Chapter Eight

November passed in a haze of classes, studies, and building his network of allies and followers. With Dumbledore running around, dealing with the recent influx of ICW and Wizengamot business, Snape was unable to really bully anyone in Potions classes. McGonagall may have been a totally ineffectual leader, but she was still a competent administrator and fair-minded judge.

The study club Harry had started at the beginning of term had expanded beyond his inner circle, and encompassed most of first-year. They even had some Gryffindor and Hufflepuff second-years attending for the practice. The only house not well-represented was Slytherin. The three already in it were the most remotely trustworthy people in the dorms of green and silver and the Boy-Who-Lived wanted to be able to trust them enough to keep such dedicated schemers in line before admitting more. Plus, I don't like the way Daphne and Tracy are looking at me; it's almost like they're trying to plot out how to marry me.

Harry proved a most able teacher. He had determined not to teach the foundations of true magic to any but his inner circle, and even then, not before he could trust them absolutely. But the wand magic he had learned from watching the memories he got out of the fragment of Tom Riddle lodged in his scar was still enough to make the non-Order members of his club the best spellcasters their age.

He woke up with a headache. He'd lost consciousness during a training session, which was odd for him; he never succumbed to pain like that.

"Good to see you awake, apprentice," a voice spoke. His master held out a glass of water, which he took eagerly and drained in short order. "I had hoped that we wouldn't have to do this so soon, that we could wait until you were a little older, but Fate seems to have other plans. You remember what I told you of Tom Riddle?"

Harry nodded slowly. "I do, master. May I assume that this has something to do with the Horcruxes he made?"

Gilderoy chuckled. "Indeed it does, Harry. Riddle was and is a megalomaniac, and only performed the ritual to split his soul using murders he found significant. Yours he saw as the most important, as with your death, he thought to cement his power forever. Your survival corrupted the ritual, but did not stop it. Since he did not have a properly-prepared vessel with him that night, the piece of soul he severed latched onto the nearest magical being: you. Your collapse yesterday tells me that the fragment may be somewhat active, and may be able to influence you."

Harry sat in silence for a minute. The idea that he had a part of the man who murdered his parents and tried to send him the same way in his head, potentially able to possess him, was quite disturbing. "Since you say 'you hoped we could wait,' you have a way to deal with this problem?"

His master nodded gravely. "I do. A tome recovered from the Library of Alexandria detailed a ritual to transfer a soul from one vessel to another. It was originally used to transfer Phylacteries, which are a more primitive form of Horcrux, but after much work, I think we can use it on your dark passenger. My Phoenix friend and a Unicorn can and will supply us with Light energies to empower you and weaken your enemy, and that should make the process easier. It is not without risk, and will be one of the greatest challenges you may ever face, so I can understand if you need some time."

Harry didn't need much thought. He wanted the blasted bastard out of his head, and would pay nearly any price.

That Friday, Gilderoy carved the appropriate ritual circle, and Harry stepped into it. He wore only a simple robe, to preserve his modesty as he lay on the ground in the center. Then Gilderoy began to chant. Harry immediately lost feeling in his body, and closed his eyes in preparation for what he knew would be a miserable experience. He was doing this to get better, after all, and misery is par for the course in most medical procedures. One might even argue that without some degree of unpleasantness, actually getting better is impossible.

Then Harry opened his eyes, and saw what looked like the fortress his body was in, save that he could tell at a glance that it was all in his head. This was the hard part. To remove a Horcrux from a sentient creature without crippling injury, the host must cast it out. Since this was Voldemort, Harry expected nothing less than a full-scale mental war. Sure enough, it did. Voldemort and Harry traded arrows, fireballs, and lighting bolts all within the privacy of his own head for what seemed like weeks. Tom Riddle was a genius, and he had studied many branches of magic, some of them quite obscure. One of the least well-known arts the man had delved into had been the ability to reprogram another's mind through Legilimency. That skill could only be used after any defenses had been utterly destroyed, so Tom had had to study every branch of mental combat he could. His prowess in this arena was unmatched.

Harry had loads of his own advantages in this conflict. First, the body was his, and its magical core responded to him alone. The love and care he had received from his several sets of part-time surrogate parents, combined with the drive of knowing his destiny, had given him a stronger sense of self than most nine-year-olds. Finally, the fragment of Tom Riddle in his head was just that, a fragment, no more able to stand on its own than a fragment of pineapple, while his own soul was whole and undamaged.

Despite these positive conditions, he had a fair number of weaknesses to overcome as well. Riddle's Horcrux may have been less than a full soul, but he still had over five decades of experience on Harry. Harry was also still a child; like all other children, he didn't have a fully defined sense of self or the opportunity to develop high skills in much of anything. He had the abuse from the Dursleys sapping his will to fight. If he had tried this ritual without the careful guidance of his Master, and the dual influences for good provided by the Phoenix and Unicorn, he would have been consumed by the Dark Lord.

The conflict ended nearly eighteen hours later, but Harry remained a citizen of Dreamland for at least two more days. He was only nine years old, and despite the love and care of his master and Healer, his age had not allowed him to develop the reserves of magical or mental strength needed to fight Voldemort on his own. The battle had drained him of nearly all of his energy. He needed the time to recover. When he did, his master showed him the Pensieve-like vessel the Horcrux had been transferred into.

"Harry, I realize that you're going to have to fight Voldemort on relatively even terms sometime in the next ten years. He hates you too much for anything else. His memories, which can be examined and studied without the associated emotions through this device, should give you the edge you need."

Harry was quite glad he had that bowl of memories to study from. His master could only teach him things he knew, and Voldemort knew things that no one else did. The only other way he might have gotten them is if he'd been merged with the Horcrux. Of course, if that had been tried, he likely would have been overwritten to a degree by the experience, even if the Phoenix and Unicorn could prevent it from twisting him to darkness. And that ignored the risk that bringing a Dementor into the room would have posed. The ritual, though also a risk, let him benefit from the magical knowledge, memories, and skills of one of the greatest dark lords in history without feeling as if they were his own. Emrys the Phoenix and Emilia the Unicorn had done him wonders, even afterwards, staying around to keep him company and further reinforce the love and care from those he'd come to regard as his true family. Part of him hoped that Hermione would one day join it.

Thinking about his bushy-haired best friend, Harry felt satisfaction at her progress with her special training. She had become accomplished enough at the Flame and the Void that he could begin teaching her the most basic of true battle spells. Given her proclivities for academics, Harry predicted that she would focus her future efforts in either Alchemy or Enchantment, both of which were quite useful in magical society, but that didn't mean she could avoid combat entirely and he wanted her to be safe.

Her Occlumency was even further along. He now had trouble penetrating her mental illusions in their practice sessions, and she had even begun building some more traditional defenses below those. Of course, her cleverness gave her more inventive protections than most wizards had. Harry predicted that she would be proficient enough to begin Legilimency training in less than a year.

The others in their group, as expected, were not up to her level. He simply didn't trust them enough yet to share his greatest secrets, which the Occlumency technique he taught Hermione was. But with what he had shared, the illusions and mazes, the members of his Order had better protections than anyone else their age. He could see that some would be ready to begin building proper guardians and traps to fill their minds with before third year. Daphne, Tracy, and strangely, Susan certainly will certainly fit that category. The others aren't far behind.

He had a meeting tonight of his inner circle, and had to decide how best to go about what he wanted to teach. It was most unusual to being dueling before age fourteen, at least on this level, but the sooner he started them down this path, the better they would get. He took his friends up to the Room of Requirement, which they used as their training room, and turned to look at them.

"ÓK, tonight we begin dueling training," he said. "Step into the circle indicated by your name and face your opponent. On my signal, begin. Your goal is to render your opponent unable to continue. Any methods may be used, and we will be using these practice wands to ensure that we all survive." He indicated a rack of identical wands. "After all duels have finished, or the last one hits the ten-minute mark past the second to last, we will watch the instant replays, see what we did well, what we need to improve on, and where we could be more careful about weaknesses creeping in. Are there any questions?"

Susan raised her hand. "What if two duels become stalemates? Will you just call them over?"

Harry thought about it. "If two pairs cannot resolve the duels themselves, then I will begin a countdown of five minutes. The winners will be whoever scores the most points in that time, Queensbury tournament rules."

Harry watched the pairs switch their own wands for the practice wands he had the Room provide, take their positions, and gave them the signal to begin. Spells shot across each ring like brightly-colored bullets, each of the duelists trying to bring their opponents down. Daphne, as expected, employed a darker selection of hexes and curses than her opponent, Neville. The sandy-haired Lion however had a good deal more power than the average eleven-year-old, and a proper wand to express it. Each of his spells had so much energy behind them that Daphne's shields usually collapsed with only one or two hits, forcing her to dodge and employ slightly more powerful shield spells.

Hermione ended her duel first. Given the training that she had done with Harry before September 1st, it was only natural that she have the greater skill in combat. She and her opposite, Michael Corner, walked up to Harry with their own appropriately smug or embarrassed expression. The three then turned to watch the other duels.

Twenty-three minutes later, all the duels had finished. Hermione, Neville, Susan, and Lisa had won their duels, leaving Hannah, Michael, Daphne, and Ernie as the losers. Harry looked at the winners, "Well done! You have vanquished your opponents. If this were a tournament, you would be moving into the next round. But this was just to see where you stand on magical combat; while you did win, you did not do so as easily as you could have."

He then turned to the losers. "You need work. Daphne, when facing a wizard with significantly more power than you have, you must cast faster than he can. If your hexes come out more rapidly than his can, you can force him to shield, giving you time to throw more curses that you would have otherwise spent dodging or shielding. Michael, you faced an opponent with a good bit of power and an impressive arsenal of spells. In future encounters like this, your strategy depends on speed of casting and physical prowess. Muscular tissue is just as good as a shirt of steel chainmail for resisting spell damage, and that forces her to tire herself out with even more powerful spells if she wants to actually injure you. Hannah, you lost because you did not seem to want to attack; you won't have the luxury of passivity against anyone who is not your friend, so I'm going to have to teach you how to be aggressive. Ernie, you started out well, but then you let success go to your head and became sloppy. Your opponent took advantage of that, as she should have, and brought you down."

Knowing that he would have to balance this out, lest he lose half the Order, he then returned his gaze to the winners. "Hermione, your weakness is dodging. You let Michael score more hits on your shield than you should have. If he'd been a Death Eater, he would have been throwing Unforgivables, which ignore shields. Neville, you won only by attrition; against an opponent with equal endurance, you would lose. You need to cast a wider variety of spells, and learn some specialized counters for fire curses, which gave you considerable trouble. Susan, what you need to work on is casting speed. Not every opponent will just let you cast spells at their shields, they will be hexing you back. Lisa, you need to increase the power of your spells. Ernie would not have been able to force you back if you could put more power into your shields. If you were facing a cocky dark wizard, his shields would have stopped anything you could throw at them cold. Spells either have to break a shield, or bypass it, and those that bypass are on the higher end of the power scale anyway."

Then he went over what each person did well, ensuring that they would not forget to keep making those better. Since speed was the most widespread problem, Harry lined the Order up on a firing range, and set them to drilling each spell they used in their duels. The goal was to land five spells in less than three seconds for that night.

After everyone finished the speed drill, he set the targets to random motion, and told his students to hit their target ten times in a row, each time with a different spell. This one went more slowly, as had not set a time limit for the to worry about.

The evening drew to a close. For their final activity that evening, each one stepped back into the ring, this time with a different opponent, and dueled again. Hermione, Daphne, Neville, and Ernie won this time. Harry congratulated the victors, and assigned everyone a report on their second duel. He wanted three things they did well and three things they needed to improve. They just didn't have time for a post-round breakdown as they did earlier.

***Scene Break***

I know that the accuracy drill wasn't terribly realistic, Harry reflected in his four-poster bed that night. Next time, I'm going to have to incorporate a time limit of some kind. Perhaps I can tell them to hit it five times in ten seconds? No, have to start that on fifteen seconds, ten would be beyond most of them. I'm going to have to increase the pace at which Neville learns spells. I know it will take a good deal of work, but he needs to have a more diverse arsenal to win again.

His thoughts then turned to the club that had sprouted up around his Order. I know that most of them won't be Order material, but they are still young; they have time to get better. Every first-year Gryffindor and Hufflepuff is in my club. I have all but two Ravenclaws, and I even have three Slytherins. If I can capture the next year's incoming class at this rate, I should have enough students to begin organizing the Army of Light. I know that Godric's Hollow and its sister cities can field over twenty thousand soldiers in total, but a force bearing that stylized tree in Wizarding Britain would not be counted friendly. It would be resisted as a foreign invasion, which it technically would be.

He knew that he had time before the Goblins launched whatever fresh hell they had in the works, which was good for him. He didn't really want to have to call upon the Freehold to defend any part of Magical Europe. Wizards by and large are a lazy and short-sighted lot, he knew, but European ones took that to a whole new level. If the Hordes launch their war now, all of Europe would fall. Hundreds of thousands would die. Thank the Valar they aren't ready yet; I need the time to prepare at least Wizarding Britain to stand as a beacon of light.

A/N: Once again, I drew inspiration for parts of this chapter from the Lord of the Rings. The Valar are basically Archangels in Tolkien's system. The fight with the Horcrux in Harry's head was inspired by Perfect Lionheart's Partially Kissed Hero, even if I twisted it to fit my own purposes and ends.