2000-04 April - Iceland

I appeared without difficulties in the spot I had set up months before, and dedicated an instant to take in my surroundings. While I managed to better the portkey-travel, it was still uncomfortable. But then again, humans weren't meant to cross thousands of kilometers in seconds.

The study was relatively cozy, even if quite large, it was 8 meters long, 10 wide, fournished with heavy back wooden desks, shelves and armchairs with red velvet cushions, it had walls and ceiling painted of a cream white that gracefully reflected the light coming both from the several lit braziers and the little iridescent magelights that I had taught Sam how to cast.

There was a single unlit fireplace in one corner of the room, while the opposite one presented an admittedly out of place jungle like environment. My eyes found the runespoor without diffuculties, busy as he was with lazing in the damp warmth.

There weren't any windows, but given the fact that we were underground I didn't feel trapped, my fox form coming through with its appreciating the area.

I carefully placed the jar on an empty desk and turned towards Sam, which was studying me with ill hidden concern from beneath her cowl.

Her eyes, barely discernible from the light wet glint they gave off from hunder her deep hood, landed on the jar, before turning to me: "I still had six months to make the gillyweed potion work better, and I doubt you solved England's unrest in a couple of days. Why are you here?"

I sighed, reaching for a case of Jack Deniels and pouring myself a glass: "Fleur got into a fight. A big one, she tried out her trick to immortality, it didn't work out, and she's stuck halfway through."

Sam blinked owlishly, before looking toward the jar of glass. She rose from her seat and went to gaze into the glass jar clearly interested.

I sighed, massaging my temples: 'I don't know how to help her, what to do, what to do?"

"I was before the world began,

and will be forever after,

I was when they invented fun,

and almost always I matter.

Your youth I used to attend,

and I mitigate your grief,

the industrious and sloth I befriend,

and of most I am chief.

You can use me while you may,

because for no man I stay." a familiar voice croacked.

After a rustle, Raven left the folds of my trenchcoat, landing awkwardly on the desk and looking at me like she was expecting an answer.

"You need to stop sneaking in my coats, you stupid bird." I sighed, while my mind was already processing her riddle.

Sam walked back to her seat and offered me a glass with two ice cubes and filled with what some kind of wiskey. I scoffed before drinking it. It looks like a good time to get drunk.

"...time?" I answered to Raven "You suggest to give her time?"

Her answer was to flap her wings and dip her beak in my drink. It was the best answer I was going to get.

I sighed again, taking away the glass before Raven could manage to get her feathery self drunk. I shuddered at the prospect.

How to help Fleur? I wondered. The truth was... I had no clue. I was ages away from feeling comfortable with the idea of becoming an element, facing the task like Fleur had been forced to do... It was a testament to her skill that she managed to hold together enough of her self so that she was a flame separated from the world-soul wide concept of fire. Raven was right, Fleur was in a better position to master her transformation. My understanding of souls was solid, but manipulating one with the skill necessary to not worsen the situation was beyond me. For now.

Luckily, I had been playing with the soul of one of the creeps I had kidnapped not long before. Completing the sentient-ward project would undoubtedly give me an insight to the inner workings of the soul, so I would likely learn something that could help her.

After a week spent wondering how to help Fleur, I gave up, and left her in her unbreakable glass jar, with an added constant alchemical process around its neck to extract Oxygen and Hydrogen out of the air, the exalathions of the fire would be reprocessed and recycled, all of that worked off the heat Fleur was giving off.

I was deep into Wonderland, in the simple hut I built for myself in one of the areas where the time flowed at its slowest, thinking about what to do. More specifically, I was inside the time room of my trunk, which was placed inside Wonderland itself. I wanted to solve Voldemort and Potter' pechant to destroy the Statute of Secrecy as soon as possible in order to be able to return to more important things. Helping Fleur among them.

Originally, I would have carefully chosen a side of the conflict, however, Voldemort attacking Fleur squarely put my guns with his opponents. I knew that in war you didn't care for who the soldier in front of you was, Voldemort stopping from attacking her had never been on the charts, not only because mercy or respect for me didn't extend to those close to me, but also because he likely didn't even know who Fleur was. I realized perfectly that it was just... business? Or something like that, I sure as hell didn't stop before butchering his Death Eathers. Even so, I kept finding less reasons to not attack Riddle every time I revisited the topic.

A chat with my favourite dark lord was necessary, if only because steering him in the right direction would have been an extraordinary boon. But I knew him well enough to know that whatever alliance I managed to strike would last until he suddenly chose that betraying me suited him better, his frayed mind wouldn't allow anything else. So, before directly facing Voldemort, be it for a parley or war, I needed to find a way that would ensure my victory.

The 'sentient ward' project was promising, extremely so. Wards could be imposed only over things one had a claim to, be those areas, rings or whatnot. Still, wards to repel magic attacks worked without any kind of filter. A ward to protect my house from spells couldn't distinguish between Wingardium Leviosa and Avada Kedavra. The only notable exception was the Patronus, that managed to cross wards without issues.

In the books, a Patronus reached the warded area where Bill got married, and another reached Grimmauld Place, arguably one of the most secure places after Hogwarts and the Ministry itself.

Why? Because it wasn't a spell like the others, obviously. Expecto Patronum summoned a warden made of positive emotions, but why would it assume the shape of an animal? And even then, why the shape of that peculiar beast?

It was specific to each caster, that went without a doubt, but why? Why why why?

I knew that the answer to that line of reasoning was an important one. Said answer was likely the reason that set the Patronus apart from other spells. It would allow me to understand why a ward would allow it and no other spells to cross its boundaries. It was a critical information.

The animal reflected the brightest side of our souls. Souls...

In the last book, the shades Harry summoned with the Stone 'acted like Patroni'. Maybe I was on onto something. The Patronus was an esoteric magic, an expression of the soul, in a way no other charm or transfiguration could be. The latter were shaped by will, they leveraged on several elements around them. A charm to impose change upon reality, a tranfiguration to coerce it.

A Patronus was inherently different: it brought something that was already there into the world. Our brightest side existed before the summoning of a Patronus, and while its appearance had undeniable effects on the world, it didn't directly either coerce nor impose a change directed by the will of the caster. It was a manifestation, nothing more.

So, manifestations of souls could cross wards. Okay, I could work with that.

Wards were constructs of will, souls were inherently closer to the World-Soul, and as such had hyerarcy working for them. In a sense, will was two dimensional, soul 3-D.

Voldemort didn't snipe people with AKs across Hogwarts' wards because the killing curse was a charm. It imposed the will of the caster to end the life of the one it was aimed to. It had, remembering Slughorn's words, the nasty side effect of cutting up your own soul.

In my opinion, it wasn't the act of killing that caused a the soul to break, after all, everything thrives upon the death of something else. Taller trees absorb more sunlight and kill the buds of new ones, plants grow out of organic compounds in the ground which were the results of decay, animals ate either plants or other beasts. The death of not-youreself was the cornerstone of your life.

The Killing Curse however killed for the sake of killing, not because of necessity, not to defend a territory or hunt dinner. That behaviour was in contrast with 'nature', as Slugorn had called it in the books, it caused a rift in the caster, which was the effect of deliberately acting against the natural course of the world. In my mind, its side effects were similar to the results of a botched up ritual. As fake-Moody had explained, or at least, as what I managed to unfurl from his near worship of the Unforgivables, the hate necessary to power an AK had to be without reserves, it had to fill everything you were capable of thinking and feeling, in the same way one needed happiness without any spark of fear to summon a Patronus.

As I had learned years before, rituals are a not-adaptable form of temporary magic enanchement. With peculiar ingredients and exact runes that linked them to you in a specific pattern, you attempted to channel into youreself a silver of the world-soul, directing it into youreself with a single purpose.

Killing without purpose, as the sheer quality of the hate imposed, meant having world-soul in conflict with youreself. That kind of hate was all consuming, the only reason you existed (while casting the Killing Curse) was to kill the one on the other side of your wand.

Using rituals, you were a fish trying to coerce sea currents to aid you through squiggles and herbs or animal parts on the fucking sand. And killing without purpose meant going against said sea currents. Any child has at some point killed an isect only because he could. Or ripped away a flower, or performed some random act of free cruelty that ended up causing the death of an innocent bug, ant, or plant. Why children grew up without their souls splintered? Like always, the answer was intent or understanding. Children don't understand what death is, and as such their intent can't be directed towards ending life.

I didn't know what kind of shit Lily Potter pulled to save her son. But souls were clearly an important part of whatever had happened. In Tom's head, killing the child made perfect sense, but he didn't actually consider him a treath. Why should he? So, Voldemort that night wasn't fighting for survival, but killing willy nilly. At the same time, Lily Potter, far from being the only mother to ever die for her child, cooked up some ritual that clearly had among its components her 'not-fighting-back'. I knew that specific actions could be part of a ritual, after all, to learn Parseltongue I had acted in a very specific manner.

Back on the study of souls.

The purpose of my session of research deep in Wonderland was realizing sentient wards. Learning a stable and reliable wsy to do it in the process.

The snag: how to manipulate other people's souls without making a mess of my own soul.

Why not using a kneazle or a House Elf' souls? Frankly, I preferred potentially maiming the souls of killers and rapists, but the other reason was that being human myself, it would likely be easier to manipulate another human soul.

My fingers dug into the folds of my coat and brought out a little stone box, placing it on the wooden table in front of me, opening with a flick of the wirst. Inside, a little, cracked, black stone glinted omniously, as if it was daring me to uncover its secrets.

Souls were strange things. A reflection of an identity, an embodiement of all the events that shaped said identity, and a somewhat separated shard of a greater whole.

Interaction with reality are our personal history, our thoughts and beliefs are crafted with roots in said events, but ultimately can travel far from everything you have ever experienced. Who we are is a direct answet to what the world around us is. The 'real' one, made of roads, trees, buildings, other people and flesh; along with the 'virtual' one, made of dreams, hopes, fears, thoughts, beliefs.

Death was a condition of existence. When our time came, our bodies collapsing and surrendering to mortality, our souls return to be a part of a bigger entity, snce they're tied without hope to be freed to our physical rapresentation. Any sign we've left on the world keeps existing through either physical condtructs, for example a statue we carved, and through the impact we've had on other people. The latter is a far more accurate memory of us, because how could a statue undertand its maker by the feel of his hands during its creation?

The Resurrection Stone, when turned three times, pressed its amorph self against your soul, finding the empty impressions of those that no longer fill them, and gave appearance to those empty furrows. To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time. Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. If my soul was water, my history (and among the events that shaped me there would be also the presence of other people) would be the canteen that contains it.

The Stone created, or better yet, allowed our own soul to 'materialize' the dead close to us. It allowed our soul to 'fill the gaps' so to speak.

The Dementors devour souls, I didn't know if they dismembered what they ate before scattering it again across the world-soul, but they searched and ate humans based on their fear of death. Fear of death its a biological imperative, unavoidable, its a result of evolution, its the counterpart of the first commandament each living being' istinct answer to: Survive. Survive means not die, not dying means do everything in your power to avoid lethal situations, or if unavoidable, do everything to overcome the treath to your life.

From what little I could divine, and among the clues there was their distinctly human shape, Dementors were clearly a human creation. Or at least they had spawned from some crazy magic a witch or wizard had performed. Maybe, given the shared weakness to tge Patronus, they were related with Lethifolds. That was why they hunted human souls. Maybe it was because they felt that with enough souls they could manage to regain their humanity, maybe they were simply bored. I didn't know, and it didn't matter, not really. They clearly perceived living beings from their fear, but given how tgey were able to navigate the world (one had opened a carriage's compartment at the beginning of The Prisoner of Azkaban) they also had another set of senses, a less otherworldly one.

Why did the dementors not only ignore Harry Potter, but reacted to the shades brought back by the Stone like they were Patroni?

My tentative answer was because during his last stroll in the Forbidden Forest, Harry Potter was an impossibility to their senses. They could perceive a human and a will that fully understood that he was about to die, a soul that recognized its primary istinct, and a fear that was so utterly powerless to even make him waver. So, given their lack of experience with the phenomenon, or better yet, the sheer impossibility they witnessed, made the dementors recoil.

Why hopeful suicides didn't have the same effect on Dementors? Likely more than one prisoner of Azaban wished nothing more than to die at some point or another during his stay on the dreaded island.

Again, intent assumed an important role in the course of events. Desperation, fear of further suffering, tiredness, many things could lead someone to take his life, or at least to wish for death.

That was not what ruled Potter's mind in the books. Rather, the snitch opened 'at the end'. And the purpose of Harry Potter was to end the conflict, it overruled an istinct which was still very much awake and active in the young man's mind. He wasn't even thinking about the effects of his self sacrifice, only about the end.

If the stone only used our experience to create the shades or its enchantment was able to actually shape again the souls of the dead close to our hearts I couldn't know, since I really had nobody to check.

What the stone did was pretty straightfoward, was it was... it was different from anything else I've ever experienced. I did manage to turn Fyendfire into a kind of alloy, I did manage to forge a crystal butterfly around my Patronus, so I wasn't a novice when it came to crafting. The small black stone, was made of sonething I couldn't define. Harder than diamond, lighter than it should be, it captured and refracted light in a way I couldn't justify with physics.

Maybe studying the Cloak I can figure it out. I mused to myself. For the time being, I suspected it was simply the anchor of the magic that made it work. And mire than that, I believed the magic itself had created the stone.

When the moment for the experiment came, I cleared up an area from twigs and whatnot in front of the hut where I had spent an undetermined amount of time researching, and dragged out one of the two men I had previously captured.

My wand moved languidly in my hand, a circle of blue fire surrounding the man, an hollow, one inch tall dodecahedron made of gold, and the Stone; while I walked around it, writing down runes as I went.

Hagalaz: hailstorm, destruction, change, loss. I would violently rip away his soul, bending it to a purpose different from what the will of its actually holder could fathom.

Mannaz, which stood for self, friendship and mankind, but upside down, so that it meant suicide, manipulation and mortality. His soul would be mine to manipulate.

Raido, which stood for journey, and Raido upside down, which instead stood for injustice and death. While he would be completing a journey, it would end with a death he couldn't hope to oppose, robbing him of the just right to defend himself.

Algiz, which would give the purpose to the soul after its holder's death, it meant protection.

Fehu, written like the reflection in a mirror, so that it stood for travel, relocation, dance of life. It bound together the previous five runes, bringing the total to a stable six, which was twice the number of elements inside of the circle and half the number of faces on the dodecahedron.

When I was ready, I took a deep breath, and each rune glowed of a brilliant golden, shining omniously among my trees.

Creation placed uncommon effects upon the crafted object. Vaguely, its soul remembered the voice that birthed it, and tended to answer much more readily to it. We were in Wonderland, a place with a loud voice, and I made it. So, the ritual was meant to ensure a conflict between me and the captive's soul, and I was sure that my soul-voice could overcome his.

With the experience that came with years of occlumency and meditation, I started regulating my breath as to not disrupt the flames that shone brightly in the otherwise dark clearing. I was in the Dusk region of Wonderland, but it was dark, heavy clouds hiding the sky I had created from view. The silence around me was heavy and thick, from time to time disrupted by a sound caused by this or that animal, which knew better than to challenge what to them appeared as the absolute apex predator of the world, didn't the basilisk himself answer to me after all?

I breathed slowly, erasing the presence of the occasional goosebumps on my skin, ignoring the light rustling of my clothes against my moving chest, perceiving and discarding the almost inaudible breeze and smells that came with it.

Soon, everything outside of the absence of action and empy void that was my mind ceased to exist, leaving only myself.

I felt almost cold in the beginning, but slowly, my bodily sense stopped perceiving, there was only the silence and the flames of the ritual, the slow breath of the uncouscious prisoner, the shifting magic of the Stone, the waiting trap of the dodecahedron. I close closed my eyes, letting the surrounding darkness swallow me.

Even more slowly, my thoughts about the purpose of my meditation faded into the background of my mind, my general worries and ambitions no longer existed. Along with those thoughts, time stopped having any significance.

When my entire being was floating in nothing, my senses slowly falling asleep, I turned my attention inwards, and with a last thump, my heart stopped beating.

I opened my eyes and observed the reality around me, I saw and I was, and what I perceived couldn't be forgotten nor described, for the words to capture the experience didn't exist yet.

I reached outward, not with my will, mind, magic or intent, since none of the parts that made me existed on their own. I simply was, and with my whole being, I overflow from the cup that was my body until I perceived the circle that I had set up.

Heat like warm water started flowing through the runes, turning their golden light to white as the ritual made what it had been designed for. The Stone trembled in its position of the ground, and through it, I felt the nearest soul,its nooks and crannies, its edges and handles.

I didn't press myself against it, I didn't need to get to know it like I did with Voldemort's soul shard inside Rowena's diadem, I only needed to push it towards the hungry trap I had prepared.

The killing curse recided the link between soul and body, it was its only purpose and result.

I reached forward, and plucked the soul of my captive with little difficulty. My hand over his soul was the hope of his deepest dearms come true, the fear of his long forgotten nightmares coming to life if he didn't obey, it was the voice of his mother calling him home, and the cruel laugh of his little sister that told him how much she had always despised him. So his soul moved, away from the despair, and towards the safety of a home warmed with love. Away from his body, and into my waiting hand.

Now for the difficult part. I steeled myself, and Halagaz came to life, destroying the prisoner's body and leaving his soul to fall apart in my hand.

Without a body to hold it together, his soul returned to the world soul, unraveling, losing everything. Or at least it tried to.

Where before the soul was holden together by its body, now the Stone had crafted a white shape visible only to me for the soul to inhabit. It was wrong to the soul, that istinctively knew that after death it wasn't supposed to be standing in a forest.

The shade opened its mouth as to talk, but then the other runes turned white.

Mannaz reversed channeled manipulation, giving me leverage on the soul inside of the shape created by the Resurrection Stone.

Raido started the short travel towards its new container, while its mirrored counterpart robbed the soul of the chance to justly oppose me. The shade started falling on itself, becoming a single white strand that twirled towards its destination.

When the soul was about to touch the dodecahedron, Algiz lit up, imprinting its purpose.

Once the last strand of white disappeared in the dodecahedron, Fehu closed the process, the dance of life ending and beginning anew under a new form.

It was done. The flaming runes disappeared, while the circle of blue fire flashed withe for an istant, before chosing to die down slowly.

At a sedated pace, I returned to the body I had never left, my heart keeping its steady rythm. What meaning has time for a soul? For me, the process lasted hours, for my body, less than a single heartbeat.

I turned towards the innocent looking Stone and golden Dodecahedron, walking over and pocketing the first while holding the second carefully between my fingers: "Time for testing, my new friend." I said. Listening to it, I could only hear a placid reassurance, a determined defence.