Chapter 11 — The First Task
Harry knew he had missed his chance. He also knew that Dumbledore at the very least knew of his invisibility cloak, so even that way was sure to be blocked by some ward. He tried his broom, only to find that a huge section of the forest seemed to be covered by some kind of obscuring ward. Even a supersensory charm placed on a telescope on the astronomy tower couldn't get him anywhere. He had just missed his chance.
Harry wrote it off. The elves had given him a good tip but he lost it. He might have to ask them to get together for another power boost for their effort. He'd wait though. There was a bare week between the weighing of the wands and the task. He had spent most of it following his schedule and using off time to try to pierce the obscuring on the forest. He didn't try too hard though, that would be cheating in any case.
Moody had taken to surprising him in odd places and asking if he had a plan, and when assured that Harry had it under control, asking after the specifics of his plan. Harry honestly didn't really care. He wasn't taking it seriously, his actual plan was just to get there the day of and not die in whatever way would make his adopted brothers most proud of him.
The aforementioned brothers, as well as Luna and Neville, had only asked after Harry's plans once. They had seen his ability to use wandless magic, and they had seen the rise in his general skill level after his 'secret' lessons with McGonagall. Harry assured them all that he was as prepared as he could be for anything short of a nundu, and they believed him.
Harry thought he could apply his work in transfiguration to any kind of battle scenario, and his mastery of summoning, banishing, vanishing, and animation made him pretty confident he could take whatever came at him. Confidence was something the former abuse victim was unused to.
The morning of the 24th dawned cold and clear. It was a Thursday, and all classes had been cancelled after lunch to provide the afternoon for the day's festivities. Harry woke feeling a bit like he had before his first ever quidditch game.
The students practically vibrated with ill-concealed enthusiasm for the show in the afternoon. For that matter Harry could feel the Lady Hogwarts respond to the feeling in the air, she was excited and radiated only a little concern for him. If he really had to guess, she seemed to agree with his friends, if Harry said he could do it, he could probably do it.
Many of the staff appeared more worried than ever, though the other champions seemed to bear it all well. Malfoy was publicly taking bets as to how long Harry would last, giving some pretty outrageous odds on anything past about five minutes.
The 'Potter Stinks' badges were making a huge appearance. Near any teachers they were spelled to go back to the 'Support Diggory' message, but most of the snakes were taking a lot of joy in flashing them at him wherever he went. Harry honestly was not physically capable of caring less than he did. As much as he didn't like the lions for what they had done, the other houses had been if anything less nice to him over the years. The opinions of anyone outside his professors and his friends didn't mean a thing to him. He reflected not a little sadly that the number of friends he had took a dive this year, but that was that.
Harry decided to actually attend his classes that day, if only to hang out with Neville before the task. Ron, Hermione, and many of the other Gryffs seemed to think it meant he was coming back to them all because he was worried that this might be it for him or something. Harry came close to leaving Neville just because of how creepy it felt to have all of those people who abjectly hated him less than a month ago try and offer words of support. He would have thought his continued lack of red and gold would give them the right impression, but it appeared the lions were thicker in the head than he remembered.
Finally lunch came along. Harry and Neville took a seat at the Ravenclaw table with Luna. Harry ate quickly, and after about fifteen minutes McGonagall came bustling into the great hall to get both Cedric and him.
McGonagall's shoulders were tensed and every step she took seemed minutely larger than the one before it as she led the two champions outside and towards a large tent at the edge of a large enclosure with what appeared to be stadium seating erected at its edge. Cedric walked calmly into the tent, and before Harry could follow McGonagall grabbed his shoulder.
"Harry, remember, we have fully trained wizards standing by to take control if something bad happens, the main thing is just to do your best and no one in the world will think less of you."
Harry nodded in acknowledgement. Despite the fact that he had no intention to actually try and win, even he was feeling the tension of the moment. He stepped into the tent and saw that everyone else was there, along with Bagman.
"Good! We're all here!," Bagman seemed more out of place and ridiculous than usual. Fleur's veela charm was only barely covering the fact that she was nearly shaking in her boots. Harry smiled as the thought occurred to him that she was doing the most graceful shaking in one's boots that he had ever seen. Viktor looked like a poster child for the stoicism of a Northman. Harry was almost willing to bet that the only noises he would make today were grunts. Cedric was an interesting combination of scared and confident.
"In just a moment the audience will finish being seated, and the first task will begin! In this bag here," Bagman removed a purple silk bad from his robes at that, "I have a small model of what you are about to face, each of you will select one just before you head out to face your challenge. From the moment you see your foe you will have ten minutes preparation time, then thirty minutes to get the golden egg. We will be going in order of age, oldest to youngest, so it will be Krum, Delacour, Diggory, and Potter. Any questions?"
No one moved.
"Alright! I'll be back in a moment to start!", with that he stepped out of the tent, and the four champions were alone with their thoughts and the sounds of hundreds of people moving towards the enclosure.
Harry waited in silence for a moment, then just couldn't stand it, "So anyone have any idea what we're facing?," he asked the room with a smile on his face. He may not care about the tournament, but he was sure that he could cut the tension in the room with a knife, then brew something with a piece of it.
Krum grunted and looked self-satisfied. Fleur and Cedric both looked down in apparent embarrassment. Harry had meant the question as a joke, but their reactions spiked a bit of anger into him.
"That wasn't the answer I expected..."
Krum chuckled, and Fleur and Cedric only appeared more embarrassed.
"You do know! All of you do! Was I the only one who didn't bloody cheat?!," Harry said, anger now plain on his face, "Well what the bloody hell is it then? A cockatrice? A pair of bloody griffins? If you all know, and the 14 year old who didn't even want to be here doesn't, the least you could do is tell me!"
Cedric and fleur shared another glance, then just looked back down in embarrassment equal to their previous tension. Krum got out another chuckle, and said, "Ve face dragons, Englishman. Our," he inclined his head towards Fleur, "headmasters told us. Hers vent on date vith half-giant caretaker and saw them. Mine follows. I think Diggory hears from father, he works for ministry, no?"
Cedric nodded, his gaze never leaving his feet. Krum resumed his chuckle, and Harry got if anything even more angry. He never wanted to even be here, and these... he didn't even have an angry enough word. Wankers felt weak but he was going to run with it for now, these bloody wankers were cheating in an international competition!
He sat on a bench in the room and started sinking his anger into his core. By the time he had purged himself of the pure werewolf rage that filled him and had moved on to trying to find the most insulting way to degrade the competition in return, Bagman had entered the tent again and held out the bag to the surly Bulgarian. Krum stuck his hand into the bag and removed a red dragon, grunted, and left the tent.
Twenty or so minutes of oohing and aahing later, it was Fleur's turn. She removed a dragon he recognized, a welsh green, and stepped out to do battle. She lasted longer than Krum had, but the reactions of the crowd had telegraphed no less action. Cedric followed her up a round thirty minutes later. He got a much larger reaction, home field advantage, Harry reflected. His dragon Harry had also recognized, a blue-grey dragon, a Swedish short-snout. It felt like an eternity to Harry, but finally it was his turn.
Bagman didn't even bother with his fancy purple bag. He just handed Harry a small enchanted model of a black dragon. Harry didn't know the name of this one, but it's tail was almost as spiked as its head. It looked to Harry like it had a solid chance of stabbing him by accident, let alone when trying to kill him.
"Just go for the egg, Harry," He said as he led Harry to the enclosure. A massive beast waited for him in the center of the clearing. It must have massed more than the Hogwarts express, Harry thought idly. No wonder McGonagall had been so stressed.
As soon as harry had stepped into the clearing, Bagman left his side for the judge's box. When he made it into the box, he cast a sonorus on himself, and as he did, Dumbledore cast a massively overpowered (therefore huge) modified tempus , making a ten minute timer appear in the air over himself.
"Our youngest champion has seen his challenge, all he has to do is get past this most impressive example of dragon kind, a Hungarian Horntail!," the crowd started yelling wildly at this, but inspiration struck Harry, and he hefted his wand and cast a wide-area silencio around him so he could have some peace in which to work.
He looked at the dragon for a moment. It regarded him with eyes that seemed far more intelligent than any beast Harry had ever seen. Maybe it spoke parseltongue, Harry spent an instant thinking, before he summoned some chalk and went to work.
First he transfigured a wide area of ground around him to a perfectly smooth and flat black board. He then used his chalk to start drawing a circle. Power circles that were inscribed on the ground definitely weren't a part of everyday magic. They were used most of the time in high level alchemy and in a number of high-magic rituals. The chalk was used as a symbol of earth, and often served to guide power in these applications that channeled huge amounts of magic, moving the energy without it having to pass through the caster, saving them from burning themselves out.
They had another application though. It wasn't as common, but inscribing a power circle was first used by early sorcerers (not wand-bearing wizards) as a channel for not energy, but focus when in the act of permanent conjuration. The act of making the circle served to bind one's magic securely to their purpose, the more descriptive and elaborate the circle, the more complicated one could make the thing they were working on without worrying about missing making a single artery or misplacing a single gear in complicated conjurations. With the advent of wands, sorcery using power circles had fallen out of favor, and so was dismissed.
The circle Harry made consumed eight of his ten minutes of prep time. It was really three concentric circles, each outlined in dozens of runes. By the time he finished, he drew a pentagram (symbolizing life and stability, he was beginning to like those things. Vernon would faint if he could see him now, Harry smirked.) over the inside, and then kneeled at the edge, placing his right hand on the edge of the circle and with his left placing the tip of his wand in the same place. He reached deep within himself and channeled pure magical energy into the circle. His closed fist and the tip of his wand both glowed a deep emerald, the color he saw in his core and now associated with transformation magic.
After a moment there was a pop of displaced air, and before him, chewing its cud without a care in the world, was a full grown Holstein cow.
Outside the area of silence Harry had spelled, the crowd shared a huge gasp. It was not common knowledge that power circles could be used in conjuration. As far as the average wizard knew, they were used only in rituals and alchemy. As they watched the fourteen year old make one, whispers of dark magic or terrifying alchemy abounded in the crowd. Many were afraid, Dumbledore himself could be seen shifting uneasily in his seat. Many looked to the accepted resident experts in dark magic, Snape, Karkaroff, and the Durmstrang contingent. All of whom could be seen whispering to one another and looking uncertainly on the boy's work.
When the cow appeared, everyone in the crowd gasped in surprise, and in recognition that they had no idea what Harry's plan was.
She had no name that the two-legs could produce. In the manner her people could communicate, she was referred to as the smell of freshly spilled blood and the image of scales glinting as they passed, lightning-quick, through the air. She was an elder. She had been dominant and a brood-mother for one hundred years before any other being here in this enclosure had been born.
Her two-legs, the ones who appeased her with gifts of meat and grain that she might not expand her territory, had spoken around her of a great tournament. A tournament that had not been held in nearly two hundred years. She had deigned to let herself be 'captured' by her two-legs that she might see this tournament herself.
She had journeyed for many long and cold nights to this place, if felt only slightly warmer than her home, which at this time it would have been four feet deep in snow. It was... nice... to be here. She worried for her unborn brood though.
She had waited her turn, she was to be last it seemed. Her children, those brood mothers who had submitted to her strength and chosen to follow her to this place, had faced the other champions. One had been distracted by a four-legs conjured by one of their wands, but she had breathed on her two-legs, so it was acceptable. One had been put to sleep by her two-legs, but she too had managed to snore and set hers aflame. Her last child had been blinded by the wand of the last two-legs. She had raged, and accidentally taken the lives of some of her own brood. She had lost the false-egg she was to protect and lost some of her own brood. She would be angry and inconsolable later. The dragon who was the smell of blood and the glint of fast scales heaved a massive internal sigh. It would be much work to calm her before they could return home.
Her very own two-legs had come out. This one was different than the others. She could feel it. First this one looked like a nestling. It was so small. If it were of her brood, she would not have let it leave the nest yet. But it contained such power. She could feel it like she could feel the old-two-legs in the box apart from the rest.
She may have a battle on her hands. They were talking, the two-legs with the terrible annoying voice was shouting about her two-legs. So he was the youngest. Hmmm. This is interesting. She turned her attention completely towards her champion.
He was scratching something on the ground, and it was slowly beginning to resonate with his magic. Her people, the dragon-kin, they were beings of magic. She could feel it around her as easily as she could feel the ground beneath her, and the resonance of the magic in the champion-two-legs in front of her was powerful indeed.
The mass of two-legs were all surprised when the food appeared. She too, had felt surprise. Before her was no wand conjuration. It was nothing like the four-legs that had so distracted her child. Her champion-two-legs had just made a living breathing food. This food would not revert to magic or rock or air after a time. This food would continue to live until it aged or was eaten. Her two legs made four more. As casually as she would call on the earth to make room for her in her cave, as casually as she would breathe on any barrier and destroy it, this two-legs just made five foods.
The nestling, her champion-two-legs, raised its wand and suddenly she could not hear the huge mass of two-legs. She was relieved a little. Quiet was good. This two-legs agreed it seemed. It laid its wand on the ground, and approached her, ushering the five foods it had made before it. Then, wonder of wonders, it spoke to her in the language of the low snakes.
"Great one, can you understand me?"
She knew the low language. She had never before deigned to speak it; it was a dirty tongue, below the dignity of any dragon-kin. This two-legs though, it commanded a small measure of respect, and she was curious. There hadn't been a speaker of the low tongue among the two legs that served dragon-kin since before she became the dominant brood-mother.
"Nestling. I can speak the low language as well as any of my kin, we do not often, it is stained, dirty. I can understand you, nestling."
"Great one, I offer you these beasts, in exchange I would ask nothing more than you allow me to lay against you and nap to waste time for a half hour."
"You would not try to take the false-egg?"
"Truthfully, I have no interest in this contest, Great One. I must be here, so I will, but I have no wish to take of your eggs. I was bound to this tournament against my will."
"Make me one more, nestling, I hunger. Then you may lay by my side."
Harry couldn't even begin to believe his luck. The dragon if front of him spoke parseltongue! He may be fate's bitch, but sometimes fate took care of her bitch. He couldn't believe it. He walked back to his summoning circle and summoned another cow. For this one, he pictured a hide with a silvery moon against a dark blue and black background (he was sure Luna would like it) on it. The other five had been marked by a lion, a badger, an eagle, a snake, and a brilliant white lightning bolt.
He had specified everything he wanted about the cows he was making, save the appearance, in the circle. That let him guide the appearance of the cows mentally as he conjured them. He was sure this was mastery-level work, these were each permanent conjurations. Real living cows. He had never tried to do it with something this big before, but he was over the moon (heh) with how well everything was going. He had even thought to throw a massive silencio around the enclosure so the crowd couldn't hear him speak to the dragon.
Harry brought the last cow to the dragon, gently smacking its flank to get it to move. He had made the cows with no sense of smell and bad eyesight so they wouldn't be frightened by the dragon.
"Here is the last cow, Great One, I will cast a small spell to wake me when my time is up (he had 28 minutes left according to the headmaster's second tempus ) please do not be concerned if you hear a small noise."
"Whatever you need, nestling. This is a more than fair exchange."
And so Harry lay down next to the dragon that could crush him without even a thought, and he took a small nap.
Outside the barrier, the crowd was going wild. Harry Potter had just used dark magic to summon what could only have been six demon cows, only to give them to a dragon, then laid down to sleep next to the hungry beast! No one could process it.
Luna looked at Dumbledore's modified tempus and laughed out loud. Malfoy owed her 500 galleons! Playing 25:1 odds against Harry surviving past the tenth minute of the challenge had been a terrible move on his part. The wrackspurts around him would have tipped her off alone, even without the humdingers encouraging her to put all of her money on her Harry. Wait... Why was it her Harry and not just Harry? Her face went from jubilant to confused in an instant. Maybe she needed to talk to the dabberblimps about this. They always gave good advice...
Elsewhere in the crowd, Gred and Forge (they didn't even try to distinguish between themselves any more, they just considered themselves a single unit) were crowing in delight. There their brother was, living the advice they had given him out to its fullest. They knew how much he hated the spotlight. They had tried to tell him though; he needed to give up on this idea of being out of it. He was a magnet to attention. They had seen it almost from the moment they had met the kid. He would draw the gaze of everyone around him for as long as he lived. So they took him aside and told him, if everyone and their blasted mothers were going to be staring anyway, you might as well have a laugh and give them something to stare at.
Neville just looked at his god-brother and had a quiet chuckle. The colored cows had been pretty funny, he had to admit, and now he was just lying there next to a feasting dragon. The dragon even looked like it was eating delicately so as to not move too much and disturb Harry's nap! By Odin, his brother was an interesting guy.
A small buzzing was going off next to him, and Harry moved slowly back towards consciousness. He left his position leaning against the dragon next to him, and walked back in front of the giant being.
"Great One, thank you for dealing with me. You could have utterly destroyed me without even a thought while I slept. I do not mean to impugn your honor and suggest that you would, I merely say that you are so much more powerful than I that you could have with no consequences. Thank you."
"Nestling, come stand before me. There is something special about you, you interest me. You will speak to my red-furred (Did she mean Charlie?, Harry thought) two-legs and learn of my home. You will come and visit me there in a few years' time. I grant you a boon that you may have an easier path back to me."
Harry honestly didn't know what to think of what the she-dragon had said. He was overtime in the stupid task now, but he knew better than to argue with a dragon. He didn't believe she would hurt him, but he was actually pretty afraid of what a dragon that outweighed him in the same manner a mountain outweighs a mole-hill would consider a 'boon'. He felt the Lady of the Castle urge him forward, which was enough to move his curiosity toward the she-dragon and take him with it.
Harry moved directly in front of the massive head of the Horn-tail, and when he was about two meters from her snout, she reared up on her hind limbs pointing her snout to the heavens and breathed much deeper than even a being her size would have any right to. In an instant she turned her head back down and her body crashed to the ground bringing her massive head to a foot above him, and breathed flames of pure gold down on the boy.
His magic broke for a moment. All of the spells he had active crumbled. In his lab all of the trinkets he had enchanted broke down, the shower and bathroom he had made disappeared. Half his quills ceased to exist, and the small chunk of obsidian resting on McGonagall's desk which had been the first purposeful permanent conjuration he had accomplished became translucent and then faded from existence. More importantly, the silencio he had put all around the enclosure broke.
In that instant you wouldn't have known though, the entire stand went silent as he stood and was willingly engulfed in flames by a dragon. A single whisper escaped from the contingent of dragon handlers.
"The flames of life..."