Death's Avenger RETURNS!!! (Patreon)

Here it is! My thanks as always go to Tomonfor his help, he is just as much help with this as he and Hiryoare for Stallion of the Line.  This is a bit of a transition chapter, but it is important as we start to see Harry getting in touch with his Chimeric Side.

Death’s Avenger Chapter 6: Progress Made is Harder Than A Mystery Solved

At first, Harry thought about outing Ebonhorn to the tribe but figured that perhaps Quetzalcoatl’s word would not be enough evidence that the black-furred Tauren was not all he seemed to be. Ebonhorn seemed to be a well-respected member of the Highmountain tribe. He wasn’t the chief shaman or druid, a role filled by an elderly Shaman named Len Oakbranch. But he seemed well-liked from what Harry had seen so far. That, and the fact that Ebonhorn was leery of Harry for some reason, stayed his hand for now. Indeed, he decided to not share his concerns even with Tyre, not without more evidence.

To get that evidence, he asked Quetzal to follow Ebonhorn around under an invisibility spell over the winter. Given that he was always quick to come back and get the heating charm on him replaced, the winter wasn’t an issue for Quetzal any longer, and his camouflage and Harry’s spellwork made him the next best thing to undetectable. Meanwhile, Harry’s time was still taken up with his druid and Shaman training and teaching runes to those who wanted to learn about them.

Almost instantly, Quetzal was able to report several things. First, Ebonhorn did not live in the town properly but lived nearby. By itself, this wasn’t all that telling, as he wasn’t the only Tauren who preferred to live away from the hustle and bustle of the town.

“The ‘hustle and bustle’? Did you really just use that term?” Harry had asked at the time, snorting in amusement. “For this little town?”

“Well, the Tauren seem to prefer small populations anyway, and I thought it fit,” Quetzal answered with an open-mouthed smile, which on a snake’s face was not nearly as humorous as on a human’s. “Although I do know that there aren’t as many Highmountain tribesmen as there were Kaldorei in that one town we stopped in.”

“True. I wonder what either race would think of the cities back where I’m from originally,” Harry mused. “Last time I checked, several million people lived in London.”

“I know you just used a word to describe a large number, but I’ve never heard of it before,” Quetzal stated, his eyes narrowing in his reptilian face as he let out a low hiss of annoyance.

“It’s not important. Is Ebonhorn close to anyone in particular? Could he be cozying up to the next chieftain after Tyre, maybe?” The reason why Harry was leery of Ebonhorn wasn’t so much his combat potential. Harry knew that would be immense if he was a black dragon in disguise, but against the whole Highmountain tribe? Harry knew the clan had at least eight hundred warriors and more than sixty magic users living in the town alone, to say nothing of the lands of the tribe beyond. Harry also knew that some of the larger families had their own small hamlets, with as many as thirty males and females of fighting age.

No, it was the idea of someone using the transformation magic to blend in and manipulate the Highmountain tribe from within, like the black dragon had the drogbar. The black dragon, Badrinath, wasn’t confident in his strength to overcome the Tauren alone. He was using the drogbar as pawns, playing the long game. And enemies who are smart enough to do that are extremely dangerous.

“He seems to be close to members of the original Highmountain family,” Quetzal stated, speaking of the family of Tauren whose ancestor had given the tribe and this valley their name thanks to his actions during the War of the Ancients.  “All of them seem to like him and almost treat him like a member of their extended family.”

Currently, Harry knew, the Highmountain family was seven individuals, four women and three men, two of whom were youths younger than even Harry’s physical age. The one adult male and his wife were middle-aged farmers who had never wanted more than to farm their land and raise their young. And while the two other women were younger, neither were leadership types. Not even Tyre’s wife, Alys Highmountain, the youngest of the three. She was instead a quiet homemaker who preferred to look after the hut and her young cousins. While her older sister… well, she was about as abrasive a personality as Harry had met among the Tauren outside of the Blood Totem’s chieftain, and that was saying something.

Harry knew from Tyre there had been at least two more, both men born around the same time as Tyre, brothers to Alys. But one had died while on the Rite of Courage, and the other had died before that, felled by a childhood disease of some kind that at times afflicted young Tauren which even Nature Magic could not stop. At the same time, the old chieftain had passed on, dying simply from old age.

That had led to a minor crisis within the Highmountain Tribe, at least according to local gossip. To hear them tell it, the tribe had been led by a Highmountain family member since Huln himself. To not have someone able to step up and take over was unprecedented. That had led to a mad scramble by the mystics and other elders to pick out who could possibly take over. Tyre had won out, returning from his trials and marrying Alys, whom he had been sweet on before the old chieftain’s demise, which had occurred while he was out on his trials. When he had beaten blooded warriors decades his senior in tests of strength and won arguments with senior mystics, it had been decided that he would make as good a chief as any, looking over the young Highmountain children until it came time for one of them to step up and take over. Or one of Tyre’s children, who would also bear the Highmountain blood.

“I have also seen Ebonhorn speak with the other druids. He does not seem to speak to the other shamans so often, but I think he is well-respected.” Quetzal shrugged as only a serpent could, a full body motion from tail tip to nose. “He also is something of a loner. As I mentioned, Ebonhorn has a house well away from anyone else’s. It is out in the woods perched over a rock overlooking one of the heat vents that keep this valley habitable. And he only rarely comes into town.”

“So maybe he’s not looking to use the Highmountain tribe. Is he just looking for something? Like that weapon from the Age of Titans held by the High Chief?” Harry mused.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I have not seen Ebonhorn do anything suspicious yet, but then again, I’ve only been what was that phrase you used on the case? I’ve only been on the case for five days at this point. Give me time; if he is doing something suspicious, I can discover it. Your own spellwork and my ability to blend into the background will see to it,” Quetzal said proudly. While he had the body of an alpha predator, Quetzal still liked to hunt like an ambush predator. It cut down on the pre-meal exercise.

Despite his misgivings, the lack of actionable intelligence forced Harry to leave the investigation to his serpentine companion.

Meanwhile, Harry eventually got to the point where he had tutored two of the younger shaman, who had proven to be steady hands with carving tools to hand over, teaching others simple runic arrays to them. Of course, Harry was still learning and experimenting himself, and neither young shaman was at the point where he could trust them to do more than copy the arrays or single runes he had taught them. But to deal with the demand for runes within the tribe, what the two shamans knew would be more than enough.

Both agreed to share with Harry a fourth of everything they traded for the work, which kept Harry fed and well-supplied with anything he wished. This let him finish work on his tent bed and start on giving him something of a wardrobe for the first time in a while, having lost several sets of clothing up to this point to damage beyond the aid of repair spells to set right. Harry wanted several sets of clothing for the winter and warmer seasons.

This freed up enough time for Harry to concentrate on his training. But there, Harry found himself somewhat stymied. He had come to the Highmountain tribe to get in touch with his chimeric self more than he had previously. In this, Tyre had taught him several druid-specific meditation methods. Harry was getting far better at communing with the forest, feeling the presence of animals near him with his mind, and was now fully conscious of his growing connection to Nature Magic. Once more, Harry’s physical abilities had begun to grow far faster than would have seemed normal back in his old world. Yet when connecting to his nature as a Chimera, he had seemingly run into yet another wall, making no progress just as he had not when training with Cenarius.

This was the case until Tyre came calling one evening near the end of winter.

Harry looked up from where he was cleaning up after his dinner at a polite clap from outside of his hut. “It’s raining cats and dogs out there, whoever you are. Get in here!”

Tyre came in, snorting in amusement and shaking his head to get rid of the water clinging to his mane. “Raining cats and… what is a dog? You have some truly odd phrases, Harry.” Tyre looked around in amused wonder, not having been in Harry’s tent since he had first arrived to spend a year with the Highmountain tribe. “What you have done with this tent is amazing, Harry. It is cold and somewhat miserable outside, even for one of my folk, yet in here, I can barely feel a chill standing by the doorway.”

Outside, it was raining badly, something that had begun about an hour ago, the kind of sleet-filed, cold rain that presaged the end of winter here in the valley of Highmountain, high up in the Broken Isles mountain range. This marked the second winter Harry had spent in the valley, and he knew it was the most horrible mix of rain and snow one could imagine. Even with their natural defenses against such, the Tauren preferred to stay inside on days like this.

Harry, not for the first time that day, wondered where Quetzal had gotten into. I hope he found someplace to hold up until the bad weather passes. Quetzal had left early that day to go hunting, so Harry had no idea where the snake had gone.

Setting that thought aside, Harry cast a drying spell on Tyre, who hummed in appreciation as he moved deeper into Harry’s hut. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it if not for your folk providing me such good material to start with. Still, what brings you out in this foul weather?” He gestured across the fire pit, where a makeshift beanbag sat by the fire, the twin of the one Harry was using. Many of the Tauren like such seats, and Harry had grown accustomed to them.

“I noticed earlier this afternoon that you were looking frustrated during our mediation training,” Tyre answered, sitting down across from Harry, wondering how it was warm in here without any visible fire until he noticed a small series of runes set into the floor glowing like coals themselves. “Ah, and here we have an example of your runic craft. But while currently I am most enjoying this particular use, and I know you have sold similar among my folk, I have to warn you about overly relying on magic like this, Harry. Using Nature Magic to help toughen your body is one thing, but the Arcana, no matter its form, should not be seen as a simple tool like this, lest  you take it for granted and are thus weakened when you cannot call upon it.”

Chuckling, Harry shook his head. “Lars said something similar, but don’t worry. The runes and stuff are simple additions. I made my hut and my bed and everything else in here by hand. And given my training with the younglings preparing for their Rites of the Earth Mother, I don’t think I need to worry about going soft anytime soon.

Indeed, living with the Tauren had begun to toughen Harry up even after he had been forced to restart, so to speak, during his elemental training. Now he looked down at himself, shirtless at present since he too had been outside in the rain and had decided to dry out in the mundane manner for a change.

Harry had real muscles visible on stomach, arms and even his sides. He also had a heavy tan to go with those muscles, but that was about the only thing that was the same now as it had been when he had begun to develop such while living in the forest before and after meeting Cenarius. There, living in the forest had made him wiry and lean. Training with actual weapons and the Tauren had rebuilt his body’s fitness in an entirely new way. I look like a beater rather than a seeker now, Harry mused, snorting a little humor as he looked down at himself before his eyes and far away. I wonder how I would stack up to the twins. They were always bigger and stronger than Ron and me, thanks to being two years older. But now?

Tyre saw Harry’s faraway look and asked, “Thinking about something from your past life?”

Harry nodded. Over the winter months, some of his past life had come out in conversations with Tyre, who Harry knew hadn’t shared any of that with anyone else, thankfully. Much like priests back on earth, druids and shamans did not share things told to them in confidence. Although Harry doubted that they would let a murderer who confessed to them live very long, as he had seen in one strange drama back on Earth with Hermione.

Earth had horrified Tyre just as Harry had expected it would. And yet, Tyre also found himself intrigued by Harry’s old world and the adventures he had there. He was always trying to pry those stories out of Harry, but it had never seemed the appropriate time to share those in any detail.

“I was just comparing myself now to when I was this age back in my old world. I was decently fit at the time, I suppose, but now? There’s no comparison.” Currently, Harry was the equivalent of thirteen years old or so, maybe fourteen. It was hard to keep track. Around the age he was at the start of his third year at Hogwarts.

“That look you had spoke of more than just comparing yourself to your past self, Harry. But I will not pry. Still, what were you like as a thirteen-year-old originally? You’re so strangely mature now for your size I can’t even imagine you acting like a Tauren child of a similar age would,” Tyre said half teasingly, half seriously.

“Well, my first time around, I was trying to be normal among my fellow wizards and witches, I suppose, and kind of failing at it. Although I would still maintain not for any fault of my own. Bloody Riddle and his belief in prophecy,” Harry grumbled, shaking his head, before pausing. “Well, that and the fact my godfather, er, a good male friend of my family, had escaped from prison where he had been wrongfully kept, and everyone was going mental about it.”

“Heh. Your summaries always make me interested in learning more. Yet you are reborn at a specific age for a reason, were you not? Tell me of the adventure that led to that,” Tyre requested, leaning back and pulling out a long pipe. It was carved to look like the end was the mouth of a bear, with the body of the pipe being marked by fish and other smaller animals.

Watching Tyre pat some of the Tauren’s herbs into his pipe, Harry paused for a moment, thinking and then nodded. “All right. It’s a long tale, though, if you want the entire thing rather than the cliff notes.”

“What would a note written on a cliff have to do with anything?” Tyre asked before shaking his head. “Ah, another strange phrase. Regardless, I would request the whole story. The better to help you, I think.”

Harry frowned at that but realized that Tyre had come here for a reason, and if he had an idea of somehow getting through Harry’s block toward understanding his new self, Harry would take it. “Well, I suppose I’ll start at the beginning, which means that summer. A house elf… call them magical spirits constrained to help around the home most of the time with their own magic… decided to take it into his head to defy his master and keep me from going back to Hogwarts.”

The story of Harry’s second year in the Wizarding World took the rest of the evening and well into that night. Tyre had to interrupt dozens of times just to ask for clarification simply because Harry’s world had so many things that Tyre’s had no equivalent of, but beyond that, Tyre was a magnificent listener, his speaking glances and silent gestures with his pipe pulled ou things from Harry that he had not shared from that time of his life with even Cenarius.

Especially when it came to the fight against the Basilisk. There, Tyre had Harry walk him through the entire battle as best Harry could remember it from beginning to end. By the time they were finished, it was well past midnight, and Tyre had to leave several hours ago to explain to his wife where he would be.

Harry finished the tail by speaking about how he had helped Jenny out from the underground cavern and made his way to the headmaster’s office, watching as Tyre leaned back in his own beanbag, humming thoughtfully as he puffed on a long pipe. “I wonder… That is a momentous story, Harry, but hearing how you became a chimera in the first place, I think it might be coloring how you see the Basilisk and Phoenix aspects of your new existence. Tell me, what do you think are the characteristics of a Phoenix?

Harry frowned at that since it seemed such an easy answer. “Light fire wind…”

“No. Those are just the type of elements you believe make up a Phoenix. Let us start simpler, then. What do you personally think when you hear the name Phoenix? How do you see them? What did that particular Phoenix, Fawkes, represent to you?”

“Salvation at the time,” Harry answered dryly before going on quickly as he saw Tyre’s serious expression. “Friendship, perhaps? Good feelings? They were, I mean, when I say they are a light-based creature, I mean they were thought of as a creature of goodness. They literally would not come near someone who felt too Dark to their senses.”

“I wonder. Perhaps that could be true, but that is not true of Phoenixes here. Phoenixes here are simple fire elementals who have taken on the form of avian for one reason or another. Yet they would have one thing in common with your Fawkes, they are both birds. Think of them as birds, not just Phoenixes, not just these magical creatures you were in awe of when you were young the first time around. And do not consider your Phoenix side a simple extension of your companion as you aged.”

He pointed at Harry with the end of his pipe. “Think not of Fawkes when you look at your own Phoenix side, but the fact that a Phoenix is a bird, an animal that enjoys flying, perhaps. Judging from your own tail, you could have that in common with them. Then expand on that. Light, fire, yes, but more than that, you need to think of the Phoenix as an animal manifestation of your own soul.”

Frowning, Harry thought about it, then said hesitantly, “You’re saying I am trying to get in touch with my own Phoenix side through the lens of believing it is a part of Fawkes rather than myself?”

“A bit of that. But I think you are also looking at it through the memory of a young man who looked at that creature with all the awe of one rescued from certain death. Do not look at it like that. The Phoenix side of you is you, Harry. Reach out to it through the things you would have in common with a Phoenix, setting aside all thoughts of your past.”

“I, I think I understand,” Harry said hesitantly, understanding what his friend was saying. I might have been setting Fawkes on a pedestal for how he helped me so often and failed to understand that my Phoenix side really is mine rather than simply an echo of my old friend. And that even Fawkes was very much an animal in many ways despite his intelligence. “And you think I’m doing the same thing with the Basilisk?”

“Only in the reverse. What do you think of when you remember the Basilisk when you think of the Basilisk blood in your system?”

“Danger, darkness, the king of serpents, evil, venom?” Harry shrugged, thinking that was obvious, not understanding why that might be a problem. “I mean, it was a…”

“No,” Tyre waved his pipe in a slashing motion in the air in front of him for emphasis. “You are indeed letting your past interactions get in the way. No creature is altogether evil, Harry. Evil has no place in the animal kingdom, and no matter how intelligent Basilisk is, it would still be an animal. Unless driven mad, animals do not kill for pleasure and do not torture their meals… Beyond need anyway,” Tyre amended, thinking of several animals who fed on other animals while they were still alive through necessity, something that was more prevalent in bugs.

“A creature could be Tainted, certainly, either through vile Arcana in the environment or by the action of others, but not from birth. The creature you met, the Basilisk you fought, it was what its creator made it. Perhaps it was easier in the Basilisk’s case because I understand from what you said of it that it was not an actual creature than it would be for a neutrally born snake, but even that is doubtful. And as for defining itself by its venom? No. No creature would define itself by how it kills.”

Tyre waited for that to sink in before demanding, “Now tell me what positives you can imagine from the Basilisk.”

Harry had to really think about that for a bit. Am I really not accepting the Basilisk side of my chimeric body because I am still equating it to the bad memories I had with the Basilisk that bit me? Is that what Cenarius meant when he said I needed to accept both Phoenix and Basilisk to truly awaken those aspects of my new self?

That made far too much sense to Harry, and he tried very hard to answer Tyre’s question. “Perhaps strength? Endurance and durability for certain. Longevity. It was ancient, several hundred years old, I think. Maybe it could be seen as a silent hunter as well? And as for elements… I have no idea.”

“Hmmm… well, that is good enough to start with, I think. That, and perhaps thinking of Quetzal more when you are meditating. Equate him to your Basilisk side,” Tyre suggested. “Push past your own thoughts, the way you are viewing these animals through a lens of your past self and grasp the soul of both creatures.” They are now a part of you, and if you look at the Basilisk side of you as if it was evil and your Phoenix side as if it was an extension of Fawkes, you will never be able to fully grasp your new body’s abilities.”

With that, Tyre reached into a pouch that Harry only now noticed he had carried into the tent with them. He set it down and pulled out several bird feathers, laying him out in a row from largest to smallest. “I think that using these as meditation tools, things to concentrate on will help you immensely. As will some of our herbal medicines. I will prepare you some for tomorrow. For now, you might want to ask Quetzal when he gets back tonight to loan you some of his skin. As a visual medium to get in touch with your own snake side, I would take some beating.”

“Especially given what you just said about thinking about him and my Basilisk side at the same time,” Harry agreed.

Thankfully, Quetzal was more than willing to let Harry have some of his molted scales. Now that he had reached his full size, Quetzal would soon stop molting entirely, but he still left behind appreciable amounts of scales, and Harry wasn’t the first person to ask if they could use some of the leftover snakeskin. Indeed, Quetzal had been approached by several people since Harry began to live among them for it.

The next day as the fumes of the herbal smoke filled his hand, for the first time, Harry felt something as he meditated on his chimeric self. He dreamed of flying, of having the wind pass through his feathers, and suddenly, he felt something else within him, something flying alongside him. The next day, he tried to concentrate on the Basilisk side of him, superimposing the image of Quetzal onto that of the Basilisk. How Quetzal hunted, his sense of humor. And finally, finally, Harry could feel the Basilisk side of him, as if his dream self had been joined by a shadow, coiled next to him, cool and patient, waiting.

For several weeks Harry meditated with his new understanding of what he had been doing wrong on the subconscious level before, always with a different feather in conjunction with a piece of Quetzal’s skin, holding them in his hand as a physical means of concentrating his mind. And on the third week of his meditation, he was finally rewarded with something.

It wasn’t a greater connection to his own chimeric body. Rather, it was to Nature Magic itself. Before this, the best he’d been able to do with Nature Magic was strengthen his body and feel nature around him. Well, that and become a greater part of nature so that animals like wolves and bears wouldn’t simply attack him out of hand. But as he came out of his meditation, Harry looked down at his hands, where they gripped the two tokens and saw that both hands were glowing green with Nature Magic. “Well, now, there’s a thing…”

This seemed to be his new plateau for the next few weeks as the heavy rains that presaged spring began to ebb away. Finally, Harry decided to take a break from that and spend a few days practicing his woodcraft with Quetzal trailing after him, shrunken down to the size of a small Python rather than his normal, in the snake’s words, “Magnificent, full-sized self.”

The next day, still wanting to have a bit of a break from what Harry thought of as his glacial progress with his meditations, Harry approached Tyre and several of the other Druids. Because he had not only been working on meditation throughout the winter. He was also working as well on the basics of druidic and shaman-style combat magic, and there were some aspects he wanted to experiment with.

“I don’t like the use of that term,” Tyre muttered, looking around at his fellow shamans and Druids. “Still, it will be a learning experience for certain.”

“And I don’t like that term,” said one of the other shamans even as he grunted and got to his feet. “Yet it will be fascinating to see how well Harry can incorporate our magic into his own style. None of us have had any luck with his spells.”

The last was said in a grumble, but one more resigned than bitter. Back with the Rivermane tribe, Lars Proudtree had first tried to replicate Harry’s spells along with his journeyman apprentice, Vol Stoneskipper. Several other Druids among the Rivermane tribe had tried similarly, and although Harry had given them some ideas of new ways to use their own spells, they hadn’t been able to replicate any of his actual spell work. Nature or Element Arcana simply could not be formed into the various types of magical spells Harry could use.

“And I doubt I will ever be able to transform into a bear or any other animal. And at the moment, it looks as if I won’t be able to use elementals at all, so I suppose into each of our lives some rain must fall,” Harry answered dryly, snickering at the groans that evoked from everyone around the fire pit. Like the other Tauren who lived in Highmountain Valley, the Tauren of the eponymous tribe accepted the fact that every spring brought with it intense, extremely cold rainfall. But that didn’t mean they liked it any more than the other tribes.

The group continued to banter amongst themselves as they left the town, heading deeper into the woods towards an area where the warriors trained themselves against one another. There was an area there for the shamans and druids to practice combat spells against one another. It was to this area that Tyre led them all, gesturing Harry forward to one side of the training area, which was almost a carbon copy of the one in which Harry had fought his little duel with Ash, Tessa, and Ren.

“I would ask that we fight at least once without the use of magic, Harry. You have been training your body very well, but I do not believe I’ve seen you actually training with that sword of yours. Not,” Tyre hastened to add, “that I want you to use that particular blade against us. But if you do not practice your sword work, your skills will atrophy.”

“Agreed, although I’m not looking forward to the bruising. But first, a magical battle, unless anyone has an objection?”

No one did, and the druids and shamans spread out. Harry was amused to note that none of them seemed to think it odd that four of them would face off against Harry on his own, but that just showed they had learned. This wasn’t the first time he had sparred with them, after all, and over the last few months, every mystic in the Highmountain tribe had learned that while Potter might be small, his bag of tricks was anything but.

“This is a training match. There will be no bloodletting, only good humor here.” One of the shamans, the oldest looking among the group who had been sitting around the fire pit announced, standing outside of the training area, watching as the others squared off against Harry. “No physical strikes, no use of weapons, only mystical arts of all types. Agreed?”

He waited until all five combatants verbalized their agreement before chopping one hand downward. “Begin!”

The shamans instantly began to craft elementals in front of them, two water and one fire elemental. The water elementals wore the forms of Kaldorei women sans breasts, reminding Harry that elementals were intelligent creatures who chose their own forms. The fire elemental, in contrast to the two water elementals, was that of a giant boar.

All three charged toward Harry, who in turn created two earth golems to fight them. He then sent an overpowered Aquamenti toward the fire elemental. This caused a mass of steam to appear, but no spell like that was a danger to a real fire elemental. That hadn’t been Harry’s plan. Instead, he used the resulting steam to back away and move to the left of where he had started.

Meanwhile, Tyre, the only one among the foursome who identified as both druid and shaman, crafted several totems. The speed with which he did so would’ve startled Harry if this had been the first time he’d faced Tyre, but it wasn’t, and Harry was ready. This time, with his own totems. “Away, away, steal my foe’s magic and return it to nature!”

The shamans’ eyes all widened as their magical attacks suddenly diverted to the multi-armed totem that appeared beside Harry. At the same time, another totem smacked down beside Harry as he intoned, “Ohn'ahra’s wind fill my form and hasten my step!”

A gleam of white buzzed across his skin, and suddenly Harry was moving even faster than normal, racing to one side to dodge a series of strikes from the Water elementals.

Harry had been very surprised to learn that the totems were kept in some kind of small pocket dimension linked to the shaman during the creation process. If you compared each type of totem to one another, something Harry had done during his training, there was a series of magical symbols, the druidic symbols for blood, bind and hold, each delineated by the creator’s blood during specific meditation rituals. All the other symbols could be made simply while you pushed your magic into the totems, but those three could not.

How the three symbols came together in this manner, Harry had no idea, but it did, although any given druid still had to be wary of binding himself to too many totems at once. And worse, once called upon, passing through from his pocket dimension, the totems instantly began to be overwhelmed by the magic within. They could not be put back into storage, so to speak, without redoing the symbols.

With his enemies on the back foot, Harry zipped across, leaping into the air where he flipped himself over a strike from one of the earth elementals and hurled down another totem in between them. “Tortolla’s weight bear upon you!”

Gravity shifted in that area of the training grounds, causing one of the shamans to blanch and fall to his knees, gasping as he tried to push himself back to his hoofs but finding his body was suddenly too heavy to move. Similarly, the water elemental collapsed under their own weight, unable to sustain their forms. The fire elemental was unaffected, however, since fire didn’t have enough of a physical form to be impacted by gravity and continued to attack Harry, charging forward and trying to push him back into a corner of the training area.

“That’s impossible! There’s no totemic spell that can do that!” Shouted one of the shamans, only to be hurled off his feet by a well-placed Bombarda spell which flew over the fire elemental’s head to strike the ground right in front of him.

“Evidently, there is now,” Tyre said dryly, backing away rapidly and hurling nature bolts towards the totem between the two water elementals, hoping it was out of the area of effect from the first totem that Harry had called upon. But it wasn’t. Instead, he watched as his own spells, a Sunfire and Starsurge, were pulled in that direction, hitting the totem with no apparent effect. “I think, Harry, that an anti-magic totem crafted by you is cheating.”

“If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying,” Harry retorted, sending a spell Tyre his way, only to watch as it, too, was deflected into a nearby totem.

For a time, the three remaining Tauren and Harry danced around one another, using their totems and magic to good effect. But Harry’s totems didn’t fade as his opponents did, and without being able to close and make the battle into a physical contest, Tyre and the two shamans were stymied.

Realizing this, the old-timer called the fight to a halt, then hopped sprightly over the intervening fence, moving forward to examine the three totems Harry had called on. Harry hastily canceled the connection between him and the gravity totem, letting it slowly crumble to dust, and the old man moved towards the other two totems, examining them closely. “The anti-magic totem is similar to ones we can carve ourselves. I think there, Chieftain Tyre is correct. Your immense magical power means this type of totem might well make all spells used against you useless in the future. If you have time to set it up, at any rate.”

“I noticed you needed to verbalize the creation of the totems. Do you think you’ll be able to get to the point where you won’t have to, like me and other master mystics?” Tyre asked, also moving forward to examine the totems. “And this speed totem is extremely well made, Harry. Well done.”

Each totem was different in many ways. About a third of the symbols were a personal preference or sign of the carver’s character that carried his or her magic. One-third was the underlying symbol structure which had to be there unless you wanted to simply cart your totems around physically, which no druid Harry had seen yet wished to. And the last third was made of more representational carvings denoting the power whose characteristics the totem was made to call upon. Like the Earth Mother to protect from spells or harden the skin of your allies, as the drogbar druid’s had during the battle against Badrinath.

Harry smiled in thanks at the praise and said he was going to try hard to get to that point, but with the need to push his self-understanding, he wasn’t certain he would have the time to practice. Then he sighed theatrically and moved over to a nearby tree, where someone had been doing some woodcraft recently, leaving behind dozens of large and small woodcuts. A wood-binding spell merged them all into a sword shape, mimicking the sword of Gryffindor, and Harry turned back to his Tauren friends. “And now, I think it’s time for you to get some of your own back on me, right?”

The chuckles he got from the Tauren were not all encouraging, nor were the ways they eagerly hefted their staffs or blunted staff axes.

As summer moved on, Harry continued to push himself on the meditation side of things as well as in terms of integrating his new totem and Nature magic into his combat style. He really wanted to push past the verbalization needed for the totem spells, or else they would be of limited utility in Harry’s own combat style of ambush.

And as for Nature Magic, being able to use it consciously at all, even in small ways, was amazing after so many years of trying. In this manner, he learned Rejuvenation and Barkskin. Barkskin was a single-person version of the same totemic-style spell Harry had seen several times by this point, far less costly in time, but couldn’t be used on other people, only the user. Rejuvenation was even better, though, being a self-healing spell that didn’t care at all about what kind of wound it was healing, entirely unlike most of the healing spells from Harry’s world, although slower than the simple Episkey spell.

Many of the other ‘first tier’ shaman or druid spells still eluded him, unfortunately. Although he had begun to see something when he was trying to create a spirit animal, his mastery of the Expecto Patronum spell helped him learn the more advanced spell far faster than he should have.

However, by this point, the Highmountain tribe had also woken up to the combat utility of runes and not just their everyday uses. One day, as the few farmers and the many hunters went about their business, Harry once more found himself in a small area marked out by red ribbons in the nearby forest. With him on his side of the field were seven other Tauren. Two shamans, two druids, and three warriors.

Barely visible through the trees across from them were thirty warriors, accompanied by five other magic users, four shamans, and one druid, Tyre in this case, who was the leader of his side of the field as befit his position of chieftain. Both sides were armed with their favored weapons, blunted, of course, and Tyre had already begun to separate his group of warriors into smaller teams.

“This is a bit more than I was expecting when Tyre said he wanted to see how runes could be used in combat. It’s almost like a war game,” Harry observed.

“War game? I understand the term, but we use it when we speak of strategy games. Yet I get the impression you mean something else.”

Harry shrugged his shoulders, not wanting to explain that the militaries in his world had often created wargames, pitting one unit against another in a specific scenario. Harry hadn’t thought the Tauren would be interested in doing something like this, but really, that was what Tyre had set up here.

Nearby, at the top of a large tree on which a lookout station had been made, the same old shaman as before stood, watching carefully. “This is going to be a full-on training bout,” he bellowed, the sound echoing across the All of you are using blunted weapons, as witnessed by myself. All magic is to be nonlethal. All elementals are to be summoned now and made to understand that point.”

The old shaman waited as his fellows did just that, and Harry noted that none of them summoned fire elementals. This made perfect sense given the battle was occurring in a forest and the fact Harry knew fire elementals who were capable of combat didn’t really have many non-lethal (or at least exceedingly painful) attacks regardless of their power level.  Huh, come to think of it, why did Faar Gleambright use one against me in our match a few months ago? Ass.

“There will be no grudges, no hard feelings after this battle, no matter who wins. Do all understand and agree under the eyes of Mu’sha?” The rumble the old shaman got this time was far louder than the one he had gotten from Harry and his five opponents several weeks back, and he nodded firmly. “Excellent. In that case, begin.”

With a quick flick of his wrist, Harry flung out his hand, launching a wide-angle Bombarda spell downrange at the ground right in front of his opponents, who had just as quickly begun to scatter. While the spell shattered several trees, it only caught one of the enemy Tauren.

And the opposing Tauren had been prepared. Tyre had used the bulk of the other fighters to block the fact that he had already begun to conjure up totems, spreading iron bark skin totems across the battlefield for his companions and then creating an anti-magic totem. “Well, crud.”

At the same time, his own team had not been idle. The Elementals on his side roared forward while the shamans split up their concentration, one working on summoning totems and the other on the Astral Bulwark spell, a spell meant to give those touched by it greater resistance to physical damage despite the name. At the same time, the two druids worked together to create a Violent Typhoon spell, spreading it out in front of their team. Spread out, the spell didn’t have the impact it would have otherwise, but it still slowed the enemy's charge toward them, forcing the enemy mystics to cancel or overcome the spell.

The warriors raced forward, howling and raising their blunted weapons, while others stayed back, spreading to either flank, hurling spears forward from large quivers on their backs. Others fired arrows from the massive bows that the Tauren could use, forcing Harry and his companions to duck or cover. As the warriors and enemy elementals closed, Harry’s new gravity totems were quick to halt many of the charging Tauren in place, crumpling them to the earth while the elementals of his allies moved forward to battle the elementals of his opponents.

And then, runes got involved.

Harry was no Master Rune Carver. He had only been studying them since coming to Azeroth, after all. But what Harry did have were books on the subject and an… inventive… nature. What he could do with them varied wildly, but all of it made for a very bad time for the enemy.

A shield went up around two of the warriors, protecting them from the arrows and spears of their fellows while allowing their own to pass through. Two of the enemy warriors went down, hit by the blunted arrows of Harry’s team. Elsewhere, warriors froze in place or were tossed aside by other standard defensive arrays.

Those were the more prosaic constructions, based on the books he had read, not ones he had come up with. There were several of those types as well scattered around the battlefield.

Elsewhere, swamps appeared as Tauren stepped into the area of effect around another runestone, Harry’s attempt to recreate a Weasley Wheeze succeeding dramatically. Other Tauren found themselves flung into the air as gravity reversed on them. Still more ran forward to destroy the enemy totems, only to run into still more runes, runes which caused loud screaming noises to bounce around the woodland or which caused illusions – simple ones admittedly of other Warriors – to appear all around them, distracting them and making them easy pickings for Harry and the shamans. And others, perhaps most disturbingly to the Tauren, shrank them as they entered their range while still more conjured up vines, the vines springing out from the trees those rune stones had been placed on.

Meanwhile, the druids had finished summoning up their totems, and Harry felt tougher, stronger and faster than ever before, the effect of the totems combining.

A few runic arrays didn’t work, instead fizzling out or exploding, but most of the ones Harry had prepared for this fight worked very well, to his happy surprise. With them involved, the battle, which should have been bloody but one-sided, was very even.

Later, Tyre Fleetforest and his senior advisors sat in a small clearing made by the battle. Around them, the magic users and warriors, all healed from their various bruises and broken bones, moved, cleaning up after the wargame.

“…I honestly don’t know if I should be happy that my team still won or annoyed at how badly it could have gone if you had been allowed to use more of your high-tier spells and Quetzal, Harry.”

“Those runes are, they are a nightmare to contemplate fighting. The only way would be to sweep them off the field first,” Gren Holdstone murmured.

Beside Gren, Lyra Highmountain nodded firmly. She was the only member of that family who was a member of the chief’s council and was known as one of the best archers in the valley, but she was also incredibly standoffish and caustic to the point no one wanted to be around her for any length of time. She was also the tallest Tauren woman Harry had seen, although her proportions were far less… bulky than most. “That, or lots and lots of arrows, a veritable arrow storm or a spell, like Typhoon. The little creature’s runic arrays are not insurmountable, but you surely need to prepare for them.”

“We started to use that spell near the end of the battle,” one of the shamans on Tyre’s side stated, as Harry’s eyebrow began to twitch at the ‘creature’ comment. “But even so, these were only the direct combat versions of Harry’s runes. And he had barely a week to create them. There are less direct ways his runic arrays would change how we view warfare. And I am not certain I approve of it.”

For a moment, the Tauren all looked at one another silently, faces troubled, Even Lyra’s, and then Tyre nodded in agreement. “I shudder to think what the Bloodtotem tribe would think of this kind of combat potential. We just staved off the attempts by that blasted black dragon to cause a war between us and the drogbar. The knowledge that these runes could make us so strong, those who think like the Blood Totem tribe would want us to expand, to push out past our peaceful valley here. I, I do not think that would be good for our clan.”

Harry winced at that. He could all too easily see Tarn Fansnapper trying to convince his people to launch wars of conquest out of the valley. The valley itself would give them a near unassailable base, and with his runes, Harry doubted they would face much opposition from the drogbar or anything else they faced out there. “I wouldn’t be against seeing your people spread out beyond your valley. But if you did, eventually you’d run into the Kaldorei settlement, and that I would be very much against. And that kind of expansionistic attitude does not seem in keeping with your folk’s beliefs.”

“Truth.” One of the other shamans said, shaking his head as he stared over the wreckage they had caused throughout the combat area. Other shamans were using Nature Magic to repair the damage done to the trees and other plants. “I am thinking we need to stop looking into using runes for warfare. We can keep on using runes at times in peaceful ways, but I do not think we should experiment further with large-scale usage.”

Tyre nodded firmly, and after a moment, the rest of them nodded. “There is no way we could keep such skills a secret, and already I know that your selling your runes has spread to the other tribes, Harry. We cannot even hint to the Blood Totem tribe that such this is possible. They are my fellow Tauren, and I do respect and like Tarn well enough for the most part, but their aggressive tendencies tend to push them in directions we as a people should not go. If we are faced with a threat against our lives here in Highmountain, we can bring up the idea of runes again, but not before.”

Harry nodded, understanding the decision but also thinking that it might be a little shortsighted. Still, up here in their valley, the Highmountain tribes are truly unassailable. By anything on the ground anyway. They really don’t need my runes to be so dangerous. “I’ll agree with that on everything but the shield arrays, as I think they aren’t as much of a game changer but can keep a lot of your warriors alive if used appropriately.”

Lyra made to comment, but Harry continued, speaking over her in a way that caused the tall Tauren woman to glare at him, which he replied to with a beatific expression.  “You’ll have to convince Redhorn and Deepdelve of it, though.”

Those were the two young druids who had taken to learning the runes so well that they had been able to reproduce the simple sort in Harry’s stead. Both of them were out with the hunters today instead of taking part in the mock battle.

The others all agreed, and Harry tabled the idea of further experimentation in this area. That didn’t stop him from continuing his own experiments with runes, specifically on armor and more permanent arrays on his clothing. Harry was determined to, once he was able to figure out how to re-create jeans, make certain that they survived the next time. Leather leggings were just not doing it for him. Beyond that, well, no one seemed to object to the use of runes to keep smells away, heat up huts, or to enlarging small bags into weaker versions of Harry’s trunk.

As summer turned into autumn, however, Harry set aside his own projects, knowing that soon he would need to leave the Highmountain tribe to head on to the Sky Home tribe. Harry was looking forward to it since the Sky Home tribe was the tribe that was most at home with air elementals and druidic flying forms. Harry had even heard from some of the other Tauren that they had bonded with giant eagles and could ride them, but he hadn’t seen any himself yet.

But Harry refused to leave without first figuring out the mystery of Ebonhorn.

When Harry moved to confront the man, he ran into a problem: Ebonhorn ran away from him. Every time, every single time he spotted Harry, Ebonhorn would turn and walk away from whatever he was doing, regardless of what he was doing or who he was talking to. He was polite about it and would make excuses, but Harry knew it was his presence that was making the man so nervous.

“I wonder why?” Harry mused as he once more saw Ebonhorn turn from where he had been going and head back the way he came to get away from where Harry had just stepped around the corner of a hut. “What do you think, Quetzal? Do you think he hates me for some reason and doesn’t want to rock the boat by interacting with me? Or does he think we’re onto him and that staying away until I have to leave would be enough to save him?”

? Quetzal’s tongue flicked out several times as he closed his eyes, ruminating for a few moments.  “We have not seen Ebonhorn do anything suspicious or dangerous. And having seen him interact with the tribe, I do not believe any longer that Ebonhorn represents any kind of danger to the Highmountain tribe or even to you .” The snake’s tone turned teasing, and he smiled without opening his eyes, hissing in humor. “Not everything needs to be about you, after all..”

”HAH!  Well, true, it's just that in my life, strange mysteries like this always revolve around or were because of me for some reason. I guess I will need to realize that’s not the case in this world. But while he might well have been here long before I arrived, that doesn’t mean his goal is as peaceful as his methods might indicate.

“Perhaps not, but his running from you is a pure prey response,” Quetzal observed. “So whatever he is here for, he is scared of you.”

Harry frowned at that. “He’s scared of me? Why?” Harry well understood his own abilities, and alone he certainly was no threat to a black dragon.

“That I could not tell you, but I believe we will need to figure out a way to talk to him regardless. Or else this mystery will eat you up inside. You humans seem unable to set such things aside,” Quetzal added in a tone of superiority.

Snorting at that, Harry nodded. “You’re right about that. So let’s see if we can set up some kind of meeting with him.”

This proved to be very difficult. Because not only did Ebonhorn run away when he saw Harry, but he did so when Harry was simply in his vicinity. Harry was able to tell this by using the second fire spirit he had been able to make a contract with. While his attempts to call on water or earth elementals had not gone anywhere, and he had nearly killed himself again when trying to commune with air, the fire elementals at least were willing to talk to him.

This second elemental was a tiny sparrow-like fire elemental named Tricksy. Harry believed it was quite aptly named, as it enjoyed playing tricks on people, flying through their huts, buzzing their heads, causing nearby fires to go just a little bit out of control, and finding out secrets.

So Tricksy was quite happy to help in trying to track Ebonhorn, and it was from using Tricksy’s eyes that Harry watched Ebonhorn turn away from a road where Harry had been hiding. Not magically, admittedly, just around the corner of a hut, leaning up against it as if he was contemplating a carbon in his hand. But even so, Ebonhorn should not have been aware of his presence. But he was.

“His reactions to your being nearby, it seems to be some kind of magical presence or scent? Much like how I was able to find out that Ebonhorn himself was not a Tauren, he seems able to figure out where you are at any given time.” Quetzal observed.

“Well, if it is a physical scent, I can probably do something about it. Magical, that one is a poser unless my invisibility cloak hides that too. It might,” Harry said after a few moments of contemplation. But I would dearly like to not use my invisibility cloak within the town.”

“In that case, we can ambush him near his house. Although not on his property. Like any magic user, trying to come upon a magic user while he is at home is not a good idea,” Quetzal drawled. A fact that even Tricksy agreed with, bobbing up and down in midair to show her agreement.

So it was that Harry had Quetzal scout out the area between the town and Ebonhorn’s home, finding an appropriate place for Harry to hide himself using his invisibility cloak. This proved to be a small, forked tree, which allowed Harry to observe the small trail leading from Ebonhorn’s home to the high mountain tribes town in either direction. With the invisibility cloak on, Harry didn’t need to worry about being seen, although if it rained, admittedly, that would give away his position. But as it was, Harry waited there, with Quetzal on the other side of the road hidden under spell work and his own camouflage, as Ebonhorn made his way towards town.

When Ebonhorn was in front of him, Harry spoke, pulling down his hood and letting his face be seen. “Shaman Ebonhorn, I believe it is…”

That was as far as Harry got before he had to fling himself forward into a diving roll as a lightning spell went off, crashing into the tree he had just been purged in. “Okay, so maybe I was being a little overdramatic!”

Ebonhorn did not reply, instead readying another spell, this one summoning up an elemental to one side of where he stood, a massive water elemental the size of a two-story building and built like a giant lizard of some kind. “You will find that I do not take kindly to being surprised…” Ebonhorn’s voice trailed off as he saw Harry’s face, and his eyes widened, and he took several steps back, going from angry and surprised to frightened within seconds. “You!”

“Me. And you should be thankful that I have such good reflexes. If you had killed me and I had to go through the last two years of growing up again, I would be most annoyed,” Harry drawled, standing up and holding his hands out to either side of his head to show that they were empty. Of course, with magic users, that didn’t really matter, but the thought counted, at least. “I’m here to ask you why you’ve been so set on avoiding me.”

“I, I haven’t. Chieftain Tyre has been seeing to your education most admirably. There was no need for any of us to step…” Ebonhorn began, pulling himself together, although he still seemed a little frightened just by being near Harry.

That, despite the fact Ebonhorn seemed to be gaining control of it, caused Harry’s jolt of adrenaline to disappear, and he held up his hands peaceably. “Peace. I’m not here to fight. I’m just here to solve a mystery.”

He waited until Ebonhorn seemed to regain full control of himself and then backed away, using an Aquamenti idly to put out the fire that Ebonhorn’s lightning attack had started in the tree that he had been hiding in before leaning against it. “That mystery has to do with you, Ebonhorn. I’m not talking about why you’re avoiding me. I’m talking about why Quetzal thinks you smell like Badrinath, the black dragon we fought in the Drogbar cavern.”

That made Ebonhorn start, and he stared between Harry and Quetzal, who had just moved forward, canceling his camouflage.  But Harry simply stood there, holding his hands in the air, doing nothing but looking back at the older Tauren.

For his part, Ebonhorn took several steps backward but made no move to flee entirely, rather simply putting more distance between himself and Harry. So much so that they were at the very limit of what Harry would think was talking distance, but he wasn’t about to try to push for anything more.

“I, I am a black dragon,” Ebonhorn began, causing Harry’s eyes to widen in shock at the admission and for his hands to clench into fists. But before he could do anything precipitous, Ebonhorn hastened on. “But I’m not corrupted!”

“…. I thought that all of the black dragons had been corrupted through Deathwing, who in turn had been corrupted by the ancient ones. How is it that you avoided that?”

Originally, the black dragon flight had been guardians of the earth, watchers of deep places and the secrets therein. But sometime during their history, Cenarius had not known when, Nethalion, the Aspect of Earth, the leader of the Black Dragon Flight, had become corrupted by the old gods. Eventually, during the war of the ancients, he turned on the other dragon flights, first instigating a scheme to weaken them and then wiping out hundreds of thousands of other dragons via some massive enchantment Cenarius had not gone into detail about, breaking their numbers forever.

Ultimately, Nethalion, who had at that point taken the name Deathwing, had been forced to retreat, to hide away in some deep place within the earth, and many of his black dragons had been hunted down by the other Dragon flights. But it was fact, or so Harry had supposed before this, that every black dragon had been corrupted by Deathwing, twisted into evil versions of themselves. Still, I of all people should know that absolutes are almost never accurate. And he’s talking to me rather than attacking, which is a plus.

“I was hatched at the start of the war of the ancients, and my egg was purified by Huln Highmountain. Being here, in this valley, it keeps the corruption from Deathwing at bay,” Ebonhorn said, still sounding a little scared, which was extremely odd from such an elderly, powerfully built Tauren.

“I… see, or rather I don’t see, but I have to presume that’s tied to that weapon that Tyre refuses to let me examine?” Harry said, having asked more than once to examine the Hammer of Khaz’Goroth. But Tyre refused to let him, saying there were some things that even friends could not ask of the chieftain of the Highmountain tribe. And that weapon was too sacred for his people to let anyone simply examine the way Harry wanted to.

“I believe so. Obviously, since I was in my egg, I was not exactly conscious during my cleansing,” Here, Ebonhorn actually sounded somewhat caustic, having fully recovered his self-control although still not looking very comfortable near Harry. “But I believe it does have something to do with both this valley and that item. I have never strayed from Highmountain for fear of falling prey to contamination. And to repay Huln for saving my soul like that, I have remained here as a guide and advisor to his family. I have to change my appearance every sixty years or so, but I have always lived here ever since the War of the Ancients.”

Harry did not question how Ebonhorn had kept his secret for so long. He came from the Wizarding World. There were many mysteries and strange things there that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, scrutiny that never came. People tended not to ask questions of such things, and Tauren were probably even less likely to wonder about a shaman like Ebonhorn than humans would be.  Rather, Harry concentrated on the other half of what Ebonhorn had said.

“Okay, that makes some sense, I suppose, or at least I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, given that weapon was a Titan construction and able to injure Deathwing. With that, I can see that it might make sense that it would be able to be able to cleanse the Taint of the Old Gods somehow.” Although how it could do that, instead of simply destroying his egg, I don’t know. Maybe sometime in twenty’s years or so, Tyre will have mellowed on that no examination of the ancient religious object rule.

Setting his frustration on that score aside, Harry crossed his arms and looked at Ebonhorn thoughtfully. “That explains what you are and why you are here. But it doesn’t explain why you are afraid of me. That was what really clued me into you being different in the first place. If you hadn’t been so obviously leery of me, I wouldn’t have sent Quetzal to snoop.”

Ebonhorn scowled at that, shaking his head. “You don’t know? How can you not know? To my senses, you, you reek of Death!”

Harry frowned in turn and was about to reply when he paused, one eyebrow rising in surprise. “You said Death with a D there, didn’t you?”

“Yes!” After exclaiming like that and seeing Harry confused, Ebonhorn took a deep breath. That bothers me on two levels. First, I am a Spirit Walker. I commune with the dead, using mediums to call forth dead spirits to speak to the living. As such, I am very much in tune with the power of Death. Not necromantic energy, but Death. I commune with those who have passed on to the next realm. Necromantic energy is a corruption of that power, taking from that realm souls and forcing them into an un-life. Understand?”

Harry’s frown deepened as he felt a… he didn’t know how to describe it, a kind of roiling in his mind, a part of his mind… or was it his magic? Whatever it was, Harry realized that Death had most definitely marked him more than he had thought. “I… I understand, yes.” I don’t know if Death cares about the distinction between what Ebonhorn calls a spirit walker and raw necromancy, but I can see it.

"Good. So believe me when I say you absolutely reek of Death! Not your magic, you are not using necromantic energy, but your soul is very strangely marked by the power of one who has been beyond the veil between Life and Death.”

That line caused Harry to start, wondering if that was because he came from another dimension or because of his odd method of resurrection. It doesn’t sound like it. Yes, it definitely appears that Death did something to me, the utter bitch.

“More than being a problem for me as a Spirit Walker, that is a problem for me because of my cursed heritage. When my father, who shall never be sufficiently damned, used what he called the Dragon Soul in the War of the Ancients and betrayed the other aspects, he somehow was able to use the power of that creation to take the power of Death into himself, empowering him further, becoming both the Aspect of Earth and, in a way, an Aspect of Death. And all of us who are related to him, even me, despite my uncorrupted status, became very in tune with Death. It makes us stronger, immune to disease and more, but the, the touch of it in you, for some reason, it scares me. I cannot explain it more than this,” Ebonhorn finished.

“… I did not anticipate this,” Harry said honestly. Although I am willing to wager dealing with this so-called Aspect of Death is part of why she sent me here. “I was told by Cenarius that I had some Death Magic within me, but…”

“Cenarius is tied into Nature Magic and life. He is also immortal. The touch of the Death within you would not seem so great to him as he is not in tune with it as I am,” Ebonhorn explained. Although he had never met the even more ancient Cenarius, he knew of the demigod. “How did you come to be so touched?”

“That is a tale and a half. How about this, you go into more detail and how you were saved by Huln, and explain all you can to me about the Dragon Flights, and I’ll tell you how I arrived here in Azeroth,” Harry proposed.

What followed were several revelations on both sides of the conversation. Ebonhorn never seemed comfortable throughout, unable to push through his discomfort with Harry’s presence. But he was willing to talk at least, so long as Harry stayed well away from him anyway. Harry got the impression that despite it being several thousand years since the War of the Ancients, Ebonhorn was still somehow sheltered, maybe? Or perhaps just not used to being outside his comfort zone? He knew a lot about Tauren, their customs, and life here in the valley. Yet when it came to his own personal experiences, it seemed like Ebonhorn had not experienced as much as you would expect from a being so ancient.

Still, Ebonhorn did know quite a bit about the War of the Ancients, and more about the rest of the Dragon Flights, saying that such information was simply part of being a Dragon. That confused Harry, but he figured that for creatures as magical and intelligent as dragons, it kind of made sense.

In return, Ebonhorn was at first very intrigued at the idea of Harry coming from another world or perhaps even another dimension and then deeply concerned by the fact that he had been sent here by a manifestation of Death the Eternal, one of the ultimate forces in the galaxy, to right wrongs in the future. Somehow, Ebonhorn simply knew that his father, Deathwing, would be involved in some way in that. And he shuddered to think of that confrontation. Harry might look mortal and might still be young for his own species, but on the magical level, Ebonhorn knew that the physical was a lie and that, eventually, Harry would be powerful indeed.

Through the sharing of tales, Harry and Ebonhorn got to know one another. They would never be friends. Ebonhorn’s automatic leeriness of Harry was too much to overcome, and in Harry’s mind, Ebonhorn was a little too placid, a little too prepared to just sit in safety. Still, he was quite happy to have at least solved the mystery.

Harry’s time with the Highmountain tribe ended about a month and a half after his discussion with Ebonhorn. During the last month and a half, he had come close occasionally to figuring out his chimeric self, but he wasn’t quite there. That wasn’t to say he had made no progress…

“Harry, I realize that I don’t know much about your species, but I don’t believe it is normal for you to be on fire, is it?” Tyre asked, staring at where Harry sat in the middle of his hut, his entire arm to one side on fire.

Harry came out of his herbal-induced meditation, blinking and fighting back the urge to say something like the ‘colors, the colors’. The herbs the Tauren used were really powerful stuff. Instead, he stared at Tyre. “Could you repeat that?”

“Your arm, and your head, they’re on fire,” Tyre answered helpfully.

Blinking again, Harry looked down at himself and stared. His arm, indeed, was on fire. And not because Tricksy had set his sleeve on fire again for a practical joke. No, this fire was a hot red fire, and it was coming from his skin, but it wasn’t burning him. Instead, it felt warm, soothing, almost gentle.

Soon after, he lost whatever connection he had forged with his Phoenix side for a few moments there, the fire going out, and yet, it hadn’t left him entirely unscathed.

As the fire faded, Tyre looked closer at the top of Harry’s head, snorting in amusement. “Is it normal for humans to change their hair color so quickly?”

Harry conjured up a mirror and stared at his own hair for a moment. Right above his lightning bolt scar and slightly to the left, there now was a long streak of reddish hair mixed in with his normal black. The hair was as fiery red as the images he had seen occasionally of his mother’s hair, and Harry gently reached up and touched it, smiling faintly. “Well, will you look at that?”

Unfortunately, there had been no progress on his Basilisk side, or at least not that much. He was starting to understand snakes better things to so much time spent with Quetzal and alpha predators more so, but a direct connection to his Basilisk side still somehow eluded him.

Still, he was making progress, and that satisfied Harry for now. It proved that he was able to make progress at a normal human level rather than the far slower Kaldorei fashion he had been learning with Cenarius.

OOOOOOO

The Skyhorn tribe lived at the farthest, highest point of the valley, putting it well away from the other three clans. This wasn't because they were isolationist like the Bloodtotem tribe nor had this happened overnight. But they had eventually migrated up there because of their growing relationship with the Giant Eagles that made the mountain range of the broken aisles their home. Because of this, Harry and Quetzal took nearly 2 weeks to cross the valley. Admittedly, Harry could have had them moving far faster than that, but he had wanted to take his time and explore the valley a bit more. After all, thanks to his trunk and his new hut, which he had designed to be able to take down and put up quickly, it wasn't exactly a hardship. Even better, one of his main missions once he figured out what the Highmountain tribe specialized in had been fulfilled. Harry now had an actual wardrobe, which allowed him to change out of things when they got dirty. After having lost what little of his clothing from Earth he’d been able to bring along, this was the height of luxury to Harry.

The valley narrowed as the traveler moved away further away from the central area. On the tenth day after leaving the Highmountain Tribe’s territory, the forest, heavy for the valley, began to give way to more sparse brush. Here, Harry found he was able to look in either direction and see the mountains around the Valley in the distance in a way he hadn’t been able to since he and Tyrande had arrived.

And as he did, Harry paused, staring up into the sky. “Hmm…”

Next to him Quetzal also paused. Harry had turned him back into his normal size a day ago when they ran into an extremely angry mountain lion. Quetzal had taken it in his head to take the lion on alone, and Harry had let him, knowing that the Needlespine Shimmerback’s poisoned spikes would let him do so easily.

Now the massive snake, who could lift his body to be taller than any Tauren and was about twice as long in the body, shifted his head around in a circle, wondering what Harry was looking at. "You and your fascination with birds," he said at last, having found what Harry was looking at, a series of small dots in the sky above them.

"Those aren't just birds," Harry said, and Quetzal only realized then that Harry was enhancing his eyes with Nature Magic when he turned to look at his companion, and saw the telltale green light coming from his eyes and face. This was a modified version of the Eagle Eye technique he had learned while trying to get to know {}, much to both of their annoyance, the snake remembered. "They aren’t moving right to be just birds… it almost looks like a patrol pattern. I believe we are seeing the first sign of the famed Eagle Riders of the Skyhome Tribe. And I am even more interested in living with them for a time."

Harry pressed on from there. The ground noticeably began to rise up underneath them, the sides of the valley coming closer and closer throughout the next three days, until finally they saw the small side trail marked by light blue painted rocks that they had been warned to look out for. Quetzal looked at it askance, then in the direction they had been going and around them, where no tree could be seen, only rocks and heavy brush, and no other true path either. "And that is truly the way up, is it? It looks like any other portion of this part of the valley, and I use that word with some hesitation considering how the valley seems to be coming to an end here."

"True. But remember, we were told that they lived above the valley floor. The only way they could do that is if they lived in the mountains that marked the edge of the valley, so…" Harry gestured, and then moved forward, before pausing, and looking back over his shoulder at Quetzal. "You might be a bit too big for this. Ready to be shrunk again?"

"More than. At least once I am smaller, you can do all the walking," Quetzal snarked.

Harry snorted at that, and after exchanging a few more insults with Quetzal, had shrunken down to the size of a garden snake, letting Quetzal shift up onto his shoulders like the world's ugliest necklace. And the prickliest, seeing as Quetzal's back was covered in the needles spikes that gave his species their name.

However, shrinking Quetzal quickly proved to be a verygood idea. Not because the way was difficult, at least at first, but because the trail was so narrow. But eventually, the trail did begin to get quite steep, so steep that Harry thought about using his limited attempts at hovering or levitating off the ground to make it easier. But for some reason, perhaps his basic stubbornness, Harry decided to keep on pushing forward physically. The endurance Nature Magic gave him was up to the task, and Harry refused to let the path beat him. If the Tauren can do this, so can I.

By the time the sun was high in the sky they were high enough for Harry, with the Nature Magic helping his eyesight, to see the eagles above them. Every he spotted them there were four or five of them in the air at once, moving in different directions. Now Harry knew for a fact that they were patrolling, and he wondered if there were other patrols elsewhere in the valley that he had never noticed before to watch out for aerial threats.

More importantly to Harry though, was the fact that those Giant Eagles did indeed have riders. From here he still couldn't make out much detail, but he could see harnesses along their bellies, and the glint of what looked like metal on their talons. "Oh yes. Oh yes! Roger my experiments with brooms and whatever hollow, riding an eagle has to beat that!"

Quetzal grumbled along his neck, shaking his head from side to side as he hissed in anger. "I fail to understand your fascination with flying. Why ever would you not want to be on solid ground? Besides, in the air, you're always so much more obvious than if you are able to hide on the ground. There is no cover, and you cannot as easily look behind you."

"Hah, that’s the ambush predator in you talking, Quetzal. There are other ways to fight, and just think of how fast you can move, how much you can see. And, how much fun it is!" Harry exclaimed excitedly, once more sounding like his physical age.

Harry hadn't been able to do much with his experiments in terms of creating a permanent flying broom or object. That kind of runic array was well out of his reach at the moment, and his experiments with it had resulted in both embarrassment and some destruction over the past two years. He could of course create something that would float for a while with spells, but actually fly without needing to constantly redo his charms? That was beyond Harry for now.

But flying while riding on a Giant Eagle? Well, that almost sounded as much fun as being on his old Fireball back in school. So long as I can find a bird with the right temperament anyway.

For the rest of that day Harry pressed on, going higher up the side of the valley, the way becoming steeper, until it shifted to the side and began to level out for a moment. Harry wondered if that meant that they were close to the end of their journey, and wondered what the Skyhorn tribe would be like if they made their home in this kind of extremely rocky terrain without much in the way of flat surfaces around.

But he was wrong. Instead, the trail led to a sheer cliff face, across from which a large rocky outcropping could be seen, sticking out from the rest of the mountain at an angle. The pathway here was the first portion of the pathway to be marked by a safety railing, and ahead of him, connecting the trail that he had been following to a trail that started on the side of the outcropping, was a long rope bridge.

Along his neck Harry felt Quetzal shiver. "I am so very thankful that you are doing the walking right now, Harry. Not only does that thing look like it would not take my weight, but I would never trust it even if it did!"

"Actually, I am wondering if that is some kind of test," Harry mused, cocking his head thoughtfully to one side. "We’ll know if the safety railings fade away as we go forward."

Quetzal was aghast. "What are they testing you for? Suicidal courage?"

"Fear of heights at the most basic level I suppose. And maybe this was some kind of agreement with the Giant Eagles. They would not respect anyone who was not willing to come and meet them at their height?"

That reminded Harry of a children's book he did read, something about a family being lost on an island with dinosaurs. He’d read it in a library once when hiding from Dudley, and had come back to it several times as he grew older and could make out more of the words on his own. And now I can't even remember the name of it. Damn.

Above them an eagle’s cry came on the wind, and Harry smiled at the noise before making his way forward onto the wooden bridge. It swayed dangerously in the wind, the wind whistling and hissing around him, but Harry had never had any fear of heights, and certainly had not gained such since coming to Azeroth. He made his way forward on sure feet, and even when the safety railings disappeared several moments later didn't even pause, simply continuing on his way, staring out over the valley in wonder of the view as he went.

Meanwhile, Quetzal quailed against his neck, the snakes eyes tightly shut. It was very evident that Quetzal would not be enjoying his time among the Skyhorn tribe.

The trail wound around the outcropping of rock five times before starting to even out once more, and eventually a series of stairs finally lead Harry up to where a single Tauren was standing, hands on a long staff as he waited for Harry. "Few indeed among our own folk have been able to make the journey up here so well as you have, Harry Potter. I wonder, is that a mark of your strange people?"

Evidently word had gone around that Harry disliked being called a cursed or tiny vrykul, something Harry was very thankful as he bounded up the last few steps without any fear of the drop to one side. He held out a forearm, and the large Tauren took it, squeezing gently. "I've never had any fear of heights. Heck, back in my old life, I was something of a wild child in the sky. We didn't have Giant Eagles as you do, but we had our own Arcana implements that let us fly, and there was even a sports based around them."

"Indeed? Then I think you'll fit right in here." The man's voice turned formal, and his grip on Harry's arm tightened. "Be welcome among my clan, slayer of dragons. We give you guest rights, and ask only that you abide by our traditions."

"I accept guest rights, and will abide by your traditions as far as I am able. I do not follow the ways of the Earth Mother, but I do follow the ways of Nature Magic and those who use it," Harry said formally. He hadn't had to do this with his friend Tyre and the Highmountain tribe, but he had to at one point with the Rivermane before starting his education, so he remembered the words he'd had to use then. "Nor am I a Tauren, so there are certain things I simply cannot do."

Like with the Rivermane tribe chieftain, who Harry had met for this ceremony, and at no other point during his time with them, this seemed to serve well enough. The middle-aged Tauren snorted, and turned, gesturing up the last few steps to what was the top of the butte. Already Harry could see several huts there, their configuration different than those of the Highmountain or Rivermane tribes.

"Then be welcome, and let your stay here be pleasant for you and us alike. My name is Soros Swiftfeather, and I am the chieftain of this tribe. I lead our Eagle Riders, and if you wish to learn how to truly fly, you will spend time with myself and my Flight Leaders.”

Harry nodded eagerly, and the two of them made their way up onto the top of butte, where he looked around avidly. As he had noticed a moment ago, the huts of the Skyhorn tribe were different than those he had seen before. Most of them were larger for one thing, and Harry wondered at first if that was so unmarried youngsters stayed together in groups. Space must be at a premium here, after all.

But a few of the huts had no tops to them and Harry wondered why before passing by one, and seeing an injured Eagle there waiting to be tended by a druid. So the huts without any roofs to them are for the eagles?

Harry learned very quickly that space was not at a premium up here as he thought. Because the butte was not the whole of the Skyhorn tribe's territory. Indeed, it was but a small part of it. From the top of the butte back into the mountain Harry had originally been moving up were dozens of wooden bridges, invisible through the clouds from below. Only a few of them were marked with the safety railing that Harry had seen below. And beyond that along the mountain face he saw other wooden constructions, mostly other walkways, but some large platforms sticking out from caves dug into the sides of the mountain.

He also saw a lot of Tauren moving around, and quickly estimated that the Skyhorn tribe was at least the size of the Rivermane tribe if not a little larger.

Soros let him stand there for a moment taking the view, smiling at the appreciation and delight he saw in the strange creature that was Harry Potter. He'd never interacted with him before this, but he was not about to gainsay the agreement made by the high chief and the deliberation of many of the most learned of shamans and druids, especially since none of his own had been a part of the battle against Badrinath, putting them in debt to those who had. One of which was Harry. But it was always nice to see someone as appreciative of their homes as this young man was.

"Here in Skyhorn, we do not farm overmuch. We do have some farms, mushroom farms in a few of our larger caves, several patches for herbs scattered around, and here on the butte," Soros said, gesturing to one side to where a good quarter of the top of the butte was dominated by a wheat farm. "But we mainly subsist on hunting with our Giant Eagles throughout the mountains, and thus trade meet and furs with the other tribes, in particular the Rivermane tribe. We also patrol the valley, keeping it safe from aerial threats with our companions."

Harry nodded, and Soros continued along his way as Harry followed quickly. "That unfortunately leads me to a problem. I know you are here to learn from our Druids and shamans, but I am afraid that Norl Rockvein, the druid who should have been in charge of your training, fell in battle several months ago. There was a large group of wyverns that attempted to invade the valley, and although we repulsed them, it was not without loss. So you will not be getting any one-on-one instruction. Instead, you will join with another traveler to learn from our senior Shaman, Dor Redcliff."

“I am sorry for the loss,” Harry answered solemnly. But in regard to my own training, I am at a point where I think I only need a little bit of help to get in touch with my own inner self, at least to a certain extent. And I would dearly like to learn more about reaching out to elementals, so learning from a shaman is fine. Have you heard of my mishaps with calling on air elementals?"

At that, Soros shook his head, shrugging his shoulders at the same time. "We Tauren are not really into sharing gossip beyond the tribe, so no I have not heard of any such mishap. But even if I had, I'm not a Shaman so I wouldn't be able to help."

He led the way onto one of the rope bridges that didn't have any safety railing, which led to get another trail carved out of the site of the mountain. It was so steep that Harry had to go on hands and feet for a few moments, but it leveled off quickly, coming up in between two large crags which were home to several different caves, a wide walkway having been set up between them. Indeed, it was so wide that it served as a kind of gathering point for the caves around it.

There, Harry ran into a surprise.

"Harry!? What are you doing here?"

Harry blinked as he stared at the female Tauren who had called out to him, before he recognized the tone and some of the beads in her hair. It was very evident though that Harry hadn't been the only one to go through some changes in the past year. Tessa had grown by at least six inches or so, and Harry recognized that she was probably becoming even more attractive for her people than she already had been. Harry on the other hand only appreciated her sense of style in terms of her clothing, which was made in light purple and light gray colors along her leggings, combined with a blue and light purple blouse that had several intricate designs of different types of animals along the edges. The beads in her hair had also multiplied over the past year, which Harry knew was a sign of her advancing along the Rites of the Earth Mother and as a Shaman.

"Tessa. I could say the same to you. You did know I was supposed to spend a year with each tribe… Bar the Bloodtotem tribe anyway." Harry could impose on the Bloodtotem tribe too given the High Chief had welcomed him to the valley and Tarn had agreed with the other chieftains on hand that he should be allowed to go wherever he wished in their territories. But he didn't think it would be a good idea. While Harry and Fangsnapper had forged a kind of respect for one another during and after the fight with Badrinath, that was a far cry from actually accepting one another's presence. Harry disliked the arrogant, warlike and above all xenophobic chieftain, while Fangsnapper was, well was xenophobic in the first place. And did not have a funny bone in his body.

"I had forgotten that," Tessa admitted. "But I suppose that answers the question as to whom my cave companion is going to be."

Harry translated cave companion to being the equivalent of being a bunkmate, and simply nodded. While he could understand that male Tauren would find Tessa attractive, he wasn't one. So it made sense that if they were crowded for room, he would be paired with the outsider female. "Makes sense. As long as you haven't backslid in the last year, I don't think we'll have a problem. But what are you doing here? I didn't think it was normal for even students like yourself to shift from one tribe to another."

Tessa made a cutting motion around her neck, glaring at Harry as he mentioned how she had been a bully at one point, but shook her head with a snort. "Good. I would hate to be the target of your pranks and still be forced to live so close to you. And I wanted to learn more about the wind elementals from a master." She shook her head. "I spent all of spring and summer gathering and hunting up the number of pelts, carven claws, and meat necessary to pay for spending autumn and winter up here under a master."

"I can understand that." Harry gestured down to his clothing, which was far less makeshift than it had been when Tessa had last seen him. "When I was with the Highmountain tribe, I started to trade with them as well. My runic arrays, you saw me practicing some of them, remember? Several of them were a hit with Tyre and his folk. If I have to do the same here, that will be fine by me, so long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time."

"And what is this?" Soros asked, his words echoed a moment later by a Tauren that had come out of another cave to the side of the large gathering area.

He was one of the smaller Tauren that Harry had seen, although that only meant he towered over Harry by a few feet rather than by a yard or more. His arms were covered in painted tattoos, along with one side of his face by a large tattoo which looked as if it was made to look like wind coming off of a mountain top, although the wrinkles of age kind of ruined that. His mane was cut extremely short, without many beans in it, although the necklaces he wore down his chest made up for that, peeking out from his neckline.

"My runic arrays? They are a brand of Arcana that comes from where I was from originally. I can do some things with them that make them very useful. For instance, something you all might be very interested in is expanded pouches or heating arrays. If there is room to set up my hut inside the cave, I can show you."

The trunk around Harry's neck was a highly advanced form of pocket dimension magic, and Harry didn't want to give the impression that he could make such as that. But the heating array, and several other charms were embedded into his hut, and setting it up would be relatively easy so long as there was enough space.

"I just got here, so I haven't set out my own stuff. And if there's room enough in your hut for one more, I don't have a problem with it," Tessa answered shrugging her shoulders.

"Very well. I would like to see these runes of yours, Harry. If they are of sufficient utility for you to trade with the Highmountain clan, I would be very interested in seeing you trade them with my folk as well. And that expanding pouch idea, if that accurately describes what you can do, I will be fully on board with the idea of giving you some lessons on befriending and working with our Giant Eagle companions," Soros said, trying not to let his eagerness show too much.

One of the biggest problems with the Giant Eagles was that the weight of a Tauren was already pushing what they could carry and still fly at their best speed. Carrying more arrows or throwing spears was but the start of it. If they could carry more goods, then trading with the other clans was going to be much simpler, and far less time consuming. And that doesn’t even mention if he can make our caves bigger! We don’t need to expand anytime soon, but I remember hearing stories about how much effort digging out new caves took in my grandfather’s time.

The shaman also nodded brusquely. "I was bound by the word of my friend Norl to see to your training regardless, but getting some form of payment will make me far happier with the deed."

Ah so he is one of those. Old, irascible, but willing to pass on what he knows so long as you prove worth his time, Harry thought, likening the man to Mad Eye Moody or some of the older veteran Aurors Harry had met in his past life. In contrast, both Lars and Tyre had been more like Remus when he was a teacher. I wonder, will I ever find a teacher like professor Flitwick in this world? Someone who delights in teaching and the quirky?

The cave that Tessa and Harry were assigned was a medium-sized cave, with very few comforts carved out of it, making it seem spartan to several others Harry had glanced into on the way up. Thos had smaller cubicles carved out of the side or even ledges for seats, cooking pits and so forth. This one, unlike most others, didn’t even have a curtain over the door.

But that didn't matter. What did matter was that it was indeed large enough for Harry's hut.

Tessa and the others watched from outside as Harry worked, first rolling out the bottom of the hut, noticing that unlike other huts, which would have their outer walls and floors as separate pieces, Harry’s was one, unending piece. This made putting up the framework more difficult, obviously since you had to enter the hut and do so from the inside.

Actually, for Harry, putting up the first two prongs of the frame was the most difficult. After that, the interior dimension, the area which had been enlarged, was accessible. From then on, Harry was able to use spells to put the rest of the frame together, shivering a bit as he tried hard not to really look at what was going on around him. There’s a reason why no one conscious wants to travel in a enlarged tent while it’s being taken down or put up. Ugh…The sight was like watching the area around you being blown up somehow like everything was a single balloon, previously flat and no suddenly becoming three dimensional. I need to come up with a spell to do this entire thing for me, sod not using magic for little things, this is a ruddy big thing!

Activating the heating array built into the center of the hut took a bear second, and then Harry was pushing open the flap, gesturing Tessa and the two Skyhorn males in.

Stepping in, Tessa looked around then laughed, shaking her head. The area within the tent was at least twice as large as the cave in every direction.  "I see why you were not concerned overmuch about space once your hut was put up Harry. There is more than enough room for two in here. And it is warm as well. Which is a great pleasure to me, considering it will get immensely cold up here once winter hits."

"I thought so too," Harry laughed. "Although I think I will charge you in the form of splitting cooking duty with me if you're going to use my hut."

"Deal!" Tessa chortled, giving Harry a thumbs up, a mannerism that she had learned from Harry during their year learning under Lars. Then a thought seemed to occur to her, and she sobered, looking around thoughtfully, moving to the side of the hut and looking at each item as she walked around. Several of those items had been in storage within the hut, much like it would have been in a magical tent back in Harry's old world. But others he had placed in his trunk and taken back out now.

What she was looking for Harry didn't know, and didn't have the time to wonder about just yet given his other two guests.

The two local men were looking around in some surprise and shock. The heat was one thing, but the proof that Harry could indeed expand the space of a dwelling like this was another. "I think, Harry Potter, if you can show you can do something even on a smaller scale than this for, say, a pouch? Perhaps one for a quiver of throwing spears sling-stones, that will demonstrate the two most important of uses for these runic arrays of yours. Then I will cheerfully teach you the ways of the sky riders," the chieftain of the Skyhorn tribe declared, before snorting. “But do not be surprised if my clan beats a new trail through the rock of the mountain to your door once they learn of this skill. You will be drowning in pelts and anything else you could want soon enough.”

"For my part, putting a heating array in my cave like the one you have demonstrated here would be a treat. Nature Magic can only do so much for the elderly, and my hands and back suffer greatly in the cold." Redcliff said.

Realizing the old man was probably talking about something like arthritis, Harry nodded, knowing make Nature Magic probably wouldn't do much about that kind of thing given that it was simply a natural process of growing old. He wondered how old Radcliffe was, but decided not to pry. "I can agree to that. In fact, if you are cold now, I have a spell that works quite well. My companion,” Harry gestured to the snake around his neck, who had begun to move down his arm to the floor, "says it is by far and away the best use of arcane he's ever come across."

Redcliff snorted at that, then gestured with one hand towards himself and Harry obliged by casting the heating charm on him. The man gasped, grunted, then straightened a little, smiling very briefly. "Oh, that feels nice… Ah, yes, that and your heating array for my cave will almost be enough to make up for forcing me to spend time teaching you."

"As it is evening now, we will leave you to get settled in,” Soros said. “But might I ask first what your priorities are going forward?"

Harry looked over at Tessa, who did not look back, simply still examining some of the items in the room, frowning pensively and tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Well, for my part, I wish to continue my meditation on my inner self. I've made quite a bit of headway, and I am hoping that being up here among the Giant Eagles will catapult me forward in that regard along one avenue, so to speak. Beyond that, I wanted to figure out some means of communing with air elementals that wouldn't immediately cause my violent death."

"… That sounds like a tale," Redcliff murmured. Tessa had overheard that, and broke off from her own musings to snicker, causing Harry to mock glare at her. "Something that occurred while you are training with Lars, I take it?"

Harry explained what had happened, with Tessa interjecting her own thoughts about the event and Harry's strange resurrection technique, something that both their listeners gaped at. But after a few moments, Redcliff was able to control himself and said simply that he would need to see Harry's reaction to calling on an air elemental himself. "But never fear, I will have several of my own air elementals standing by to intercede.”

After a few moments discussion, it was decided that Harry would work with the chieftain in the morning, while Tessa would use that time to train with Redcliff. Afterward, Harry would join them for afternoon lessons. He would then break off in the evening at least at first to put the heating array down in Redcliff's cave, allowing Tessa some more one-on-one instruction with the man for the first few weeks. After Harry had proven he could be a sky rider or not, they would take a whole afternoon and evening to see what Redcliff could discover as to Harry's bizarre reaction to trying to summon air elementals.

After that, the two males left, leaving Harry and Tessa alone bar Quetzal, who Harry absentmindedly canceled the shrinking spell on, letting Quetzal grow to half of his normal size. "I hope you still think there's enough space in here for you Tessa?"

Tessa and Quetzal nodded to one another, and she shrugged. "That is more than fine with me. Although I have a question, Harry. Have you ever considered…" She blushed a little, looking away and scratching at one of her newer tattoos on her neck. "That is, have you ever considered a runic array that would… get rid of waste?"

Harry frowned. "I, do you mean something like refuse pile or something?"

"No." Tessa shook her head, now even more embarrassed. "I mean, er, something that would take the place of an outhouse or at least the hole in the outhouse."

"Oh, a toilet you mean. A magical toilet that would get rid of waste?" Harry guessed.

"Exactly. I believe that would be a tremendous hit, especially here with the Skyhorn tribe. They tend to use buckets they have to dump into one of their farms every day."

Harry's eyes widened, as he realized that kind of thing wouldn't be a hit with just the Skyhorn tribe, but indeed such a tool would be huge with anyone that didn't have access to indoor plumbing. A spell or runic array would get rid of the waste, maybe deposit it elsewhere? No, maybe vanish it entirely, since teleportation via runes has never been done as far as I know. But then how to make certain it’s just waste and not anything that enters the field? But, but even with that issue, it’s certainly doable!  "Fuck! Why didn't I think of that?!"

Tessa began to laugh at that, and didn't stop until Harry hit her with a stinging charm. She wasn’t laughing later though when Harry told her it would take him days, maybe even weeks, to come up with a runic array that would do what she had suggested. Until then, they’d be sharing a bucket. But at least the bucket could remain outside of the tent.

Surprisingly, despite their rocky start, Harry and Tessa had actually become something like friends during his time with the Rivermane tribe. So sharing a hut was no big deal for either of them. A simple cloth curtain separating a small changing area at the back, and Tessa's volunteering to cook two out of every three meals, including going down to the market on the butte to get ingredients, and both of them were more than satisfied with their living conditions. Although Tessa did get a little bit of a surprise the next morning.

Being an early riser, Tessa was up and changed into fresh clothing ready to head down to the market for fresh eggs for breakfast. However, when she exited the hut, she found the area beyond, about a yards worth of cave completely full of birds. One of them was a young Giant Eagle, while a falcon perched nearby, and an owl clung to the side of the cave at a small rock that stuck out from the entryway there, its head twisted around to look inside.

Tessa’s eyes widened, and she took us took us several steps back, as all of the bird stared at her but then just shook her head, and recalled few times she'd seen similar reactions from birds to Harry when they had spent nights out in the forest communing with nature as part of their training under Lars.

She stuck her head back into the hut, shouting, "Harry, you've got some flying friends out here that want to meet you." Then she turned, and politely gestured to the birds to one side. The Giant Eagle youngling shuffled out of the cave, his talons clinking on the wood beyond to let her go, as several nearby Tauren watched in confusion.

This continued later that morning when Harry was introduced to several of the Giant Eagles. They took to him instantly, one of them coming over to rub its giant head against the top of his so hard that Harry's legs nearly buckled.

The Giant Eagles were indeed giant. So much so, they reminded Harry of the Roc from legends back on earth, so big one of them could have picked Harry up in a single talon. And their fierce glare was no doubt quite scary to many. Too Harry, like the Skyhorn Tauren that was not the case.

Indeed, his fearlessness in the face of the Giant Eagles surprised many of the other Eagle riders, having thought that due to his small stature, he would be scared of them. Even Tauren young born up here in the mountains were scared of the massive raptors.

But then again, many of the Tauren here had discounted the tale of how Harry had helped kill Badrinath. After a few weeks around him, and seeing how fearless he was with the large birds or the heights of their tribal home, they no longer could. Indeed, by the time two weeks passed, Harry had made firm friends among the eagle riders for his runic arrays, and for his willingness to pitch in with the giant birds.

No one who knew him in his past life would have been surprised to discover that Harry spent so much time with the sky riders, that his time with Redcliff was barely a few hours before the sun fell. This was not helped by the fact that the Skyhome tribe was indeed very interested in his expansion arrays, and not a day went by without at least ten of them asking for a trade for such. It got to the point where he was barely able to meditate on his own, let alone meet with Redcliff for a meal and lesson.

Not that Redcliff or Tessa minded since this allowed Redcliff to concentrate on her and by the time Harry was ready for his first flight with the giant birds, Tessa had summoned up her first air elemental. This was a diminutive but extremely intelligent spirit by the name of Harlit who took the form of, of all things, a flying squirrel.

"There is no accounting for an elemental’s taste I suppose," Quetzal had opined as he saw the small air elemental for the first time. "Why anyone would prefer to be something like that little creature when you could be a snake of some type is beyond me."

Harry on the other hand simply congratulated Tessa for her progress, and then headed down to the eyries for his own first of the day.

Soros shook his head as he looked between Harry and the extremely makeshift saddle. "We need to find a smaller bird for you Harry, and make certain that your personal leggings and riding equipment truly will fit you. If you hadn't already shown me the strength of your sticking charms, I would say this was folly in the extreme."

Harry could barely reach the stirrups to get up on to the Giant Eagles back, let alone use them to pass on minute movements of his legs that the eagle riders could use to steer their companions. This freed up their hands to do deadly things to their opponents, so it was a necessity for any Eagle rider to get to that point before they could be allowed to actually engage in combat awing. The reins connected to a necklace around the Giant Eagles short necks were similarly disdained by most experienced riders. But Harry would have to make heavy use of them or verbal commands on this first flight.

Actually, Harry would have dearly preferred this, as he had his translation spell, which allowed those around him to understand Quetzal and had previously used it to let Kaldorei Sentinels, like Tyrande, to talk to their bonded tigers. But the eagles were different. Unlike the Tigers, they lacked the touch of civilization and that last tiny leap to true sentience to let them speak the common language. Harry estimated they were close, within two or three more generations, but not quite there, which was deeply disappointing. They could, however understand spoken words quite well.

“I feel I need to do this. I need to feel the wind in my face, the sky opening up before me again," Harry said, his tone tinged with a longing that he hadn't really realized he had been feeling until he arrived here in the Skyhorn tribe's territory. But seeing the giant birds and their riders every day had been both a blessing and torture for him. Now that he had proven that he understood how to command the Giant Eagles and everything else, nothing could hold him back.

As for being afraid of falling despite his sticking charm, well, Harry knew more than a few spells that would save him from falling to his death, whatever the height he fell from. Indeed, it was all Harry could do to stop himself from seeing just how well he could fall with style for fun before this. But he rather doubted the Tauren would be pleased by such attempts, even if Harry explained his spellwork to them beforehand. But waiting will have been worth it after this, I know it.

"Then may the ghost of Aviana watch over you," Soros said, taking a step backward and gesturing with one hand towards the open entryway leading to the side of the butte. Harry hadn't noticed when he had first arrived, but it wasn't just the ceilings which were missing from the eyries, but the outermost wall. There was a tarp that could be used to cover the roof area at need to help with foul weather, but the side of the eyries were always open to the sky beyond.

The Giant Eagle waited patiently until the much smaller than usual rider on his back found his purchase, then shifted from one talon to another as he felt something occur on his back. He couldn't figure out what it was, but it was almost as if the non-Tauren thing on his back was sitting more securely. But the Eagle set that aside as he felt the double tap on the back of his neck that signaled the rider was ready to go.

Such signals were part of the learning process that Harry had gone through the past few weeks even as he set aside all of his other training to push for this, this one, sublime moment. Now as the eagle hurled itself forward and down from it’s perch, Harry whooped in delight, flinging his hands up and away from the reins. “WOOO!”

The eagle flapped several times to gain even more altitude, and then coasted for a time before it hit one of the thermals wafting up from below in the valley. The same heat vents that allowed the valley to remain livable despite being so high up in the Broken Mountains gave the Giant Eagles the thermals they needed to fly even higher, and within moments, Harry knew they had ascended up from the height of the butte almost as if he had taken an elevator to the top of the largest skyscraper in London.

And as he looked out over the world, Harry breathed in, smiling in delight. From up here, he could see from one end of the valley to another, if without any detail whatsoever. Clouds, actual clouds, passed by as the eagle soared forward, it's wings flapping powerfully. The sky above shown clear, cold though, the bite of autumn turning into winter giving way to simply the normal bite of being so high in the sky. The mountains beyond the valley also could be seen in greater detail, a few snowcapped peaks visible spreading out to dominate the horizon as the Giant Eagles flew towards one end of the valley.

Nearby, other Eagle riders had taken to the sky, and were flying around Harry. Three of them moved in the direction of the far side of the valley, where they would begin their own patrol. Two others trailed after Harry, watching just in case their newest rider got in trouble.

They needn't have bothered. Harry was a natural in the air, even when he wasn’t the one flying. Leaning forward until he was hugging the Giant Eagle around the neck with one arm, Harry began whispering instructions. And while the Giant Eagles were not quite intelligent enough to speak themselves, they had absorbed enough of the natural Arcana of Azeroth to understand speech. Or at least the language of the Tauren who they had bonded with. The other more experienced riders used this during combat as well, but they hadn't anticipated Harry being able to think to give out instructions on his first flight.

If an eagle could grin, this one would as Harry whispered his instructions. Following Harry’s orders, the eagle banked hard to the left, then flapped and twirled back, hitting another thermal, and letting it push him higher again. A moment later, he was behind the two trailing eagle riders, who were looking back at Harry and his Giant Eagle in surprise. Another whisper, and Harry and his companion were zooming away, threatening to leave them behind as Harry whooped once more, delighting being in the air after so long.

What followed was several hours of aerial artistry. Harry seemed almost to feel out the winds as well as his companion, and together they through loop-d-loops, long dives, steep climbs, twisting and turning and simply showing a mastery of the air that even Soros and his flight leaders would have had trouble matching. Watching all this and keeping up as best he could, a small part of Soros wanted to put this down to false pride in his sticking charm, and luck too. But Soros knew that wasn’t the case. It is almost as if Harry was resurrected in the wrong form.

Finally, the heating charm Harry had used on himself began to fade to join the sticking charm, which had long since faded, not that Harry had cared. Still, he knew that the eagles could only go for so long before they needed to rest. "Let's keep going until we hit the last thermal in front of us, then turn to the left. We’ll make for home in a long loop."

The Eagle squawked in agreement, swiftly turning towards the left right before they hit the last thermal, which allowed him to carry the thermal up into the air even as he did start to turn away. From then on, the Eagle floated for several moments, flapping its wings only occasionally, as it's keen gaze swept the area around them and Harry rested for a bit, just taking in the view.

Then he spotted something in the distance to their right, soaring low over some of the peaks leading down into the valley. "Wait, turn right. What is that in the distance?"

With the wind pulling away at his voice and Harry sitting up in the saddle once more, the Eagle barely heard him. But despite feeling somewhat tired the eagle did obey, turning in that direction and flying closer to the thing that Harry had spotted.

The flying object Harry had seen turned out to be a large wyvern. With the bodies of lions, the heads of men mixed, the wings of bats and the tail of a scorpion, wyverns were both dangerous and oftentimes intelligent enemies. Intelligence, however, didn’t seem to be normal for them, although Harry had once heard tell that Cenarius’s second son, Zaetar, mention that this was shifting over time. To hear Zaetar tell it, the more intelligent wyverns were starting to outbreed the more violent, animalistic ones in the south of Kalimdor, where they had initially evolved. If such a word could be used for the accidental magical backlash that created the wyverns back in the War of the Ancients, anyway.

Regardless of their basic intelligence, wyverns were not native to the Broken Isles. But in the last five hundred years groups of them had somehow flown out over the oceans from southern Kalimdor. Why or even how they had done so was a mystery, one the Tauren put down to being caused by crowded conditions in their hunting ranges back home. Which, come to think of it, did back up Zaetar’s words. None of the wyverns who made that trip seemed to have any kind of intelligence, that was certain.

Yet enough wyverns eventually survived the trip to establish themselves in some places on the Broken Isles. And unfortunately Kalimdor wyverns bred quite quickly.

The flight ahead of Harry and his companion was six strong, heading down towards the valley. It wasn't a large enough force to be an attack group, but it could be a scout group.

Regardless, Harry knew what to do, and glancing behind him, saw that neither of the riders who were following him had gained as much altitude as he had from that last thermal. They can’t see the wyvern's yet.

With that in mind, he reached into a pouch by his side. This wasn't one of the expanded pouches that he had been working on creating for the Eagle riders, rather, it was a long hard leather cylinder that was made to carry a long poll, around which dozens of small flags resided in small pouches. Since shouting could barely carry a few feet in any direction up here thanks to the wind, the eagle riders had come up with other ways of communicating with one another. Each flag was in its own small container, with its own mark on the flap, so that a rider could feel which flag he wanted by touch.

Harry quickly pulled out the flagpoles, setting red, yellow, and a white flag with a large symbol on it meaning enemy ahead and below, waving it above his head back over his shoulder, grimacing as the wind tried to drag the poll out of his hand.

On his own eagle, Soros’s widened. He had been surprised all along by how well Harry Potter had taken to the air, despite Harry's talks of the most interesting game of Quidditch. After all, there was a difference of flying a mere hundred feet above the ground, and several hundred stories above the ground. To say nothing of the fact that they had already begun at the highest position in the Highmountain valley.

And now he seems to have found an enemy? For a moment, Soros debated signaling back that Harry should turn away and that he and his companion would handle it. But then Soros shook his head and reminded himself that Harry was a bloodied warrior. One who also had a quite large bag of tricks.

With that in mind, he rooted around his own signal pouch looking, and pulled out a red on black flag. This was the signal to attack.

When Harry acknowledged the order, a green flag, Soros turned to his companion, and used hand signals to gesture downward and to the side, hefting with his other hand a throwing spear. This close, hand signals worked just as well as signal flags, and his fellow rider pulled in alongside of Soros as they shifted to the left and up, using a bit of clouds to hide their movement from below.

Meanwhile, Harry and his eagles stooped down, heading straight towards the wyverns. Harry reached into one of the expanded pouches, pulling out a stone. He kept in his hand, and then sent it forward and down, hitting it with an Engorgio charm as it fell. The charm hit, slowly enlarging the rock into the shape of a boulder, which continued towards the wyverns below. Some instinct caused one of the wyverns to look up, and its eyes widened almost comically as it saw the boulder coming down towards them.  It screeched and the wyverns scattered, but one was too slow, the boulder turning it into paste.

Another one was hit by a cutting spell as the Giant Eagle flew down following the boulder. Another yowled in pain as the Giant Eagle hit it from above and behind, it's talons clawing at its wing, tearing the membrane and shredding it from front to back.

The wyvern tried to bring its formidable tail to bear, the thing flashing forward so fast it was a blur, but Harry hit it with a stupefy spell causing the wyvern’s body to go limp, including it’s tail. This allowed the Giant Eagle to pull its talons out of the bloody ruin of the wyvern's wing and flap his own wings once, shifting up and away from the now falling soon-to-be corpse.

In their tumble through the air with the wyvern, the Giant Eagle and Harry had lost altitude, and now were below the remaining four wyvern's. They turned, swooping down on them. One of them ran into a spell from Harry, a Reducto spell which turned it into a fine mist, sending bits and of bone and flesh and feather everywhere.

The others never saw the other two Giant Eagles coming until the first of the throwing spears crashed into the back of one of them. sinking deep. Others followed, and within moments, the last of the wyvern's was dead, and Harry was circling upwards on the Giant Eagle, forming up on Soros.

Soros signaled with a flag as he turned in the saddle to stare behind him at Harry and his fellow pilot. Both of them signaled a negative in turn to the query that they were not injured, and after a few moments, Soros pulled out another flag, a circle in green blue and yellow. Resume the patrol.

Later that evening, after returning to the eyries, Harry was greeted with cheers from the other pilots, Soros’s other wing mate having returned and carried the tale of the battle with him. Now, Soros shook his head. "Well Harry, that was not the first flight I had in mind for you, from beginning to end. But I do not think any of us can argue with the results, can we, Eagle Riders?"

With Harry's training as an Eagle Rider over, and only needing now to build up more experience and trust between his fellow riders and the mount he had been assigned, Harry's time with master Redcliff grew as winter downed most of the flights. But even more importantly, despite the other demands on his time for rune-crafting, Harry’s meditation time also grew and with the memories of his flights with his assigned companion in his head, Harry made a breakthrough within a month.

Tessa returned to their shared hut feeling utterly drained and cold despite the small walk it was but ecstatic. When she had begun her training with master Lars, she had been warned that air was her weakest element. But that morning, she had contracted with her second wind elemental. That brought her to a total of nine, one less than was needed to be known as a Master Elementalist, a type of shaman that specialized in summoning and working with elementals. There were only seven such specialists throughout the Highmountain valley, and Tessa was determined to make it eight.

Even better, my newest elemental is a combatant, unlike my first air elemental. Ctric was not very intelligent, not in comparison to her water elemental, Sylph, and the form he took was just a large Tauren-sized tornado. But he was powerful, and in contrast to her first air elemental that was good enough in her opinion.

Entering the hut Tessa paused, staring. "Harry, I realize you have enjoyed your time among the Eagle Riders, but that is no reason to transform into an eagle in your hut."

Harry blinked, coming out of his meditation trance and staring at her. "What are you talking about?” Harry asked, becoming excited. The last time someone pointed out something as he meditated, it had been when he had made a breakthrough on his Phoenix side and begun to be able to summon up phoenix fire.

Wordlessly, Tessa moved over to her belongings, which took up a small area of the hut, pulling out a small handheld mirror, the mirror itself made of burnished metal. It had been ridiculously expensive for her to trade for, but it was one of her prized possessions. She held it up to Harry though, letting him see himself, causing Harry’s moment of déjà vu to grow. Although there was no fire this time. Instead, Harry's entire body was covered in red and gold feathers. One of his eyes had also turned into that of a raptor, and when he shifted his arms, they were very obviously on their way towards transforming into wings.

"Well, this is quite a breakthrough," Harry said, staring down at his strange quasi-transformation. "I didn't expect I'd be able to transform into my chimeric forms…”

"Transforming is one thing, transforming back another. One must be able to let go of the animal mind in order to fully transform back into your own body, and furthermore must have a strong mental image of your body to pour your soul self into," Tessa said, quoting some of the things she had been told before she had decided to follow the Elementalist path.

Nodding, Harry looked down at himself, crossed his hands in his lap, and began to concentrate once more. A fire erupted all around him, causing Tessa to back away rapidly, and hold up a hand, ready to call on one of her shamans spells to put the fire out. But the fire soon dissipated, leaving Harry standing there, once more back in his normal body, although Tessa noted that the red streak in his hair was larger now.

Harry slowly raised his hands, clenching and unclenching his fists as he stared at them, then closed his eyes, and as he unclenched them, Tessa watched as talons appeared, the fingers fusing together, the needles elongating. Then, as Harry concentrated again, his hands were back. "Well now, I do believe I can call this a success."

End chapter