Disclaimer: Guess what? I do not own this! No really, I don't!

"Speech" "Other Language" 'Thoughts' Parseltongue

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Chapter 15 – Shadow's Rise

The magic moved like a missile.

A blazing white missile in what looked like a dark moor. It was not long before it hit a barrier, a wall of hard stone.

Mind struggled against mind, magic against magic, and the foreign invader started steadily opening a hole in his opponent's shields. Briefly, he noticed a stream of gold flickering to his left, but he ignored it as he focused his energies into his invasion.

Finally, after a five minute struggle, he passed through, and the two people fell back into their respective chairs, panting.

"Well." said Harry, whipping his brow "you certainly seem to have made progress. You should be able to hold off most direct assaults from an intermediate legilimens."

"I certainly hope so." whispered Ginny, clutching her head. "I'm sick of getting this bloody headache after every session we have."

"Well Gin." smirked Harry, "That is simply the result of trying to resist the inevitable outcome of me winning." Immediately, he ducked, avoiding the quill chucked at him.

"Anyway." he continued. "It is almost eleven, and I know that training in mind magic is very tiring. I think we best be going to bed."

"You go on." muttered Ginny "I'll stay here. I'm not tired." she said, squaring her jaw. The effect was ruined however, when she yawned deeply.

"Yes you are." said Harry, frowning

"M'fine." she said, nodding off sleepily.

"Why don't you just sleep?"

"I…get these dreams whenever my mind is weak like this...I really don't like them."

"You mean nightmares?" he asked, now concerned.

"Yes…it is full of fighting and death…I…you…we are all fighting…and there is blood everywhere." she said, shivering.

"Sounds pretty bad." said Harry, while gears turned around in his head. 'Maybe these exercises are weakening her mind to the point where the subconscious, and its fears, have no resistance while she sleeps and take over…' "Why don't you take any dreamless sleep potion?"

"I've tried, but I can only take so much without Madam Pomfrey getting suspicious…plus, if I take it too often, I'll have to deal with side-effects that are worse than nightmares…don't worry, it is better if I let my mind clear up a bit before sleeping" she said, gazing at the crackling fire-place.

"Hmmmm…tell you what, I can make a draught that should help you a bit…" he said, thinking back to the mixture he used to make to help him with headaches induced by Voldemort's glee at his increasingly frequent nights of terror – before he learnt occlumency, naturally. 'I think I probably have some left over from that ritual I did last week…'

"Come on, let's go." he said, pulling the redhead of her feet, and pulling the invisibility cloak over them. They left from the room of requirement, and moved along the seventh floor corridor to the fat lady, who, annoyed at being woken up, irritably let the invisible duo in.

"Wait here." said Harry, while Ginny sunk into one of the plush red armchairs, looking longingly at the staircases that loomed at the other side of the room.

5 minutes later, he returned, a bottle of a thick yellowish liquid in his hand. "Here, drink this." he said, handing her the bottle.

She took a sip, and scrunched her nose at the taste. "Does it have to be so bad tasting?" she whined playfully.

"All medical potions have a bad taste Gin…you just have to endure it."

"Torturer." she said, before downing the entire thing in one go. "Mmm…that feels a little better" she said, her eyes clearing. "Thank you Harry. I guess I'll be going up now. Hopefully I won't be watching people with red slits for eyes throwing stuff at me or cackling women sending green lights to my direction this time…"

"That is what you see?" asked Harry, surprised.

"Yes…probably your fault anyway, with all these stories you tell us whenever there is a Shade training session…you've scarred me for life now." She said, giving him a mock scowl.

"Awww…poow babwy." said Harry mockingly.

"Ahh…but you'll just have to watch out for my revenge!" she exclaimed, waving her wand teasingly. "Beware of the ides of September Potter! I'm going to get you tomorrow!" she said, her voice deepening. She stopped when she let out another yawn. "Anyway, goodnight Harry." she said, bouncing up the stairs.

"G'night." called Harry after her, feeling his own tiredness overtaking him. He turned to his own dorm, and jumped under the covers, gratefully surrendering his mind to the peaceful darkness.

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"Oh no…we have divination again…" groaned Ron the next morning, after he had cleared the perimeter of food.

"What?" said Harry amused "Not to your liking?"

"Trel…Professor Trelawney is….she is crazy!" said Neville "First she predicts my death on the very first lesson…"

"Oh come on you big baby. I though you were over that." cut in Ginny

"Alright, so I'm not dying anytime soon….but she is just…creepy…keeps on muttering about dark and evil stuff happening…about her 'inner eye'…" he continued.

"I don't really think she's a good teacher. She doesn't really….know…anything." commented Hermione, in a strained voice.

"Do not underestimate her." offered Harry, pleased that Hermione was finally able to speak against figures of authority. "While she may not be a competent divination teacher, she is a seer…though her predictions are few and far between…and always spell doom…." he trailed off, absentmindedly twirling the piece of bacon stabbed by the end of his fork.

"What?" asked Ron, confused.

"Oh nevermind. You should have listened to me when I said it was a useless class…"

"Yea…now, you have Healing lessons…lucky git." snorted Neville.

"They are not that nice…Madam Pomfrey keeps on harping about ethical treatment of patients and what questions to ask…It is like a History of Magic lesson…I never get to do anything…though hopefully that will change eventually." contemplated Harry.

"Still better than Divination I reckon. Well, at least we can make up our homework for that." said Ron. Hermione shifted uncomfortably at this, but said nothing.

At that point, Malfoy passed, glaring at Harry. Harry waved to him and shouted loudly with a smile "Good Morning Draco! Why don't you come join us?"

The Slytherin's scowl deepened, and he ducked into the seats by his house table. The students that had heard Harry looked between the two in a slight shock.

"Still not over last week is he?" asked Ginny.

"Maybe…but then again, it may just be normal for him to have a stick up his arse…" said Harry, his mind turning back to the events of last week.

/FLASHBACK/

Harry watched dispassionately as the students lined up in front of Hagrid's hut, Malfoy and the Slytherin's around him muttering under their breaths, no doubt about the hut's condition or insulting the intelligence of Hagrid.

He frowned when he saw Malfoy's lips form something that looked like "As bad as a mudblood", but he didn't stir from the tree he was leaning.

His friends, seeing him, decided not to pick a fight either, though Ron required Ginny's hand on his shoulder to refrain from charging over when a comment of "How did that rancid oaf get to be a teacher of all things?"

Finally, the mutterings fell to a lower level when Hagrid came out. After noting that they would be doing Hippogriffs, Harry let his attention wander to examining the students, or rather, Malfoy's group. The blonde was sniggering about something, and a smirk came into Harry's face. He crept closer, unnoticed, until he was very close to the blonde. He stopped the shades from following him with a wave of his hand. He turned back to Hagrid, just as the latter said:

"Now, firs' thing yeh gotta know abou' hippogriffs is , there're proud. Easily offended, hippogriffs are. Don't never insult one, 'cause it might be the last thing yeh do."

"Hope you heard that Draco…we wouldn't want….any 'unfortunate' accidents to happen…I would be heartbroken to attend your funeral." whispered Harry. The blonde jumped and whirled around.

"POTTER.." began the boy.

"Oy! Quiet back there!" said Hagrid, his eyes clouding with confusion when he saw Harry standing next to Malfoy. As Harry's wink, he shot him a strange look, before continuing with his speech.

Finally, they came to a point where Hagrid asked for a volunteer to ride one of the Hippogriffs, Buckbeak. The class looked hesitant, but Harry just winked at Malfoy.

"Wish me luck" he said, before bounding off to a relieved Hagrid. He faced the noble creature, bowing respectfully. It stared at him contemplatively for a long time, and Hagrid tried to pull Harry away, but he stood his ground, his eyes never leaving Buckbeak's. Eventually, the creature gave a bow, and soon he was back in one of his favourite places, the air.

Granted, flying on a hippogriff is not the same as riding a broom, but every form of flying is exhilarating.

When Harry landed, the class seemed much less fearful of the Hippogriffs, and many of them were soon making their own attempts at riding a hippogriff.

And, naturally, Malfoy couldn't keep his tongue under leash.

"This is very easy. I knew it must have been, if Potter could do it ... I bet you're not dangerous at all, are you? Are you, you ugly great brute?" he said, sneering at the hippogriff.

"Accio Malfoy!" shouted Harry, quick as lighting, and Malfoy sped towards him, the hippogriff lunging at his face and missing it by inches.

"That thing tried to kill me!" shouted the pale boy "It's dangerous! I almost died!"

Hagrid paled at this, and pulled Buckbeak back into the pen, but Harry just turned to Malfoy, calmly.

"So, you owe me a life debt then? Oh how…nice…"

Malfoy cast a dark look at Harry, his face scrunched in inner conflict between getting Hagrid in trouble and accepting that he owed a life-debt, any debt, to Potter.

"Hmmpf" he finally snorted "That thing wouldn't be able to do anything. It is just an ugly pile of dragon dung, I had it under control." He said, stalking off to his Slytherin classmates.

/END FLASHBACK/

"Anyway" said Ron, gulping down the last piece of omelette. "We'd better get doing. It's all the way up in the North Tower after all. See you in Defence Harry."

"Good luck guys. I guess I'll just enjoy my free period now." Said Harry, waving to Ron, Hermione and Neville. Soon, Ginny left too, for her Transfiguration lesson.

Harry cleared the last vestiges of food from his plate, and left the great hall. He went up the staircase to the second floor and, after casting a look around him, entered the second floor bathroom.

"Open" he hissed to one of the sinks, and he stepped back as the entrance to the chamber of secrets was revealed.

He slid down the tunnel, falling onto his knees amidst the myriad bones, which crunched under his feet. Casting a few quick scourgify's, he cleared the slime from his robes, and he followed the tunnel to the main chamber.

He made his way to a serpent-encrusted altar in the far end of the chamber. He opened the dusty book that was placed on it, and, drawing some papers from his pocket, began to read it.

'Let's see if I got this right…It isn't enough that Salazar wrote this damned book in parseltongue, he had to use all these runes and encode it as well…talk about being paranoid.' He thought, making his way through each fragile page and writing down notes in his papers.

After almost 2 months of hard work, he thought he had managed to break the code, and was now eagerly absorbing the information in the book

He skimmed past the sections that talked about wizard Politics and "proper" wizard upbringing. Interesting as they might be, he was sure that they had been copied in countless old books. He eyed the Dark Spells listed in the book with interest, but they were not anything exceptionally powerful, even if they were very…creative in nature. Especially the one that turned the opponent's blood into acid.

Finally, he came along the part where Slytherin detailed his experiments on various dark rituals. Smirking, he started decoding them, certain that he would find something.

He shuffled through the various notes detailing the power-networks that Slytherin worked on, and found some that looked oddly like the imperius curse. Reflecting upon it, Harry decided that it was quite likely that Salazar produced the imperius curse as an offshoot of this research.

It seemed that what Salazar had been designing failed. An attempt at building a dark army, it was supposed make the people it was performed on more powerful magically, physically stronger, more acute mentally and, above all, bound and loyal to the caster.

But Slytherin had run into a lot of problems. First, he found that the ritual would never work with a fully developed human mind, as even the slightest resistance would mean that it would fail. And, no matter how loyal a follower was, their mind would still subconsciously resist the foreign magic.

'Probably resulted in quite a lot of wizards on the floor under the cruciatus…Slytherin was so steeped in dark magic by that time that he was almost uncontrollable in his rage.'

Trying it on still-developing infants, in their mother's womb (Harry unconsciously shivered at this), Salazar found that the magical core of a child resisted the ritual, thereby dooming it to fail.

Desperate to find some way of making research bear fruit, Salazar turned towards animals, but found that, with the absence of magical channels in someone's body, the ritual would simply overload the system and kill the organism.

'That rules out muggles too' thought Harry unhappily.

In despair, Slytherin had turned towards the only things that had no will and no cores, yet still had channels: Dead Wizards. The zombies he raised that way wreaked a lot of havoc on England at that time, and created the first tales of the dead rising from their graves. Eventually, generations of Dark Wizards fine tuned those zombies into today's inferi.

But Harry could still see Slytherin's bitterness pouring out of the paper. The dark wizard felt that much of the ritual's power was wasted on the zombies, and, defeated, he had went on to create a new one, much weaker, but one that would be more efficient on the dead.

Harry frowned, going over all of Slytherin's detailed notes again. He saw an approach that Slytherin had not considered.

Squibs. During Salazar's time, they were almost unknown, and regarded as cursed babies. Even now, there had to about 1000 squibs in the entire world. It would be impossible to identify one before they are born but it was a possibility….and after all, as Squibs were able to handle magical items, they could use many of the devices that the twins or the goblins had produced in Harry's old timeline.

But still….getting them while they were unborn would be hard, at the most producing 2-3 followers….and since they had no magic, they wouldn't make particularly strong soldiers. Enchanting them wouldn't work that well either…the only way for this to work, he reflected, was if he could somehow create life….but he was no god…

He broke of his trail of thoughts as he glanced at his pocket watch and saw it was about time he headed for Defence against the Dark Arts. He cast one last, disappointed, look at the book.

'What a pity that I can't use this on Squibs…I'd get better results with an imperius.' he thought, but filed away the information for later nonetheless.

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Harry joined his classmates in the Defence class and sat between Ron and Hermione. He didn't bother taking out his materials, and simply launched into a few furious whispers with his friends as they waited for the professor.

Finally, Lupin came in and, flashing a wink at Harry, told them they would be having a practical lesson this time.

The children followed Remus out of the classroom, and they reached the Staffroom, where Snape was stretched on an armchair. The potions professor left, but not before making several comments to embarrass Lupin and the Students.

Lupin went next to the Wardrobe, and it rattled, banging of the wall.

"In here" he said, pointing to it "Is a Boggart."

Much of the class took a tentative step back, and after a series of questions and an overview of what a boggart is and how to combat it, Lupin cast a spell at the wardrobe, and it burst open, a mummy launching itself at Parvati.

"Riddiculus!" she bellowed, making the mummy get tangled in its bandages, and fall over.

The Bogart passed from person to person, and Harry prepared to somehow counter a dementor, thinking whether making it sing a lullaby would be a good idea.

Eventually, the boggart came to rest in front of him, and transformed to a tall, draped figure. The temperature in the room dropped by several degrees, and a dark mist covered the walls, dulling the light to the point that little was visible in the room.

Harry stood frozen as he gazed upon the figure. It moved closer to him, pulling back its hood slightly. Harry expected to see the nothingness of a dementor before it administered the kiss, but instead he gazed upon a pale face, with two red-slit eyes, a being guided by an unholy energy that was wrapped around him.

His eyes unconsciously moved further up, and he gazed upon the burning red lightning-bolt scar on the figure's forehead. He gasped, and raised his wand, instinctively calling "Expecto Patronum!"

A blinding-white stag burst from his wand, charging at the figure, which faltered, and took a step backwards. But before Harry could act further, Lupin strode forward, and placed himself in front of the boggart, which turned into a lunar sphere. Lupin banished it back into the cabinet and locked the door.

"Are you alright Harry?" he asked, looking concerned.

"Yes…I'm fine." mumbled Harry, gazing apprehensively at the cabinet.

Lupin dismissed the class, and asked Harry to remain behind. He handed him a piece of chocolate, and asked him to sit down.

"A dementor eh? Interesting…the thing you fear the most is fear itself…" said the man encouragingly. Harry didn't bother correcting him. It was better that they think he feared dementors rather than whatever that…thing…was.

"When did you meet a dementor anyway?" asked Lupin.

"There were some there when Sirius was being held in the Ministry." lied Harry, producing a fake shiver and hoping Lupin wouldn't enquire into the matter. It seemed that he succeeded, for the man simply nodded.

A few minutes later, Harry left the staff room for some lunch, and several questions from his classmates.

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For the third time that day, Ginny snapped her wand towards her target, shouting the incantation for a scorching hex. This time it worked, and a red bold of energy hit one of the nearby wooden dummies, setting it on fire.

"Well done Ginny!" said Hermione "You're the first one to get it." she said, a small hint of jealousy in her voice.

"And it works perfectly too. You people keep on practicing, I'll move on to the next spell with Ginny." said Harry, leading Ginny to another side of the room of requirement, by a large, red tapestry embroidered with a golden eagle.

"Now, there's a very useful shielding charm against solid objects" started Harry. "It will work against most objects, though, as you understand, the bigger or more magical the object, the more difficult it is to stop it. For example, it should be pretty easy to stop or deflect a muggle bullet, but not a muggle car." Ginny nodded.

"Good. I'll be testing you with pellets then. The incantation is Codecli, make sure you picture the shield in your mind." he said, grabbing a handful of pellets.

"Codecli!" shouted Ginny, as Harry launched the pellets at her. A furious wind whipped around her, knocking the pellets away.

"Not bad, though with practice you shouldn't need to create a whirlwind around you. Focus on making it more of an egg that covers you." said Harry, as the two tried again.

Eventually, the other Shades managed to master the scorching spell, and moved over to Harry to try the new shielding charm. Soon, the air was filled with smashed pellets or other objects going off course.

"Right, Right, Enough!" said Harry, as he watched the mayhem. "I think we have it covered for today."

"But you promised us a duel!" jumped in Ginny.

"But its late and there is Quidditch tommoro…" he tried to argue.

"You could beat them all with your eyes closed Harry. Now come on, you did promise us we'd get to have a fight."

"Fine" said Harry. He snapped his fingers, and 8 of dummies suddenly started moving. "Lets see how well you fare against these…1, 2, 3, BEGIN!"

The wooden figures moved towards the surprised children. Ginny was the first one to react, and within a few seconds, she had already turned one of the dummies into a burning pile of charcoal.

Within a minute, all of the dummies had been dispatched.

"That wasn't a real duel!" said Ginny, ignoring the pleading stare that a sweaty Ron gave her, as he nursed a bruise on his jaw.

"Okay, Okay. Ron, you go against Hermione, Neville, you fight Ginny."

Soon, curses and hexes were flying around. Harry watched impressed as Hermione countered a particularly powerful bludgeoning curse from Ron with her shield. She staggered back several steps, and when Ron sent another curse towards her, Harry expected that would be the end of that battle.

Hermione however managed to flatten herself against the ground, and with a quick flick of her wand, she managed to win the duel in a way that would have given the twins cause to tease him for several weeks, had they known about it.

She simply summoned the spiders Harry kept in the nearby jars (the ones he used to test curse on, though no-one knew about that) and then sent them all towards Ron, who started performing a rather peculiar variation of the Tango dance. A simple expelliarmus later, and Hermione was declared the victor.

All three of them then turned to watch Ginny's and Neville's duel. Watching some of the spells flying, Harry frowned. They were both displaying an unusually high amount of power. He had become accustomed to expecting as much from Ginny, but even she was pressed to the limit to counter the barrage of spells that Neville was sending her way.

'They will grow into powerful people…all of them will.' He thought, now watching the exchange with increasing concern as Ginny's robe was singed.

The spells both parties were using were now powerful enough to cause some serious harm. Harry prepared to step in, when Ginny sent a storm of ice shards towards Neville, who summoned a shield in place. The ensuing whirlwind easily smashed them away, yet Ginny kept on sending more and more towards him.

The others watched this exchange with puzzlement. It seemed fairly pointless to waste so much energy in summoning things, when a simple shield could stop them. Soon however, the room's temperature began to fall, and an icy mist gathered around Neville. The wind that used to swirl around him had now become so cold, that Harry was sure he could hear Neville's teeth clattering, even though he couldn't see him through the mist.

Pointing her wand carefully at the mass of what now resembled a cloud, Ginny whispered, as silently as possible, a disarming hex. It wasn't particularly powerful, but combined with the advantage of surprise and Neville's frozen fingers, Ginny soon found herself holding two wands.

"Well" said Harry, sending a warming charm to a relieved Neville "That was certainly interesting. Nice strategy Ginny." He said to the girl, that now looked as if she wanted nothing more than to sink into the nearest warm place and let sleep overtake her.

Soon she, and the rest of the Shades, did just that.

Apart from Harry that is. He spent a long time that night meditating and reconstructing his mind barriers. To his dismay, he discovered that whatever he had done had caused it to become scorched.

He repaired it all, hopefully spelling the end of any future headaches, yet, despite his ordered mind and healthier than ever core, he felt as if something was missing, and something deep within him shivered as he felt the lingering presence of a former shadow. For a moment, he felt almost as if he was in front of that…thing…that his doggart had become in class earlier, but the feeling quickly disappeared, and he sank into unconsciousness.

o0o

He dived, urging his broom to go faster. This was one match he didn't want to lose.

Keeping his mind focused on the golden ball fluttering in front of him, he barely heard Hufflepuff scoring and reducing the difference to 70-30. He ignored Diggory on his tail. The crowd, though louder that ever, had long since gone silent to his ears. For once, his entire world was focused on a single, golden, point.

Stretching his arm beyond what he would have though possible, and earning himself a strained forearm in the process, he managed to get that ball into its rightful place: his hand, giving Gryffindor the victory.

As if somebody had cranked the volume up, he suddenly became aware of the thunderous roars and shouts around him. Grinning victoriously, he drove his broom to a rapid descent, joining his teamates in the ground for a group hug, which was soon joined by the Gryffindors that jumped over the stands.

For this one, fleeting moment, Harry let his mind revel in victory, forgetting everything about the impending war. His grin faltered however, when he saw a pale Ginny hugging him as tightly as possible.

"Hey Gin…we won…it's not like it was that dangerous a dive…"

"But….you…you fell…and there was this coldness…"

"I didn't fall…"

"I know but…I saw you fall…and yet I didn't…it was almost as if I was seeing two things at once."

"Maybe you were just too worried?"

"Maybe…" she agreed, colour returning to her cheeks. "Well, I think that they are waiting for us up in the common room."

"I'm sure." said Harry, wincing as he rubbed his strained arm.

"You've managed to hurt yourself just getting a ball?" she asked incredulously.

"It's just a little strain." he said.

"Just a little strain!" she muttered, taking out her wand and moving it gently over his arm. "There. Now try to take care of yourself for at least one day will you?"

"I don't think I can do that Ginny. You'll just have to take care of me I guess." he said, pulling her into a tight, one-armed hug. "Now, I heard the twins left to smuggle in some butterbeer…I think we should honour their effort by being present when they bring it up to the dorms."

"Right you are Potter." she said. "Last one to the tower is one-toothed squib!" she called, giggling and running up the stairs.

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'Watching Goblin Councils is boring.' decided Harry, as he watched some goblin named Berg rant on and on about how his cheese was better that his cousin's Brag and how everyone should buy cheese from him.

Brag then cut in and started saying something about his great-great-grandfather's toes, or something like that. 'If you ask me, their cheese looks exactly the same and smells like the Gryffindor's Quidditch team's locker room.'

But still, he kept an impassive face and pretended to be interested, just like the goblins beside him were doing, as far as he could tell. Boring as it may be, he was happy that he had been invited by the goblin leadership to become an honorary advisor to the council.

It seemed strange that the Goblins would give such a position to a human, as that had only been done once before, with Gryffindor, but it seemed even stranger that they would give it to a 13-year old boy, even if he had helped them greatly.

From what Harry had learnt however, it turned out that the Goblin sages had made some prediction that he would be of indispensable help to the goblin nation…even if they were rather vague, the Goblins trusted their sages immensely, and Harry now sat in the annual, and rather long, council meeting in London's Gringotts. Those sages were, after all, the de-facto leaders of most goblin communities…even if the day to day workings of society were taken care of by others.

He had met many Sages and Council members, and while he was impressed by their wisdom, he still didn't understand some of the logic. The council had opened on a rather interesting discussion about the Goblin Rebels that wanted to take over and wage war against the humans, yet since then it had randomly jumped from matters like outstanding debts from various ministers to Berg and Brag's cheese conflict, which apart from being boring, had also began to make the room smell bad, as the two goblins had insisted upon bringing cheese samples with them.

So Harry now opted to think how he was going to sneak back into Hogwarts. Luckily, the Christmas break had begun, and he had told his friends that he wanted to spend the day alone because of some things he had to catch up on, but as it was nearing night time, he didn't know how well he would be able to fend off their questions.

His thoughts were interrupted by the head warlock, Gushend, as he ordered that the matter would be thought upon and that it was time for the two cousins to leave, which they did, after complaining loudly and being poked with some nasty looking enchanted spears.

Then talk seemed to turn once more to the rebels, and one of their attacks at some underground city. Harry watched the debate with interest. Despite these rebels having infiltrated almost every level of goblin society – he had already identified one within the council – outside society knew nothing about them.

Soon however, the meeting was over, and from what Harry understood, it was mere formality, as no decisions were taken on any matter, whether it be rebellion, new interest rates or smelly cheese.

He got up from his chair, and followed the crowd of short people to the exit, stopping every so often to have a few conversations. Now was the time the real decisions were made: each person approached the other, arranging specific meetings over specific matters. Left with nothing else to do, Harry decided to go to some of the goblin technicians, who were eager to show to him some of their newest machines, and ask his opinions of various enchantments.

Frankly, some of the projects they were working on were very impressive. Ultimately, some of them had the goal to build thinking and moving machines, willing servants, but they had run into several problems. He watched with interest how they had managed to create a mixture of organic substance and machine, but without somehow managing to create a creature with magical channels to join to their machine, their experiments were doomed, and they knew that.

At best, they would manage to make a temporary worker, which would last as long as the enchantment on it. For it to work longer it need life to sustain it…

'Perhaps a captured soul would work, like what those ancient Egyptian mages used…but that would require some connection to a different plane, and they would be disobedient and dangerous…no, they would have to build life for it to work.'

He gave them some useful details on various magical rituals forbidden to them by the ministry's oppressive rule. Yet, as they told him, "Magic, strong as it may be, cannot replace life…neither can a machine."

They then guided him to some other things they had developed, many of them sporting an obvious muggle influence. When asked about it, the goblins admitted to taking many muggle inventions and adapting them to their needs.

"Taking" in this case meant stealing, and from a list they handed to him, he saw that several institutions researching Artificial Intelligence had their data stolen. Their "Hit-list" as they termed it, was in fact the government's list of certified research institutions. Next to each lab, the goblins had written stories about their break-ins, many of which included posing as aliens.

Laughing, he asked for a copy, which he stuffed into his pocket, to peruse later at his leisure.

After passing by various offices to take care of some last minute affairs, and after being approached by many councillors on various mundane matters ranging from buying some ale to placing a bet on who would make the world Quidditch cup finals next year. (Where Harry, armed with his knowledge, gleefully placed a large sum on Bulgaria and Ireland).

Finally, he escaped from the bank and, gazing at the snow falling from the dark sky, he apparated several miles to the north, to an even colder place, and pulled on his invisibility cloak.

15 minutes, and one, deliberate step on Mrs Norris's tail later, he entered the common room, and ignored the questions that his friends made, as he gleefully sank into the couch nearest to the roaring fire.

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