“-. .-“

After they finished eating and Nicolas settled in the den to read Harry’s notes, Harry decided he’d only dig his hole deeper if he outright avoided his friends. He gave his temporary goodbyes and returned to the Pottery, where his friends had also come very early because they still had Hogwarts to get back to, unlike him.

To Harry’s conflicted relief, they hadn’t skipped any of their schooling to stay at his bedside in that dark room. They’d only done that every moment outside of classes. At Dumbledore’s direction, McGonagall had given the three of them special dispensation to spend the night at the Pottery instead of the Gryffindor dorms.

There were exclamations of relief, tight hugs, and very hasty updates on what all had happened while he was out. He’d missed the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament, the Yule Ball, and the Second Task too. Not that he’d planned to attend any of them, he had every intention to be a no-show to reinforce that he didn’t want to be in any way involved. Also, he hated crowds. Well, maybe not hated them anymore, he was doing better about that now, but he still disliked them.

This all, at least, his friends had known all along, and had leaned hard into every time the topic came up. The result of this was that nobody had found out that Harry was in a coma all this time. Ron had made special sure of that by ‘making up’ a ‘tall tale’ about Harry going to bed in a dark room and becoming unable to wake up, so you lot better not bother him until his one true destined princess charming goes and wakes sleeping beauty. Many scoffs and jeers ensued as the twins themselves lambasted Ron for being such an embarrassment to the Weasley tall tale tradition, how did he expect to sell people on anything if he was so transparently lying?

Whether Fred and George saw through it or genuinely didn’t was still unclear.

Instead, the rest of the Magical World thought Harry was being aloof and private. The daily prophet made up no end of conspiracy theories about him, but as far as Harry could see from Hermione’s newspaper clippings, they never did more than skirt the truth.

They skirted it really close, so much that Harry suspected they knew more than they were admitting, and Hermione agreed. But the poison quills continued to show restraint for some reason. Weird, but Harry wouldn’t complain.

The first task was getting a fake egg from a nesting mother dragon. Viktor Krum won first place with a Conjunctivitis Curse, followed by Cedric Diggory with a rock to dog spell, and Fleur Delacour with a bewitched sleep (she got penalized for the dragon snorting flames over her in its sleep just as she passed by).

For the second task, they had to rescue a hostage from the bottom of the lake. Fleur failed to save her sister because grindylows ambushed her, Cedric saved his girlfriend Cho Chang, and Viktor Krum saved…. Hermione. Because she was his date for the Yule Ball.

“Hermione,” Harry said calmly. “Did you consent to… being kidnapped?”

“Actually yes,” she replied to Harry’s relief. “The headmaster called me that morning to ask me, and I wasn’t the only option. They couldn’t risk us talking about it without the Tongue-tied curse, so they didn’t let us know any earlier. Or whatever else they might have used to prevent us from communicating it in writing. Dumbledore was opposed to cursing students not bound to the contest, and the other headmasters had to make a show of agreeing that another ‘leak’ like the first task was unacceptable.”

Cedric Diggory, it turned out, was the only one who went into the Frist Task blind. If he wasn’t already so good at transfiguration, he might have been in trouble.

Harry thanked his friends for being there for him, but was guiltily glad Hermione wouldn’t get to fret over him immediately. They only had a little more time to get to their first class. Through Raptor Mountain.

He saw them to the door, but didn’t go through with them.

Usually at this point he’d practice magic or sword-swinging, but Harry didn’t much find the motivation for either. He began to walk around his home. At first aimlessly, then more deliberately when he ended up in those parts of the manor that weren’t used.

Dobby kept a clean home, but he also had to attend to Harry, Charlie and Nicolas fairly often, since Harry had offered the house-elf’s services to both men when they were doing work. So while there wasn’t much dust to speak of, that was about as far as Dobby’s housekeeping went, especially in the service corridors, or the workshop buildings adjacent to the main home. Harry even found a doxy nest in the attic.

He ended up spending all his time up to noon on finally dealing with all that leftover clean-up. He even did some renovation here and there, there was a lot you could do with a reparo, the scale of that spell was so big it bordered on silly. Especially when most of the broken parts were still nearby.

All the while, he waited for Nicolas to call in again. Wondered what the man was doing, since he must long since have finished reading Harry’s notes. Nicolas had excellent speed-reading, and he would probably be skimming everything too, trying to find his trauma. Which he wouldn’t, it all happened after Harry was dead and he hadn’t included it in the notes, same as he cut his memories off at the moment his jet blew up.

It was that afternoon, while Harry sat at the table of the master bedroom’s veranda, that Nicolas finally showed up again.

The man took a seat across from Harry, dropped the journals on the table and beheld Harry calmly. “There is nothing here that would explain why you would want to burn those magazines.”

Harry hesitated.

Then he took out his wand, brought it to his temple and drew the memory he’d been keeping back. The memory of what happened from the moment Evan Lorne died, up to his reawakening on this side.

Nicolas took it cautiously, but wordlessly rose and left to watch it. Maybe back to his own home, maybe in the basement where Harry’s own pensieve was. Harry could have tracked him through the wards, but didn’t bother.

Nicolas returned half an hour later, grim and silent. He gave Harry back the memory and sat back down in his chair with a face like stone. Harry had never before seen Nicolas Flamel so angry that he had to forcefully control himself.

The tense quiet went on for so long that Harry finally couldn’t stand it. He got up, grabbed the cloak from the hanger at the door, and descended to the ground floor. There, he put on his boots and went out the door into the outside air. He was torn between dread and relief that Nicolas followed him.

“I don’t remember that life, exactly…” he hedged as he aimlessly took the first footpath, which was the one eventually leading out into the forest. It was still hard to believe one of his past lives was King Herla himself. “But I do remember what was going on in my head in that moment.” Fear. Disgust. Horror. Outrage at the betrayal inflicted on him, and he wasn’t just talking about that one leftover body snatcher resurfacing just to possess his sister and r- and commit the incest that would spawn Medraut.

Harry remembered a fancier way of talking than Harry Potter too. Of thinking too. Instead of English, his mental voice changed whenever he touched on Herla’s memories, even brief as they were, to the old Common Brittonic of his time. Which, it seemed, Harry also knew now, and would be mutually intelligible with Breton, Cornish and Welsh. You know, if a situation ever arose where that was at all relevant, what with just Cornish hanging on to life in the present day.

Barely.

“Do you know why nobody’s been able to pin a historical identity to King Arthur?” Harry asked Nicolas as they walked. Like they once did on that first walk, except they didn’t need to pretend to be unaware of each other.

The far too patient man scoffed. “Besides everything other than ‘Arthur and Medraut fell in the strife of Camlann’ being French fiction?”

“Besides that, yes.” Harry felt like he might have smiled on any other day. The impulse didn’t make it nearly so far this time. “The reason is because ‘Arth’ is the first name ever put under the Taboo.”

The Taboo was a powerful jinx which designated a word as a key to revealing the speaker's location. Voldemort had used the Taboo during the Wizarding War, to take out his bravest and most defiant opposition, and also as a tool of terror.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The spell worked more or less like the Trace spell applied to underaged wizards and witches, but with one key difference – instead of being triggered by magic, it was triggered by a word being spoken. It also worked regardless of the age of the speaker, but Harry now knew that wasn’t really a difference. The Trace only officially faded upon recognized adulthood, in reality you had to dispel it yourself, or get someone else to do it for you. That was how the ministry had kept track of the doings of adult Muggleborns for quite a while after the institution of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery.

The deception only came to light during the Second World War. Thanks to scapegoats, neither the laws nor their enforcement changed even after that. But at least the Muggleborns tended to find out about it these days, and there were enough of them – and half-bloods – that it was not really an issue anymore.

Also, Dumbledore had added a component to Hogwarts’ wards that automatically dispelled the Trace, if it detected the spell on anyone inside the wards over the age of seventeen. The castle had thoughtfully made it a usual part of its wake-up routine to double check that too, ever since.

What the Taboo did have over the Trace spell was its offensive element – it disabled all but the most powerful and mysterious protection spells. Even the Fidelius Charm couldn’t completely counter it – while the Taboo might not break the enchantment outright, it did reveal the general area around the speaker’s location.

The Taboo thus enabled the hunting, murder and control of individuals, until they themselves limited their freedom to speak, leading to great stress, terror, and frustration even if they were lucky enough not to be found, tortured or killed by headhunters.

“Legend goes that speaking the true name of the bear would summon the bear,” Nicolas said thoughtfully as they crossed into the woods. “That is why nobody knows what the bear’s true name was, and every language in Europe uses some version of ‘the brown one’ or ‘honey eater’ instead. There is ongoing effort by linguists and etymologists to reconstruct the proto-European tongues, but I’m not up to date.”

“They’ll confirm it in fifteen years or so,” Harry revealed. “The word is ‘Arth’ and it was King Herla’s original name. Herlacyning was just a nickname the little folk gave him, because he played the harlequin better than any of them.”

“I don’t know where this is going but I mislike it already.”

“You know the tale, right?”

“King Herla of the Britons meets with the king of the little folk, an elf with a red beard and goat's hooves, who is mounted on a goat. The latter offers to attend Herla's wedding, if Herla agrees to reciprocate precisely one year later. The king agrees, and enjoys a most wealthy wedding guest, whose attendants do all the provisioning and hosting to the point where Herla’s own preparations are left untouched.”

The house-elves came by their housekeeping skills honestly, at least.

“But when Herla reciprocates one year later as promised, and attends the fairy king’s own wedding in his underground realm, the three-day wedding ends up lasting three hundred years on the outside. Except Herla only finds this out when he and his men return to the surface, and discover that his old lands had been conquered by Saxons two hundred years ago, which was a hundred years after he disappeared on his wife and kingdom. He and his men will also instantly turn to dust if they dismount before the little bloodhound gifted by the fairy king jumps out of Herla’s arms. Which it never does, thus the eternal Wild Hunt.”

“Herla’s-“ Harry stopped in his tracks.

You know what?

No.

It was only a memory, it didn’t play itself out, he woke up before everything happened. He’d had indecent dreams before, and they all cut off the same way before the going got good. Or bad, in this case. This was even less than a dream, it was a memory from a dream, which he didn’t have to live through a second time. Innocence had protected his sanity, as innocence always did and always would. And even if it hadn’t…

He was nowhere as faint of heart as all this.

Harry James Potter straightened where he stood, turned to the man next to him, clasped his hands at his back and gazed at Nicolas Flamel while idly noting that they were the same height. “I am Arth Wendollau ap Ceidio. Brother of Nudd and Chof, son of Ceidio ap Arthwys, who was the great-grandson of Coel Hen the Great, father of kings. Student to who you know as Merlin, but whose own true name was Marzhin Gouez Lailoken. He was my foster father who raised me after I was orphaned, and whom I respected and loved very much. Like you.”

For the first time ever in Harry’s memory, Nicolas Flamel couldn’t find any words.

“The real reason I agreed to that pact was because the king of the little folk promised to reveal who’d cursed my name. The hosting and gifts they provided were to appease my retainers, who to a man strongly advised against going to the Underworld for any reason.”

Which would have been the wise thing, considering that elves didn’t speak in literal terms that much back then.

“I agreed anyway. After all, someone was going around murdering my people in my name. I’d had to proscribe my own name before people started to believe it wasn’t me indulging unholy urgings. I could bear not a moment more of it.”

Neither could his people.

“Besides, I thought I got along well enough with the little folk. After all, they gave me a name even more famous than the one I was forced to ban all mention of, for the people’s own good. I didn’t know that they resented being treated with the same honors and rights as any of my subjects, they thought I was condescending to them. Considered it me trying to force their kind under human rule. Also, they resented mankind’s ascendance, even Magic’s ascendance, though I didn’t know this until much later. And even if not for all that… the little folk played into the image of little jesters, because they thought it was the greatest prank ever pulled over Manu’s kind.”

Nicolas watched Harry grimly. “So when the little fairy king allied with a card-carrying body-snatching ‘goddess’…”

“It was the punchline to the ‘prank’ on me. Kindly, naïve, stupid king Arth.” Harry’s voice didn’t sound like his own at all by the end, his vocal cords metamorphing to match those of the King of the Little Folk, who’d cackled as Herla was about to be raped by his own possessed sister. Oh, sweet Danu, what was done to you? “Also, I didn’t live up to my end of the pact by choice, or in any literal way. See, there was malicious prophecy involved, and I didn’t find out until it was too late back then either. Precisely one year after my wedding was the day of the Battle of Arfderydd. You already know all about that.”

Harry turned away and resumed his walk through the forest.

“… Arderydd,” Nicolas said as he followed in step with him. “Arthuret.”

“The name is not coincidence, no.”

“At the place where was killed Gwendoleu, the son of Ceidaw, the pillar of songs, where the First of the Three Faithful Warbands of the Island of Britain battled for a fortnight and a month after their lord was slain, and the ravens screamed over blood.”

Harry grimaced. “My life isn’t remembered but my death is, and only because of the valor of my men.”

“If your life wasn’t grand, no one would have cared about your death at all,” Nicolas rebutted. “That battle, and the subsequent assassination of Urien Rheged and the defeat of the Gododdin at Catraeth, are considered the reasons for why the alliance of the British kingdoms in the north collapsed before the Angles, Scots and Picts. A tragedy is only a tragedy because the people and events that play it out were among the Great. Or could have been.”

Harry pushed a willow branch out of his way. “Regardless, my battle lines were broken and I was mortally wounded, also through the machinations of that same elf king and the false goddess he’d made common cause with. They’d been going around murdering people who spoke my name in the neighbouring kingdoms too. That’s why I ended up at war with Eliffer and his sons to begin with. The elf then stole my mortally wounded body from the battlefield and took it to his underground kingdom.”

It wasn’t just there in the other Earth, Isis and Osiris weren’t the only ones stranded here either. Set and Hathor were a definite yes, if nothing else had changed. And now, it seemed, Morgana too. Or whichever of those things took and misused her title.

“Once in Undermountain, I was treated just enough that I could wake up in time to see my sister marry the little creature, to the dark amusement of the thing possessing her. I do remember a feast too, but I thought I was dreaming while it was happening, and I still don’t know when it started and ended, I must have been drugged. Yes, she was exactly what you think, and she did indeed do what you saw beginning to happen in that memory. The little king seemed to find much amusement in becoming the cuckold in his own fairy tale.”

“That is vile.”

They had come to the end of the forest now. Before them were the Rollright Stones in all their quiet tranquillity. Unbidden, Harry recalled that the surviving writings described the little elf king as a dwarf. Which he wasn’t, but… wasn’t too far off the mark appearance-wise, if you ignored the overall size and hoofed feet. Harry’s thoughts turned to the strange, not-so-little dwarf that had been in the stone circle during the Yearly Walk. Who’d stared at Harry as he passed, with eyes that felt like fire on his back.

Was that…. person… planning to do a repeat of what happened to Arth? Finish the job the elf king started? Or was it just coincidence?

Could it be a mere coincidence?

“Do you think he meant you?” Harry asked, looking down as the echo of his past life began to fade along with all its kingly strength, leaving Harry to feel scared and adrift. “The Ancient bartender guy, who made me relive that. He couched it as a lesson, and a warning. Either to me or my ‘master.’ Did he mean you?”

“I don’t know.” Nicolas sounded offended and furious and none of it aimed at him. Or even on his own behalf. “But if the point was to sabotage your development by filling you with crippling fear of making another step down the path you’ve been walking so wonderfully, I can’t think of anything more likely to work.”

So it wasn’t just Harry jumping to conclusions about that.

Knowing didn’t make him feel any better.

“I doubt a being on the scale you experienced would consider any mere wizard a peer. But if it was aimed at me, then he was nowhere near as well-informed as he pretended. If he were, he would know that this is the worst possible thing he could have done to dissuade me. From anything. Such as researching ways to corporealize bodiless entities and do away with them.”

Harry’s head snapped up.

“I’m going to research ways to corporealize bodiless entities and do away with them,” Nicolas Flamel repeated, eyes hard and intent, and having clearly decided on this since before he even came back from the memory viewing. “Would you like to join me?”

Finally, despite everything, a tremulous smile began to form on Harry Potter’s face. “I’d like that very much.”