry had soundproofed the room using several charms, and had put a locking charm on the door. He´d then conjured a pencil, and laid it on the table. He pointed his wand at it, and visualized atoms. There had been diagrams of all the different atoms known to exist in Magic, and Harry visualized all of them, and then visualized them colliding, breaking apart and disappearing and causing other atoms to collide, break apart and disappear. He envisioned the destruction stopping at the outermost atoms of the pencil, and gripped his wand even more tightly.

"Perdo, perniciosus," he said, and concentrated. A jagged stream of blue-green light shot out of his wand and touched the pencil. It danced back and forth in midair for a few moments, before it vanished and there was an echoing, deep boom and a roar. The pencil disappeared. Trembling slightly, Harry took down the soundproofing charms, undid the locking charm, and went to bed.

***

Several hours later, Harry couldn´t sleep. He lay awake in bed, his eyes open.

Do you see what it is that you can do when given the proper knowledge and power? the Vampire Ruby asked him suddenly.

Yes, said Harry.

I presume that you are aware of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans during the second World War, the Vampire Ruby continued.

We learned about it in history class when I was in primary school, Harry said.

Good. In Hiroshima, in the space of about a second, over 80,000 people were killed, their bodies destroyed completely. Not even I know how many people died as a result from that bomb, but at least 130,000 people were killed. A similar thing happened at Nagasaki. Even those who survived the bomb often had their homes destroyed, lost family members, and had difficulty finding jobs for the rest of their lives, due to illness from radioactivity or other trauma, and prejudice. The ethics of those bombs are still debated today, but that´s not what we´re concerned with. You, on a small scale, did something similar to what those bombs did. Of course, you didn´t kill anything, you didn´t produce any radioactivity, and you really didn´t hurt anyone either. However, imagine if you had simply started an atomic chain reaction and not specified how far it was to go. Imagine what you´d destroy. You´d probably destroy this castle, certainly kill everyone in it, and probably level the Forbidden Forest and Hogsmeade as well. Do you see what I mean? You must maintain control over yourself. Corruption is the result of an absence of control. In both the United States and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, they developed so many atomic weapons that they both have so much radioactivity that they have to try very, very hard to keep the radioactivity from seeping out into the environment. In fact, in some cases, the scientists creating these weapons knew very well how the leaking radioactive materials were affecting the environment, yet they did nothing. Now, both countries have to work very, very hard to clean up the results of the mistakes made in their past. I´m not saying that nuclear power shouldn´t be used, but that when we don´t control our own creations, we run the risk of what will happen when they run rampant. If you don´t control your actions, and especially your magic, you have no idea of the destruction and misery you will cause. Do you understand me?

Yes, said Harry. The Ruby was entirely right.

Good, it replied. We will talk more about this later. You have learned much since our last discussion. Good night. Harry immediately fell asleep.