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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 402: Wisdom’s Path
🕑 Added 2025-01-02 14:00:10 +0000 UTCChapter 402: Wisdom’s Path
10 May 1995, Azkaban
Harry turned to explore the cave a bit and saw a familiar name written in Middle English, “Ekrizdis.” He turned towards his companion with a slight smirk, “Well, we did end up finding his tomb. Huh.”
The name was carved on one of the walls. It was precise enough to have been obviously made using magic, especially considering how it held up to the tests of time. Harry slowly traced it with his fingers, trying to decipher the obvious magical remnants that such an act of magic would have released, only for his Arcane Hearing to be completely silent.
The only thing that he could make out was that peculiar ward scheme and even then, he could barely understand glimpses of it, as if he was hearing a single instrument, instead of a whole orchestra. He would need to decipher it on his way out, hopefully to adapt it in a way to stop whatever corruption the breach was releasing, from spreading.
Still, now that they were safe and had actually found Ekrizdis’ tomb, they might as well also take what they were coming from. Hmm, it was extremely weird, trying to solve magic without his Arcane Hearing. It had been part of his life for so long that it felt like he was missing a limb.
Harry slowly traced the carved name once more and Voldemort growled, “We need to get out of here.”
“We came here for Solomon’s grimoire and I’m not leaving without it. You’re perfectly welcome to just leave, but that’s on you.”
“I would if you’d just make us a portal,” the heir of Slytherin retorted.
Harry groaned, “Were we in the same place? Did you not see the distortions in spacetime? We’d have better luck trying to kill a dragon with stinging hexes than hope to survive any form of space warping.”
“So, we’re stuck here,” the so-called Dark Lord complained.
“Look, you could stay here and whine while trying to understand a barrier whose magic I genuinely don’t understand, or you could join me and try to find Solomon’s Grimoire. Whoever made this place obviously knew about whatever was going on above and made sure that this place was not to be breached.”
Voldemort looked at him like he was crazy, “Follow you where? I must have vastly overestimated your capabilities since this a dead end.”
Harry smirked before channelling a bit of magic into Ekrizdis’ carved name. The name slowly released a faint golden glow before letting the cavern wall morph like a liquid, revealing a hidden passageway.
The so-called Dark Lord gave Harry a stupefied look, “How did you find it? I tried every revealing charm when we came here and found nothing.”
Harry grinned, “No one would ever go through the trouble of protecting a random cavern with some very impressive magic for no reason.”
The young wizard didn’t mention the fact that he ended up using a little trick to narrow things down quickly. After all, someone purposefully made sure that any trace of magic was hidden, but the magic was still there, just hidden. Harry just released his own magic but also made sure he was connected to it.
It was an ancient and very inefficient method of magical sensing. All it did was see if an artefact would react to magic in some way. When Harry felt small amounts of magic disappear from his senses, it had to be absorbed somehow, which is why he found the entrance so quickly.
Still, it was a very interesting trap, all things considered. Wizards and witches would easily find themselves a bit lost without the obvious revealing spells. Even someone of Voldemort’s calibre had given up after trying out his vast array of detection spells.
Voldemort raised an impressed eyebrow at Harry and spoke up, “Well, you’ve led us here so far.”
Harry grinned and walked through the entrance. On the other side seemed to be some kind of magical laboratory. He could see liquids that had lost their magic through time, more than a few dissected magical creatures, and small rune sequences, probably for a ritual. He ignored the small cell with the decomposed yet very human bodies, that Ekrizdis was obviously experimenting on.
It was pretty disturbing. The smell alone was horrible, let alone how everything just felt wrong. Whatever protection against magical sensing must have been only bound to the previous, so Harry could hear the sheer wrongness of everything around him. It was like a nail on a chalkboard, which was again very oddly contrasted by the fact that Harry knew that he barely detected a fraction of what was truly happening.
Even if they were trapped by an Eldritch being, he couldn’t help but feel slightly curious by a type of magic that he simply couldn’t replicate in seconds. It wasn’t that his Arcane Hearing couldn’t pick it out, but was mostly like Harry himself just couldn’t interpret it properly.
Voldemort murmured, looking disturbingly fascinated by what he was seeing, “Ekrizdis’ laboratory. I remember reading that they couldn’t find it after he died. I thought he destroyed it or something, but to have left it here, in plain sight.”
Harry’s tone was very strict this time, “Whatever was studied here must be left alone.”
“We’re hunting down one of the most powerful sources of magical knowledge in history and you’re wary of me misusing this. You certainly have a strange sense of priorities.”
“Solomon’s Grimoire is the key to ridding the world of the influence of the Light and Dark, not some tool for you to try to conquer the world.”
Voldemort chuckled in response. It had to be one of the worst sounds Harry had ever heard. Still, there was something that he was missing. He could feel it as if it was in the corner of his eye.
Ekrizdis wouldn’t have put his name on his workshop, would he? No, from all accounts, he was an ideal mage. He was secretive, and powerful, and had no compunction to ignore morality for his progress. The protections would have been far stronger, especially since the outer wards held for so long. This was a diversion, a way to deter people, or perhaps, test them.
The realization hit Harry as he saw what was on one of his tables.
It had been niggling in the back of his head, like this small detail that felt wrong in what he was seeing. He knew that there had to be something. He noticed a rune matrix carved on one of the tables which was completely unlike the rest of the room. It was completely wrong, for one, and from what Harry could gather, its purpose was very different from everything else in the room, which was pretty horrifying.
Harry ignored Voldemort gawking at the notes of the experiments, trying to understand the research. Instead, he focused on this table. There were runes that he wasn’t familiar with – he had learned a lot of runic languages but there theoretically could be an infinite number of languages out there – but there were enough Sumerian Runes for him to have a basic understanding of what its purpose was.
Protection. Binding. Humanity. Spirit. That was what he could make up from the matrix.
Hmm. It was unlike someone like Ekrizdis to try to figure out something like this. However, the matrix itself was unbalanced. It was subtle, but there was an absorption rune that risked overloading the entire thing if it was powered. He probably shouldn’t have done that, but Harry fixed it, if by reflex more than anything. He didn’t even power it, but the runes glowed golden, and a door opened on the other side of the room.
He stiffened and so did Voldemort, “How did you do that?”
“I think I solved a puzzle,” Harry retorted, feeling slightly lost, “This didn’t seem like the appropriate protection for a workshop.”
Slowly but surely, they walked through the new corridor, only to be attacked by a large legion of undead. Harry was about to start destroying them, only for Voldemort to raise his hand and release a pulse of black magic that made them all fall, whatever magic that animated them disappearing.
Harry gave him a questioning look only for the Dark Lord to respond with a haughty tone, “Necromancy was always a fascination of mine.”
Well, it made sense that the guy who wanted to cheat Death would learn as much as he could about Necromancy. He wasn’t exactly surprised given that Voldemort was known to user Inferi during his campaign against Dumbledore.
Not that these were inferi. Harry could tell that the magic was very different, especially given the way the resurrection stone had been pulsing slightly when they arrived. At least, Voldemort saved him the trouble of trying to figure out how to deactivate them.
They walked forward until finding themselves in a very dusty room with a pedestal on it. On it, a skeleton remained, obviously dead, but was clutching in his hands a very large golden tome. There were no doubts about what it was. It was the same unnatural magic he had felt in the entrance, the one that he could partially perceive but not truly understand.
Harry walked cautiously, expecting another trap, and hesitatingly touched the book.
A pulse of golden light illuminated the room, cleaning up the centuries of dust and grime, and allowing the skeleton to dissolve into dust. Voldemort took it from him, and slowly opened it, only to find empty pages, “What is this? We came all this way for an empty book!”
The last Potter spoke up, “Let me see.”
Harry grabbed the tome from the Dark Lord, hoping that it would have a different reaction somehow. He had been hoping that the Grimoire had imprinted itself on his magic somehow, allowing him only to read it. It had been why he had done his best to touch the book first, and yet, the pages remained blank.
Harry was trying to figure out if there was another puzzle or something, only for a foreign voice to speak up behind them, “Don’t bother, there are no secrets in here, not anymore.”
Both Voldemort and Harry turned towards the source of the noise, their wands raised and froze as they saw a man with very long white hair, that was braided to his waist. He was dark-skinned, with golden eyes, and was wearing some very old yet luxurious robes.
The heir of Slytherin must have come up to the same conclusion as Harry, because he asked, “Solomon?”
“Not quite. Yes and no. I am what remains of Solomon, his last legacy, but that doesn’t matter. You’re late. We’re almost out of time. Maybe we already are.”
“You’re the Grimoire,” Harry spoke up realizing what he was seeing, “You’re the piece of Solomon he put inside it. You’re like a living breathing family crest.”
The white-haired man grinned proudly, “A nice theory, but an incorrect one. I’m the safeguard Solomon created when crafted the Grimoire, a portion of his desires that grew over time. Still, you’re a clever one, aren’t you? You must be if you passed my little tests. I never thought I’d have to wait so long for someone to come here. They were supposed to be pretty easy, all things considered. I wonder what happened in the quality of mages when I was gone.”
Voldemort seethed in anger, “Is that what those were? Some stupid tests to amuse yourself.”
As if completely contrasted, the grin on Solomon’s face disappeared, “You have no idea how little amusement I find in the situation we are in. Especially since I will have to rely on an abomination with a broken soul like you. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the luxury of choice.”
Harry asked before Voldemort could speak up and made things even worse, “Why do you need help?”
“The previous wielder of the Grimoire foolishly used its knowledge to summon something he shouldn’t have.”
“You’re talking about the dimensional breach in the middle of the island. It was covered with black stuff.”
The white-haired man nodded, “That’s correct. You really shouldn’t have aggravated it by destroying its manifestations. The ‘Black Stuff’ as you call it, is a very chaotic form of energy, a way to hide what it was from detection from the rest of the world. It’s designed to mimic – even if it’s quite bad – any form of energy or life in a place, act as the agent of the Entity in the material realm. It slowly infects anything it touches to make copies or replacements, as everything is being devoured slowly. It spreads through magic. Ley lines, ambient magic, anything it could have access to.”
“Which is why the ley lines were blocked, stopping any form of magic from spreading. But why would anyone do this?”
“It was a mistake. Ekrizdis wished to create weapons that would have killed Light and Dark Champions. It was a very foolish concept, which caused him to sink deeper and deeper into madness. Perhaps his last act was a noble one, but the suffering he caused… Let us not speak of it anymore.”
Harry though, decided to ask a question that’s been on his mind for a while, “So, what exactly is this Entity? I know what I felt, what I saw, on the other side. The hunger. This is an Eldritch being. There’s very little we can do against something like this, especially while we’re trapped in this place, without any sort of support or preparation.”
“The Hunger. That’s quite an apt description. It’s known as the Devourer of Worlds or Nidhogg. With magic roaming once more in this place, its corruption has been spreading without anything stopping it. In exchange for your help, I’m prepared to teach you my creator’s magic. That should be enough to balance the scales, don’t you think?”
The power-hungry smile on Voldemort’s face did not reassure Harry, not at all. There was something very wrong going on, and the young wizard was definitely not going to trust some projection without any form of assurances.
He looked the projection straight in the eyes and spoke up, “Tell me everything you know about this Nidhogg. Then we’ll talk about whether or not we’ll help.”
AN: Not sure about this chapter, to be completely honest. I usually plan things a lot more before writing chapters, but I sort of winged this one since I was pretty busy with personal stuff since New Year’s Eve. I didn’t even have time to proofread it, so this is more of a draft than anything. It was supposed to be a lore-heavy chapter, but I found it to be pretty overwhelming mid-way through writing it, so I changed it up a bit, and it now feels kinda flat. I was tempted to just not upload this, since it feels so unpolished. Kind of a bad start for the new year, but I don’t mind rewriting depending on your feedback. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Comments
Anthony
Thank you
Vortex
Maybe the release of a broken prophecy (killing Tom) could help?
Afterdark230
I like the banter back and forth, it feels good and reads good. As for the lore in it, I think you started to tell it, I think if you continue the conversation with the Gilmore you will nail the lore part. If you tie in the tests with that conversation we will better understand why he put them in place. You hint at it with him saying he is disappointed but I would hammer it home. I agree with Harry it’s almost too easy. There is another shoe to drop somewhere .
Callum Runchman
Can't we just kill voldemort to remove that clear threat of greed and selfishness. I get dracul made the demand initially but now they're there woth how Solomon is disgusted by him as well as the threat surely Harry can be done with him and any risk he may pose.
