Harry Potter : Chapter 33: A Crown for the King IV
I grabbed the few belongings that I hadn't left packed, threw my haversacks over my shoulder and Apparated to a place I had observed before the sun went down.
There was no reason to willingly involve myself in another mess.
I needed the Diadem, if any of the stories about it were true, it would be immensely useful, not only that, but I would remove the artifact from Tom's hands in case he still went on the power-hungry dark lord route
...
A week later, I had managed to cross the Alps, avoiding trolls and soldiers alike, and I briefly considered to stop in Venice, steal a ship and sail south until I could make land in Albania.
The problem was, I had no idea whatsoever about how to sail, I'd need to steal fuel, and likely attempt to Imperio someone that really didn't have anything to do with my ambitions.
I am kind of down to exploit opportunities when they appear, I felt my eyes tighten minutely when I remembered the fate of Hagrid's father, but what's the point of magic if I have to compromise?
So, I pushed away my istinct to enjoy a bit of sightseeing and I kept travelling as I had done, the sheer amount of experience I had now allowing me to jump across large stretches of land with no issue.
I tried out my version of the Pepperup Potion, which allowed me to ignore sleep for a couple of nights, and I soon enough ended up in Croatia. Keeping the sea on my right, I went south until I could no longer spot the gaggle of islands that characterized the country, and just like that, I knew that I was closer.
Deeper inland, I could spy through my trusty telescope both the occasional muggle village or outright city, streets that looked like a joke when compared to the high quality ones that the world would see in half a century, and forests.
I still wasn't sure how the Magical World had managed to keep our kind of wilderness from making itself known to the muggles.
But my suspects brought me to believe that Notice Me Not were anchored to the trails that led into areas of the forests were muggles weren't welcome, while adversion wards were draped like a cloak around the places where the local magical community resided.
It was a gargantuan effort, and it made me appreciate for the first time the kind of massive workload the ICW had to deal with, especially so with Grindelwald gallivanting around.
Eventually, squeezing all my Astronomy knowledge to map my position and the distances I had travelled, I reached Albania and set up one of my temporary shacks.
For the following week, I apparated across the forests, taking a few minutes to memorize each place, etching something in the wood or arranging fluvial stones in a way that resulted easy to remember.
I crossed large swathes of deep forest during the day, my wand kept in hand and my senses peeled to feel any possible attacker.
Once I found the stretches of environment that cleary hosted a magical presence of some kind, I focused my attention there, eyeing both the branches above me and the ground beneath me to avoid a potential magical creture's hunting attempts.
I should have studied some methods to track animals, I reprimanded myself, it is a surprisingly big oversight.
Once I started to recognize one area from another, I slowed down in my random popping across the land, and returned to rest in my shack.
The morning after, I was smiling widely when I walked outside my shelter, my most precious vial clutched in my left hand and my wand held loosely in my right. I couldn't expect to find the Diadem with no direction whatsoever after all.
With the dawn violently ripping apart the mists that seemed to wish to linger among the trees, I lifted my vial of Felix Felicis, and drank, the purpose of my travel to Albania clear in my mind.
While I waited for it to make effect, my eyes landed slowly on the partially overcast sky, a sky that I had learned to recognize as something promising rain in the late afternoon.
While I breathed in the crispy air of the morning, slowly, trickling, almost teasingly, I started feeling good. So good that I patted myself down while a giggle escaped my mouth, my heavy hands making the vials in my pockets clink worringly one against another.
And while I knew that I could break them if I kept it up, I didn't stop for another couple of pats.
It wasn't quite like being high, even if in hindsight, it totally was, and the strange feeling of having a sudden wish to check upon the pile of fluvial rocks that I had arranged as a wobbling tower between a rather large oak and an almost shy course of water.
Still, between the patting myself down to make sure I was still all here, and my amazement at the sheer feeling that accompanied the drinking of a perfectly brewed Felix Felicis, I found myself laughing softly, knowing that I would finally complete one of the most important goals I had established for myself for the time being.
The soft *crack* that signed the rearranging of space to account for my presence didn't echo further than the clearing I was in, and before the Felix could nudge me, my eyes landed on my random attempt at Zen crafted when I running out of tricks to memorize places.
The stones that I had calmly piled one over another in a moment of boredoom until they reached my knee... they had toppled on one side, and my creation was destroyed.
My attention seemed to zoom on its own on the way the dirt had been moved. A foot.
I blinked, and instinctively I started to walk towards the signs on the ground, Luck making sure that I wouldn't get lost.
It took me less and less time to recognize the distincly human tracks on the ground, and while a part of my mind was aware of the kind of alarm it should be in, but my only reaction was to cast a Silencio on myself, my movement becoming quiet as I leveraged the hidden properties of Shadow.
Just like a shadow, my long legs carried me across the uneven ground of the forest, while I felt a light breeze blow against my face and another tap of my wand made me unnoticeable, my presence among the trees just as important as the existence of leaves on them. That is to say: appropriate and not needing any closer inspection.
After a while the tracks lightened, as if the one making them stopped throwing a tantrum. He or she was enraged and broke my pile of rocks before stomping away in a hissy fit?
Just when I lost the tracks and I almost started to rely on sheer dumb luck in order to figure out the next direction I should take, I heard something carried to me by the breeze, and with my interest piqued, I turned right after a singularly impressive Fir tree.
My eyes, now that they no longer were needed ot be peeled on the ground to give me a direction to follow, roamed over the area, and I felt a distant surprise coloured with amazement when I noticed that the trees were stretching upwards in ways that I suspected couldn't be achieved by muggle means.
The canopy was so thick and heavy that only moss grew on the ground and over the side of the tree trunks, for no light directly reached the ground. Not only it was dark, but there was some mist lingering just at the height of my calves, which would have made following tracks utterly impossible.
Another element that made me relize I had stumbled into a magical forest was that the very faint breeze that kept blowing against me didn't manage to move the almost milky mist on the ground.
Suddenly, I felt that I should stop to rest, and so I did, sitting on a moss covered root while my back leaned against a tree trunk.
"The fool thinks he can move freely without consequence." a male's heavily accented french voice came to my ears as I stopped moving, my frame hidden almost perfectly in the half-light of the deep forest I was in.
"Why are you making me talk this inane language again? a female replied, her accent almost unnoticeable as I heard her light steps casually kicking on the moss covered ground.
"The wizards' unrest is dangerous for us, Britain has been left largely alone, we're going to move there, I hear it rains often." the male replied.
"I spotted this one moving across the countryside last year, we could use him to hop through the border, Britain isolationist policy works well against us..."
A snort followed the start of the explanation, the woman clearly bored: "You mean that you didn't dry him when he casually charged off at a couple of werewolves. And you won't be fooling anyone anytime soon into thinking you're English."
Were these ones the thing that I felt on the Mediterranean coast of France? I asked myself in the half-aware state that defined the effect of the Felix Felicis.
The part of my mind that still operated more or less regularly stilled in temporary fear, while the eager and relaxed side of me that still so clearly worked under the effects of the Felix had me fish out a particular vial from one of my pockets, a vial that only now I noticed had a small, infenitesimal crack near the top. Did I cause this when I patted myself down before?
Without thinking, with a jerking motion of my hand, I flung away the vial containing Dawnbreak, least it exploded searing pure sunlight inot my eyes.
The flash that followed when the vial broke open on a single rock jutting out of the moss-covered ground came and went as fast as the first moment in which the sun poked its head over the horizon, the light searing and unforgiving outrunning my mundane perception, but leaving behind a pleasant sense of warmth and peace.
The two voices that I had folowed for the last stretch of the forest were quite obviously gone.
I rose to my feet feeling a wide smile stretch my features, and I noticed with another surge of joy that the milky mist that had clung to the surface of the moss covered ground was noticeably absent.
Once I turned around the the tree I had been resting behind, my eyes immediately recognized the ash smeared in a grey streak over the moss: "Vampires." I stated, grateful for my almost casual creation of something so useful.
But my attention was soon called to the side of the clearing, where a familiar, milky white wall of mist was unravelling between two willow trees. Almost like a door breaking apart, the mist fell in wisps of smoke that vanished before they could reach the ground, revealing a quiet, still pool of cristalline water being held in a perfectly circular arrangement of roots that shone with dew, revealing the earthy colour of their wood.
I walked forward, my steps avoiding the pool of water that I could feel was trying to recover from the blast of Dawnbreak, slowly exhaling once more wisps of milky white mist, and in the hollow of one willow tree in particular, one whose leaves had an almost silvery tint, I found it.
A sliver circlet with flowing etchings proving the mastery of those that had crafted it, it had a equally silver raven on the front, one that stared forward, with its flared open wings stretching backwards until they became the sides of the diadem itself, and a sapphire of the dimension of a quail egg that was way too blue to be mundane held in its claws.
Only once I fished it out of the hollow tree my eyes landed betweent the knotted roots at my feet, roots that sneaked almost flowingly around the basin holding the water that was the source of the white mist, and deep within the shadow cast on the ground, the whitered remains of a human skull stared at me with almost accusing empty eye-sockets.
"Helena." with no hesitation, my hands closed tighter on the diadem, and after a last look cast on the ground, I turned my back, tucking the diadem safely in an empty harveysack that I had prepared for the occasion, and walked out of the small groove, never looking back.
A part of me, undoubtedly fed by the effects of the Felix, knew that the protection that the dying woman had weaved in her last moments would repair itself perfectly, that the ashes left behind by the dead vampires were going to be ebsorbed by the moss, and that I had treaded too carefully to leave tracks after the first rain came.
My next Apparition, still Felix-directed, led me back to the shelter I had built near the forest, and I watched with interest as I made sure that none of my belongins were left behind, only to blink while I giggled and I set the shelter on fire.
The flame blossomed out of the tip of my wand before I could actually start thinking about it, and I laughed out loud when I realized that there would be no traces left of my presence here.
The fire wouldn't even spread to the rest of the forest.
It promised to rain after all.
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