AN: For the time being I got a bit burned off from RK II. Until I'm back on track, please tell me your thoughts about the following idea:
Shadowwolf on the space battle's forums brought back to mind a few ideas I had about Veil ending up in the HP verse from back when I was just beginning to write RK. In the last few days the concept wouldn't let me alone, so here's a snippet.
The general idea is that this time around Delkatar has no intention of taking a central stage. He'll train his apprentice while concentrating on uplifting Earth to have some half-decent tech for convenience sake and enjoying his vacation. At least 2/3 of the story will be centred upon the shenanigans of Harry and his friends. From Veil's POV it has been a very long time since he saw anything about HP, so he would be of no much help as far as out of universe future knowledge goes.
Further, I'll intent to play with various concept for the sake of world-building and trying to gain inspiration for my other HP stories, which have been on ice for years now due to my muse not cooperating.
I've been fascinated with the fannon of ancient houses and family magic in particular, however there are just a handful of stories that handle those in a way that doesn't make most people in the verse look either malicious or as idiots; the primary reason is when and how they're introduced - usually during or after third year or the tournament, something that tends to grate and bring down even otherwise decent stories.
Thoughts on how to make those work?
AN2: Well, it turns out that I had a lot of fun writing about the Sith's adventures in the late eighties, though as the ideas and the worldbuilding began to take shape, it dawned to me that doing it properly and in a chronological order it would take too much time and research, something that would grind the story to a halt . That why I decided that after a certain point I'll be writing Veil's shenanigans out of chronological order as my muse and inclination for research allowed and spread them through Harry's own adventures in Hogwarts and beyond. Harry makes his first appearance in chapter six and after that we so far have a block of updates that covers his changed circumstances until he is sorted before returning for a closer look into the Sith's attempts to uplift Earth in a proper retirement spot.
Disclaimer: I don't own either of the Star wars or Harry Potter franchises. They belong to their respective copyright owners. This story is not written with commercial purpose in mind. I make no money from it. It is not for sale or rent.
The Sith's Apprentice, Book I: The Apprentice
=TSA=
Prologue: A long overdue vacation...
=TSA=
A grey void not dissimilar to a nebula, extending as far as my senses could reach?
Check.
Me, floating in the middle of it?
Check.
The seductive whispers of the Dark Side that were my constant companion for what felt like an eternity now fallen silent because I could no longer access my power?
Check.
"Did I get myself killed, again?" I sighed mentally.
I've been here before – more times than I cared to recall and there was no point of speaking aloud.
"For once, you actually didn't." A heart-warming lilting voice whispered in my ears. Soft, warm breath caressed my back when the entity I've been working for what felt like an eternity made her or should I say, its, presence known.
"Here to make me another offer I couldn't possibly refuse?" I asked bitterly.
As a Dark Lord of the Sith, once upon a time I used to be one of the most powerful beings in a whole galaxy – yet even at the height of my power, I was as helpless against my "patron" as a babe in arms presented to the Sith Emperor on one of his bad days.
"Oh, you can refuse this one, though then I'm sure I can find you something to do, my knight." A sense of amusement washed over my whole being.
I had no illusions about the kind of relationship we had – even if it wasn't as bad as it could have been. At best I was a trouble-shooter to one of the closest being to a God that I've met. At worst – I suspected she was forging me into a weapon for a task that when it came I wouldn't survive... and I had no real recourse but accept; once upon a time, when I was at the height of my power as a Sith Lord, my patron allowed me to get a glimpse of her true self – let's just say it was humbling and left it at that.
"What new hell I should be dealing with this time?" I groused.
"Why, my knight, you'll be going to one of the closest places to home, you'll ever be able to visit!" She announced cheerfully.
Home? I scoffed at that thought. What was home now? Once upon a time, that used to be the version of Earth that I was born on. Eventually I began to consider such a few worlds in a universe most people would call Star Wars, but even that was a long time ago. Now? The closest thing I had to home was the world I was dumped last, due to memories not my own.
"You're getting a vacation!"
A bitter chuckle escaped my lips. I remember my last supposed "vacation" - I ended up stuck in a medieval hell-hole that I couldn't get up to an acceptable tech level before finally kicking the bucket, buying the farm... well, you get my drift.
"I mean it!" My patron pouted – at least that was the sense I got from her. It wasn't like I've ever seen her real face. The one time I did glimpse a part of her true self, it nearly drove me insane. "All I want from you is train an apprentice – he'll be doing the heavy lifting on this one. Otherwise, you're free to kick back and relax on this one!"
I snorted. It was never that simple with her.
"Try to have a bit of fun!" My patron cheerfully bid me farewell.
The grey expanse rippled and I was thrown in yet another world...
=TSA=
11 December 1996
north-east from the British Isles
It's been more than thirteen years since I spared a thought about my patron – besides the odd curse now and then. Technically speaking, she was right – compared to the usual shenanigans I had to deal with, this time around, it was a vacation. Usually. Most of the time.
When my idiot of an Apprentice didn't fuck up by the numbers that is... or his accursed Potter luck didn't act up – which tended to happen with a distressing regularity.
I grumbled a curse under my nose and looked around. High waves did their best to overturn the boat we were sailing in. Freezing spay carried by piercing wind slammed into enchanted armour and thankfully was a mere inconvenience instead of a real danger. On what passed for the horizon in the middle of the night during the next best thing to a torrential rain in December in the middle of the North Sea, I could see the vague outline of our destination – the Island of Azkaban. For more than a month my idiot of an apprentice was stuck there, for a crime he most definitely did commit – in the great hall of Hogwarts in front of hundreds of witnesses no less. I still wasn't sure what was at fault – the Dark Side, the fact that he was a bloody teenager or if the sorry excuse of a pink Neimoidian I was unfortunately acquainted with really had it coming. Nevertheless, even if the Under-secretary of the British Minister of Magic really had it coming – which for the record she actually did, I had no idea what possessed my Apprentice to deal with her in such a foolish way.
Teenage hormones? The Dark Side? Being a suicidal idiot? Bah! Kids these days! I was still half-tempted to let the young fool stew in his cell for a couple of months, but my wife simply wouldn't hear anything about that...
"Five minutes sir!" Our driver said over the comms – it wasn't like we could properly hear each other otherwise with the sea doing its best to drown us like a pack of rats.
I just nodded and glared at the fortress of doom we were fast approaching.
=TSA=
High Security wing
Location: Unplottable
Azkaban Prison
Cold fog seeped in his cell and snap-froze when it got near the door where a pair of Dementors greedily ate any positive emotion he ever had. Charms, curses and enchantments anchored by powerful runic arrays surrounded the whole level, yet most of their power was centred upon Harry Potter's personal slice of hell. For the first week of his imprisonment, he did his best to shatter the chains that bound him to the wall across the door. They were thick and heavy made from enhanced Goblin steel and despite all the fear and fury gripping his heart, Harry couldn't make a dent in them.
A place like this – the closest one to hell upon this Earth, should have been a tremendous fuel to his non-magic powers. It was in a sense – Azkaban was a prison where people had been suffering in utter despair for hundreds of years. The Dark Side was powerful in this place. However, the effects the Dementors had on Harry's mind combined with all the protections meant to contain him were more than enough to keep him stuck in his cell recalling his worst memories.
The only small consolation he had was that he could hear his mother's voice when his mind replayed again and again the night when he was orphaned all those years ago. The memories of his five years with his relatives, well, that was worse. The worst of the training with his Master made the highlights too...
His master, that madman... Where was he anyway? Was he trying to get him out legally? Did he abandon him to this hell? The man did promise that Harry would get just one chance to fuck up by the numbers and still get help... and he did that more than a year before losing all semblance on control in the great hall...
Harry shuddered when that thought brought a different memory to the forefront of his mind – the very reason he ended up in Azkaban. His fury was hot enough to push away the chill caused by the Dementors and replace it with the all encompassing frost of the Dark Side. For a moment Harry felt a tremendous surge of power – he almost believed himself unstoppable, which as a lie. If that was a case, he would have already escaped hell.
He railed against his bonds and the cell he was locked in. A powerful surge of the Force slammed in the surrounding walls for all the good it did – it merely chugged all the dust inside in the air making Harry sneeze.
"Merlin damn it!" Potter spat.
He was cold and tired. All he could hear was his mother begging for his life and Riddle hissing the Killing Curse.
=TSA=
The Island of Azkaban
Location Unplottable
"This is too easy..." A mercenary muttered.
He was one of six who just landed on the shore of the island where possibly the most infamous prison in the world stood. They were all wizards and witches – either Muggleborn or Half-Bloods and every single one of them expected to at least face monitoring charms long before they could reach their destination. If there were any, none of them managed to detect them – despite the two dedicated curse-breakers on the crew doing their best to do so ever since the island appeared on the horizon. Still, that didn't stop two more of their number from keeping up various concealment spells on top of those layered upon their ridiculously expensive hand-crafted equipment.
"By all accounts, even after Black made himself scarce, the primary defence here are the Dementors." Their boss said. His voice was distorted by the comm-unit that was built in everyone's helmets, giving it an impersonal electronic inflection. "If our intelligence is right, there should be only eight people here besides us and the prisoners."
Ah. The prisoners, Ignatius Vance thought. They were here to spirit one of them away and assassinate the others stuck in the high-security wing – something that should have been unthinkable. No one broke in or out of Azkaban... until a couple of years ago, when Sirius Black let himself go.
Well, no one had their equipment, Intelligence nor their boss, who was leading the raid. Ignatius had been working for Veil for more than a decade now and he still didn't know what exactly the man was. Oh, the man who paid his very generous pay-checks was a wizard – an utterly average one as far as power went, however he had something more – a power the ageing mercenary hadn't seen before. That was saying something – in his decades long career, Vance had fought in every conflict of note across the world since WWII.
Ignatius knew his boss – the same was true for his colleagues. They trusted him and his expertise, which was the real reason they agreed to take part in this particular insanity. The generous pay-day did help, but in the end it was secondary – you had to be alive to spent your money after all and there were precious few people alive Vance would believe had a prayer of waltzing in and out of Azkaban if they put their minds to it.
"We're clear. I think." Their chief curse-breaker muttered. "I'm still getting nothing."
Veil tapped Ignatius on the shoulder and the soldier of fortune nodded.
"Move up, carefully." He ordered. His eyes scanned the jagged cliffs leading up towards the castle on the far side of the island. Enhanced lenses stuck in night vision goggles, which were part of his helmet illuminated the cloudy, moonless night almost as bright as a day and as an added bonus ensured that sudden bright sources of light wouldn't blind any member of the mercenary group.
Vance shouldered his battle rifle and followed behind the rest of the unit – another rifleman was on point, wand waving curse-breakers a few steps behind followed up by the pair of witches busy keeping various concealment spells up. Ignatius along with the boss kept the rear covered.
He couldn't help but worry. Even this far out of the prison itself, despite the sealed armour and the various enhancements layered upon bleeding edge armour, the mercenary could still feel chill caused by the presence of all the Dementors of the British Wizarding World.
=TSA=
One of the Dementors skulking around the outer edges of the Prison of Azkaban sensed something. It was hungry after being stuck outside as a punishment detail after going after those tasty morsels at the castle it got stationed a few years ago – as if one of its kind could not go after such a feast!
It wasn't fair! It almost got its hands on the best meal ever!
The Dementor would have pouted in gloom if it could, then it perked up. It's hooded head snapped to the south and it sniffed with senses no mortal had. There were souls approaching! It could finally satiate its eternal hunger!
Without waiting for an order or bothering to report to the nasty souls that kept it under a semblance of control, the starving Dementor surged through sheets of torrential rain. Many of its brethren noticed its departure and froze in an attempt to figure out what was wrong. It took them mere moments to sense the approaching prey before more than a hundred of them flew south desperate to be the first to reach the tasty souls coming to serve themselves for dinner.
=TSA=
Chapter 1: A brand new world
=TSA=
Part 1
=TSA=
5 January 1986
Wizarding Quarter
Sofia
Bulgaria
A young man known as Dimitri Veil – a recent graduate from Drumstrang Institute, awoke in a ditch, covered by a blanket of fresh snow. His body was numb and his mind, well that was a mess. He could remember bits and pieces... of impossibility; of worlds that should not, could not exist. Dimitri recalled his time in the school of magic, his family – all dead thanks to the British Blood War that spilled upon the continent and inflamed ashes that by all rights should have been laid to rest forty years ago.
Dimitri stirred and with a groan lifted himself from the ditch. He shook away the snow covering him and patted himself for his wand. He needed it to cast a warming charm before he got frostbite – a worse one anyway if the numbness he felt was any indication. His mind moved along slowly, trying in vain to make sense of his fragmented memories. Who was he really? The son of a minor British Wizarding aristocrat who lost everything but a nearly worthless title in the war and a Muggleborn witch? Was he the Dark Lord of the Sith as some of his memories claimed?
He shook his head and winced when that motion caused him to sway on his feet. Dimitri needed his wand, to get warm and away from the snow. Only then he could try to make sense of how, who and why someone messed with his head.
Yeah. That sounded like a plan.
Where was that wand? How did he end up in a ditch of all paces anyway?
His head pounded and he recalled drunken laugher, followed by spell-fire. His body jerked as he got a flashback of diving into the ditch and casting by instinct born of years spent under one of Drumstrang's duelling masters.
There was a dreaded flash of poisonous green light flying at him and then... Dimitri blinked in confusion. Then he awoke in the ditch. That surely couldn't be, right? He didn't die just to awake half-frozen to death! There was only one who could claim surviving the Killing Curse and that boy was half a continent away!
Dimitri shivered as sensation began to slowly bleed back in his body. Countless tiny needles pricked at his skin, doing their best to drive him insane. He stumbled up to the nearby wall and leaned his back upon the cold stone. He had to get a grip on himself!
The wizard slammed shut his eyes and recalled everything he was taught about Occlumency – he was by no means a master, however being even moderately proficient in that mental discipline was quite a boon. Using the correct exercises and mental triggers, Dimitri forced his mind to still and tried to force the disjointed memories away so he could... He fell to his knees and moaned as jagged pieces of memories not his own, or were they, snapped together in a patchwork that wasn't quite Dimitri Veil. Not by a long shot...
His midnscape re-arranged under the orderly touch of Occlumency gone out of his control – which should have been impossible. There was a vast presence connected to his mind – like an ocean of untapped, sleeping power. He could sense it, almost touch it... and it looked back at him. Just as the last pieces of foreign memories finished integrating and overwriting pieces of his own, that power awoke and surged through his whole being.
It was only then that he knew.
He did die last night. Whoever, whatever he was now, it wasn't the same man who graduated from Drumstrang last summer.
Occlumency barriers and mental shields foreign to this world snapped in place. Power, both freezing and warm surged through his veins chasing away the frostbite. He took a deep breath and when he opened his eyes they shone with a sickly yellow light.
"Son of a bitch!" He cursed in a language no one on Earth would understand, before switching to his mother's Russian – one that most people in Bulgaria would know after the country spent the last forty odd years as a satellite to the Soviet Union. "The closest place to home, huh?" He shrugged and straightened up. "Dimitri Veil. Close enough I guess." The reborn wizard raised up a hand and called his wand using the Force. A thing ebony stick flew from under the snow. The moment he touched it, Dimitri felt the connection reforming. "Ten centimetres, Ebony and Dragon Heart String. Good for Charms." He sighed and applied a warming charm over himself and let out a long pleased sight as a surge of warmth washed over his freezing body. "That's better." He muttered.
Now where was the nearest tavern? A cantina or perhaps a hotel?
=TSA=
The Ugly Witch Tavern
Wizarding Quarter
Sofia
Bulgaria
Twenty minutes later, I was in a free room of the first tavern I ran into holding a cup of steaming soup and still trying to properly warm myself. This one was one of the more traumatic insertions I had to deal with, though by no means the worst. At least I wasn't literally blackmailed with do or die slowly like the first time I ended up working for my so called patron. She didn't really give me any information before dumping me in here, though I could make some educated guesses. While its been a very long time since I was on Earth – any version of it, what little I did remember combined with Dimitri's memories – and wasn't that a kick in the bollocks considering how close that name was to my own, I could make some educated guesses, though that wasn't on my mind right now.
Sofia – I spent years living in that city back when I was an ordinary human living an ordinary life. When she told me that this place was close to home she wasn't lying – too much anyway. Hell, if the date Dimitri thought it was was right, this was less than a month after I was supposed to be born and I was just a few hundred kilometres away from my family – if they existed in this world. That was something I would be checking once I got warmed up, some rest and figured out what assets I had available. However, first things first, I would be finishing the hot soup and trying my best to straighten up my memories...
Assets – a warm room paid for the next few days, including three hot meals a day and more or less unlimited access to hot showers. My wand, and magic, which was neat. The Force too – arguably even better, though I was biased. Sooner than latter I would need to find a secluded place and figure out exactly what were my limits.
What else did I have besides the clothes on my back?
A pouch with five galleons and some assorted lesser currency that made up two more galleons. Those were Goblin minted enhanced currency that couldn't be falsified, nor smelted for the precious metals. The exchange rate between the galleon and various muggle currencies was controlled by the Goblins – along with most banking across the world. According to Drumstrang's resident History teacher – a three hundred old vampire who insisted mothering the students at every opportunity, the reason for that state of affair was quite simple. The Goblins either won or fought to a standstill during their last round of rebellions and then blackmailed the wizarding world as a whole during WWII – which in this world was much worse than what happened in my own – almost a hundred million people died across Europe, North Africa and North America alone. If it wasn't for Albus Dumbledore finally entering the fray in 1944, most of Europe could have ended nuked to hell and back instead of only Japan getting two cans of instant sunshine along with third hitting a certain target in China.
I rubbed my forehead and regretted not being able to remember more from my original past – it felt that it might have been important.
The scent of the chicken soup distracted me and I drained half the cup. It couldn't be helped – besides, there was no guarantee that anything that I could remember would be of any relevance in this world. I learned that the hard way already – preconceptions and believing you knew the future could be one of the deadliest enemies.
Mmm. The soup was actually quite good.
Now, what else did I have at my disposal? The family vault, which had a couple of hundred galleons, half of which I earned with summer work during my years as student, the family tittle – which had a little importance in Wizarding Britain, a plot of land where the family cottage used to be before Death Eaters burned it down along with my parents before Aurors took out the bastards... and a small villa somewhere in France.
Not exactly ideal but a nice nest-egg.
I finished the soup and wondered what exactly was I supposed to do. I was supposedly here to train an apprentice and enjoy a vacation. It wasn't exactly rocket science to figure out who my supposed apprentice should be – the so called Boy-Who-Lived. Bloody hyphens.
I would have to track the kid down and figure out what I was supposed to train him in, but that was for later. First I was about to get some solid dinner, some sleep and then go see if my original family had counterparts in this reality. After that...
I grimaced. This was 1986 – practically the dark ages! So many conveniences I took for granted in any world I ended up in except for those few medieval hell-holes simply didn't really exist yet! I didn't even want to think what passed for interned and computers in this day and age!
I had to do something about that. Get rich in the process too - because I had the nagging feeling that taking Harry bloody Potter under my wings could get expensive, not to mention troublesome. Besides, if I was to be using this life to chill off for once, that could get expensive too...
My stomach grumbled. Fine, dinner first, plotting uplifting the world so it would become more convenient could wait for tomorrow!