“-. September 2, 1995 .-“

  Harry was unable to sleep well without feeling like he was doing something to avoid being trapped in the future, so summer was spent learning everything possible about avoiding entrapment of all kinds. Then escaping immobilization and confinement when that failed. Nobody in their circle was from elite military, so Harry didn’t get put through full on SERE. Also, that was the sort of trauma Nicolas vetoed outright, at the age Harry was. So did Sirius. Despite Harry technically going through it once already, as Lorne.

  He didn’t say so, but Harry was guiltily grateful to them, even though it kind of defeated the purpose of assimilating and reinforcing Lorne’s skills.

  Unfortunately, that put his achievements for the whole three months somewhere in the realm of ‘nothing worth mentioning,’ in the grand scheme of things.

  Summer was over and Harry Potter had nothing to show for it.

  Charles Gordon, however, had a lot.

  After being bottlenecked for the past two years by the sheer dross in the memories of Osiris, Harry’s life as Evan Lorne had given Charlie two big breakthroughs.

  One was the atomic formula for naquadah, complete with the visual reference of its molecular, atomic and subatomic structure (from a briefing of Samantha Carter’s that Lorne sat in one time).

  The second was the Temple of Osiris. Not the one in Abydos, Egypt, but another one. Which, incidentally, was not located in the same place as his tomb, despite the SG-1 mission report saying otherwise.

  If they’d been in the same place, Harry wouldn’t have had to live an entire different life in another reality to find out about it. In fact, odds were good that everything would’ve landed in the hands of the Egyptian magical government, since Gringotts hadn’t yet ‘negotiated’ their right of first refusal on ancient ruins back then. Also, it made sense that the place where Ra allowed the canopic jars to be entombed wouldn’t be the same place where Osiris had his escape plan.

  Consequently, it was the opposite of easy to find the place. For one, Lorne had never been there himself, no more than he’d been at the Tomb for the archaeological dig that found the canopic jars (which seemed to have unfolded identically in both realities). Lorne certainly hadn’t been part of the botched mission that saw Osiris escape earth in Sarah Gardner’s body, after almost melting Daniel Jackson’s brain.

  For another, like the Tomb of Osiris, the Temple of Osiris had been buried under the sands of the Egyptian desert for the past four thousand years. Well, technically it had been buried for closer to five thousand years, just not under sand.

  The Sahara went through cycles, apparently, and the Earth itself was technically in a glacial termination phase – it hadn’t quite finished coming out of the last ice age, geologically speaking. Five thousand years ago the Sahara was a lush rainforest like the Amazon, and it wasn’t just the wizard-snakehead war that wiped all that vegetation off the face of North Africa.

  Actually, the fact that so many ancient structures were still being found intact spoke to something different than carpet bombing, never mind orbital bombardment. Some stood out in particular by predating Goa’uld arrival entirely.

  This dovetailed with what vague notions had survived about some huge but localized calamity that Atlantis had either unleashed or provoked, before it sank. The effect would’ve been not unlike the Younger Dryas impact event – a whole lot of dirt, ash and sediment was displaced, much even kicked up into the atmosphere. This caused destruction in a radial manner, and then an ice age. This was followed the mass death of vegetation, and the subsequent burial of man-made structures under ash and loam.

  Except that the ecosystem didn’t recover because the vegetation couldn’t adjust. The too abrupt change in climate simply didn’t revert to norm fast enough.

  “With the rainforest being reduced to brush and deadwood in just a couple of generations, there was nothing to fix the soil in place,” Charlie explained one day while he, Harry and Nicolas were going on a camel ride through the Sahara dunes one hot summer day, occasionally checking the technomagical device Charlie had created to ‘douse’ for naquadah. Thank goodness for cooling charms. “And when a forest suddenly disappears, what happens?”

  “Erosion,” Harry guessed. He’d learned a lot as Evan Lorne and he’d been reading a lot too since waking up, on a whole lot of things. Charlie was really good at picking reading material for him, to reinforce and complete his past life knowledge during his training breaks. “Both water and air?”

  “And landslides, after the forests were gone the climate changed just slow enough to let the water ruin the soil layer stability even more. After that, with the cold weather and reduced sunlight preventing the reforestation that should have happened, gravity and the wind played merry havoc on the highlands that used to rely on tree roots to stay fixed.”

  The Sahara, contrary to popular belief, wasn’t all sand dunes. In reality, it was mostly exposed rock, with sand only making up a minority of its surface. It had quite a few scattered mountains and highlands, which was where the sand actually came from – all soil contained sand, especially the silt and clay of the region.

  “Soils are roughly half minerals by volume and those minerals are silt, sand, and clay,” Charlie continued later, when they were checking their latest potential dig site. “In fact, sand is often the largest single constituent of most common soils. Silt and clay are smaller and lighter, and can be moved by wind much easier when dry. In the very dry conditions here, this leads to the removal of everything but the heavier sand particles. And since wind is good at sorting grains by size…”

  “Eventually each area ends up having only one grain size.,” Nicolas answered when Harry didn’t figure it out fast enough. “Each dune, even. Without water and life to bind the material together, wind has removed all the lighter particles and left behind only the sand and pebbles. Give the wind a generation to work unchallenged, never mind thousands of years, and you get this.”

  “Is that why there are whole dunes made of just quartz particles?” Harry asked.

  “Yes and no,” Charlie replied. “A lot of the Sahara sand has actually been here for some one point three million years, at least. Most of the dunes just get grown over by grass during the less arid periods. Sand quartz crystals in particular are covered in an iron coating that could only be done by raining or aereal deposition. Also, the main source of quartz is granite, which is not usually near the surface in the required quantities, and the Sahara is certainly no exception there. Then there’s the thousand-some, not-so-fossilized whales in Wadi Al-Hitan, near El Cairo. Those things have to have been superficially buried, and current dating procedures say this occurred millions of years ago.”

  “Impossible if the desert only formed 5,000 years ago,” Nicolas mused. “Conversely, if all this sand is due to millions of years of weathering, how was the Sphinx eroded by rain-off water, if there is no rain in the desert?”

  “Well that’s the thing, isn’t it? We don’t have to wonder, unlike those poor archeologists.”

  “We’re just back at the Void Pretender War,” Harry muttered, it always came back to that of course. “The whales are super old, and the sand is even older, it was just when it got moved here that happened later. Thousands of years ago, but not that many. And the Spynx… if it’s much older than five thousand years, maybe it was built on the order of the actual gods way back? When they were still around?”

  “At least one of ‘em’s still around now,” Charlie muttered after stowing the naquadouser. “Don’t ask, please.”

  Ah yes, the ‘incident’ that broke Charles Gordon free of the memory spells MACUSA put him and his family through, for withdrawing him from Salem part-way. Which may or may not have made his retardation worse, if not turned him into a halfwit to begin with, thereby turning him into the ideal test subject for Doctor Strauss’ revolutionary intellect-boosting brain surgery. All of which was just an incidental side benefit of… whatever happened in Miami sometime in the 80s?

  Charlie had gone through some weird adventures, far as Harry could piece together from his random slips. Even by his standards. Something about helping a sky-hopping magic kung fu cop friend travel back in time to kill Hitler. By hacking time. Except it… probably wasn’t time hacking but dimensional hacking, since the kung fu cop had ended up in Raptor Mountain at some point during that whole thing, instead of back in time as they thought at the time. Which Charlie ‘explained’ by it all actually being a case of ‘supernatural evil entity induces a mass delusion that temporarily becomes reality.’

  Also, the Third Reich they ostensibly landed in had absolutely nothing in common with any version of reality.

  The 80s were a wild time in America.

  Bloody confusing, all of it, Harry tried not to think about it if at all possible.

  Thor was involved in it somehow. The god, not the Roswell gray.

  “Obviously, the Goa’uld must have co-opted the Sphynx,” Nicolas said, pulling Harry back into the real world. “Just like they did our pyramids.”

  The ancient Egyptians did not build the pyramids, though they certainly adopted them as their own. The pyramids were built long before the Great Flood. They weren’t tombs, and they weren’t landing platforms for spaceships even though that was what the Goa’uld used them for. They were piezoelectric power plants of a function identical to the towers that Nikola Tesla tried to give mankind, before evil attorneys and rivals stole his research and made sure to ruin all his initiatives thereafter.

  Conveniently, all the American industrialists and businessmen not opposed to Tesla’s point of view – but were opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve – died with the Titanic around the same time.

  What a wonderful legacy to repeat, except without the excuse of alien meddling this time.

  Or maybe not, Harry reconsidered. Maybe we should look into the Titanic too, was MACUSA involved? Was Seth?

  Whatever great war happened between the Goa’uld and the wizards, the capstone of the conflict occurred somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. Whether it was at the start, mid-way through, or at the end of that rebellion, Harry didn’t know. But it was clear, now, what the effects were – that great calamity caused the great flood. Well, the latest great flood. In North Africa, this would have manifested as massive tsunamis wiping off the great Saharan rainforest (garden of Eden?) in the same blow that sank Atlantis to its final doom, so called.

  The wizard one, not the Alteran city-ship the next galaxy over.

  “Quite possibly this is also how the Black Sea came to be,” Nicolas speculated.

  “And then there’s the Dead Sea as well, or the Lake of Sodom,” Charlie smirked. “They’re finding all sorts of stuff there. They think it’s meteoric sulfur, but we know other ways it might have gotten there now, don’t we?”

  Sodom and Gomorrah were supposedly ‘destroyed by god for their wickedness’ but since now they knew that the ‘god(s)’ in power during that time frame were the Goa’uld, it didn’t take a genius to guess what really happened. Also, there had to be a reason why the Essenes chose that place to stash their sacred knowledge. As far as preludes to the final conflict went, few were as dramatic.

  In any case, geology and anthropology lessons weren’t the only thing Harry got from those desert safaris. What he, what they also got, was Charlie finally finding the place where the Temple of Osiris was located. And, with it, the archaic tel’tak transport ship that the snake had used in that other reality to escape the Earth.

  Just as functional too, when they turned it on. For the one minute before Charlie’s various gadgets and Harry’s psychometry realized just how much of the energy being generated was vanishing into thin air.

  Literally.

  “Well, we can’t say we didn’t expect this,” Charlie wryly said after Harry rushed to shut the whole thing down. “Time to get creative.”

  ‘Creative’ didn’t mean shrinking spells, it turned out. Charlie didn’t want to risk them because magic had to be messing with at least the electromagnetic force, if not the weak or strong forces too. Harry didn’t know what those last two were, even though Lorne had heard them mentioned once or twice. He could follow along with the explanation despite it though, he wasn’t an idiot.

  “I’m not that worried about how the spell messes with gravity,” Charlie explained. “Obviously, the miniature object would be just as heavy as in full size if it didn’t. But that’s not a problem for a vehicle explicitly designed to cope with rapid changes in gravitational force and vectors, even induce them itself. What I don’t want to risk is the material properties of what this ship is made of. At the very least a shrinking spell will reduce the distance between atoms, if not between the subatomic particles themselves.”

  Hermione said something like that too, once, in another life. Since shrinking spells tended to kill many future gadgets in those lives Harry remembered living out, Charlie was right to be worried.

  “Messing with electromagnetism is already a surefire way to make life hell for superconductors, never mind these crystal-based computers here, but naquadah? If that mineral can enhance atomic reactions in its raw ore form, I don’t want to test what will happen if the atom-to-atom distance suddenly shrinks. Obviously it’s not an unstable element – the hull of this thing seems to be some sort of alloy made under extreme gravity conditions. But the liquid naquadah in the reactor is an entirely different beast I don’t understand yet, I don’t want to risk it if we don’t have to.”

  Since they couldn’t shrink the ship, and the middle of the Sahara desert wasn’t the best place to refit an alien spaceship, never mind reverse engineer it – especially in a different country that they hadn’t informed about any of this – they had to somehow transport the tel’tak back home. Fortunately, the ship was the sort small enough to fit through a stargate, and Charlie had a way to open portals. His Microbee 32000 couldn’t rip a big enough one on its own, but that was what auxiliary equipment was for.

  They ended up running some live power lines through Harry’s dimensional door into Raptor Mountain, where they set up a field outpost just for the purpose of creating a big enough portal pad. Unfortunately, they found out that Charlie’s portal magitek didn’t work there any more than regular magic did, despite that he’d accidentally sent his friend into the same place from outside, in the past.

  “Thor must’ve done something,” Charlie was muttering one day in late July when Harry dropped by. “Too much of that fever dream aligned just right for luck alone to explain it.”

  Looking at the monitors and drawings scattered about the field outpost in the pocket dimension, Harry saw a whole bunch of diagrams and three-dimensional representations of spell matrices. On looking closer, he realized that even the individual lines were made entirely out of smaller geometric shapes and numbers.

  “This is all just one spell?” Harry asked incredulously.

  “That’s what I’ve managed to deduce so far of what Magic has been doing every time I’ve cast the portal spell in the past. See this sequence of sets?”

  “The ones in bright green?” Numbers and shapes, they were – not scattered across the 3D spell matrix, they were too orderly for that, but… very widely distributed?

  “Those are the sum total of my so-called spell subroutine. The rest? I knew something was offloading a whole lot of the process, but even I didn’t know just how much heavy lifting Magic does. Unless we find a way to cast something so complex on our own, and somehow collect enough power for it, we won’t be able to open a portal anywhere from this side.”

  “This is why rituals were so important before,” Harry realized. “Why the best spells needed group casting, over a long period too. And now they don’t.”

  “Well, they do here.”

  What kind of spiritual power did the real mages have back then, that they could cast any spells on their own? “So what do we do?”

  “Work around it,” Charlie shrugged. “I managed to throw Thomas into this place by accident once, that means Magic can reach sub-dimensions from outside just fine. Rather than the whole spell, we’ll just put a beacon here.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Only if you’re fine extending the time to completion by at least a few months,” Charlie winced. “Maybe a year, advanced algebra is just the start of this anti-rocket science. No offense, your friend Miss Granger offered too, and she isn’t anywhere near those basics either. And that’s before we integrate arythmancy into it.”

  “This is why you were hired so far ahead of time, isn’t it?” Harry wondered mostly to himself. “And Doctor Strauss…” Whose surgery would make Harry so smart that he’d learn all this stuff in a month, and then more and more and more forever, because with nerve-regrowth potions they wouldn’t need to worry about turning stupid again. Well, not permanently. Like Charlie had, before he was cured and hired by the mysterious employer of mystery behind the invisible door of mystery.

  I’m not sure I like where my thoughts are going.

  They ended up temporarily removing the Raptor Mountain door from Hogwarts, and moving it to the Temple of Osiris. There, with power lines drawn over from Britain through Raptor Mountain and out again, Charlie set up a second field camp. That way, though it took several days for the rigged ritual array to collect the necessary power – it wasn’t just size, the portal had to stay open a fair while too – Charlie was finally able to overcharge his portal program to open a vortex big enough for the ship to drop through.

  Harry and Nicolas worked together to levitate the ship, but Harry fancied he might have been able to do it by himself. He would once have thought that levitating that whole thing would be more of a strain, but after his experience with the nonsense that was the Reparo spell, he no longer put upper limits on what a wizard could do. Well, with Magic doing the heavy lifting anyway.

  The lack of line of sight through the opaque portal made the moving a bit tense near the end, they had to be really careful to always levitate the ship by the load-bearing hull parts, and the ship still dropped a bit too far and suddenly at the end. Fortunately, they predicted that, which was why they dumped several tons worth of sand through the portal first. Made for quite the soft landing, that.

  Finally, even though the space was limited as such things went in the pocket dimension, they could actually fly the thing. And since he was the only one with memories of doing so, even being specifically trained for it by the Tok’Ra, Harry was the one who first powered up the ship and flew it off the ground.

  He didn’t expect the rush, but it was there. Activating the tel’tak, lifting it off the ground with pure anti-gravity and then flying it… even for the short distance around the mountain, it was the sort of thing to leave you breathless. It wasn’t the same as riding a broom, with the wind in your face and nothing between you and the fall except your grip, but moving, traveling in something you knew could take you to the stars and beyond…

  It wasn’t the first time Hary felt free from the constant dread that the Bartender had damned him with, but it was the first time when he didn’t need someone else to distract him first.

  If things were different, Harry might have taken the thing flying out in normal reality just for the joyride. Screw secrecy and slow and steady, this was an alien spaceship and it was his now.

  Unfortunately, Magic worked against them, for once.

  They’d kept the ship powered off after they noticed the drain, but not before Charlie took some readings. By his calculations, Magic wouldn’t actually exhaust the liquid naquadah reactor, at least not immediately – it didn’t so much drain it as divert the majority of the generated power into feeding itself. But to fly the ship under those conditions, they’d have to overclock the reactor so much that it would burn out well before they reached the higher atmosphere. And a lot of attached circuitry too. After that, assuming they didn’t explode, they’d suffer a thoroughly meteoric crash.

  Also, not enough power for anything else, like the shields. Not safe at all once you get high enough and every piece of space debris is a destructive micrometeorite.

  “This must be why the vimanas disappeared from myth so suddenly,” Dumbledore commented when Nicolas brought him up to speed, after he used their temporary shortcut to join them in Africa to put the Temple under Fidelius charm. Dumbledore had decided to make it a teaching experience for Harry, which worked better than they all expected. Harry not only got it but cast the spell himself, despite his age. Or because of it, when you put all of his lives together

  That said, being so old and reliant on magic to get him through the day, everyone was leery of Dumbledore staying in Raptor Mountain for any length of time, including himself, so they adjourned in the Room after that. “If Magic can drain advanced technology of power so quickly, it accounts for much of the force the Goa’uld might have otherwise brought to bear against the ancestors. Do we know how high the effect reaches?”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Not yet,” Nicolas explained, since Charlie was too busy running through increasingly arcane mathematics on his computer – he’d written the program for it himself. “If Magic stretches as far as low orbit it will certainly explain the lack of orbital bombardment.”

  “Sounds too easy,” Harry muttered from where he was being fed grapes by Kreacher while Dobby fanned him with a giant leaf. Just a few days visiting Egypt and he was already a stereotype. But his friends had talked behind his back that he wasn’t capable of fun anymore, and one of those friends was walking a path he really didn’t appreciate even in his past lives, when he didn’t know what he knew now. It left him just annoyed enough to take Dobby up on his idea to ‘get even.’ Just as soon as they got here.

  Any minute now…

  “It needs verification of course.” Nicolas told Dumbledore, and Sirius who was holding in laughter at the sight Harry made, which made Harry conflicted because even Nicolas looked relieved and Harry didn’t feel like- “The current plan is to build a harness with flight enchantments and use it to carry the ship up as far as it can go, which will answer that question.”

  “And let me know what trajectory and speed to use for escape velocity,” Charlie grunted, revealing that he was aware of everything around him as always. “Unless the field reaches all the way to the moon, it should be possible to propel the ship on a ballistic vector with enough momentum to remove it from the reach of Magic entirely.”

  “He means ‘toss it away from Earth really hard,’” Harry told Sirius just to see if it was any fun to pretend like his godfather was that clueless. It wasn’t, because Sirius obviously understood and scowled just to play along, but that still felt nice in a different way.

  Mister Godfather had something of his own to ask too. “I assume there’s a reason we’re not just drawing an anti-magic array on every inch of that thing?”

  “Because then we won’t know when or if we’ve escaped from magic,” Charlie replied. “We also won’t be able to cast anything inside, so we won’t have the option to just cast petty spells over and over until we can’t anymore. I am considering something limited to just the power core, but that will still leave all the other technology on the ship to Magic’s mercy, so we won’t be able to pilot it, or detect damage, etc. With what options we currently have, it’s all or nothing.”

  Or they could put in the anti-magic field and fly the ship to wherever, then deactivate the array, and then pilot back carefully until power anomalies started showing up…

  But surely Charlie already thought of that, right? Well, something to check with him later, if nobody else brings it up. “Anyway, when we know the point where we can activate the ship and it doesn’t have to work on a tenth of the minimum necessary power, we’ll be able to actually travel to other planets,” Harry said, and he didn’t have to fake his excitement. It wasn’t much excitement, but it was something. “Other star systems, even. It may be slow by most standards today, but the ship does have a hyperdrive.”

  “’Slow’ he says,” Sirius scoffed. “Look at that, boy has one dream and suddenly being able to travel the stars is somehow not impressive anymore, never mind at physics-defying speeds.”

  “There’s no such things as physics-defying,” Charlie scoffed where he was doing… something involving swirling numbers and rounding 3D grids. “Notice how theoretical physics is called theoretical. According to current academia gospel, there are three possibilities – causality, relativity, and faster-than-light speed, none of which have been incontrovertibly proven by their own standards. Also, only two of the three can be true. Since causality is ultimately implicit in everything, that leaves one. People have been desperately trying to prove Einstein right for the past hundred years, but in the end we need to face the fact that light is affected by gravity with all the things that implies. Also, the Destiny exists. Really, Bohr told us Einstein was wrong ages ago, and he even out-debated Einstein himself on the issue, but everyone pretends it never happened.”

  The prevalence of hyperspace travel and the multiple incidents of ‘relative time’ in the SGC reports would, on the surface, vindicate the relativity side, but that didn’t really make sense in the same universe as the Destiny, which just… moved faster than light through normal space. Somehow. Stopped as easily as it accelerated too, so it wasn’t just an issue of infinite acceleration on the same vector, though that should certainly work too.

  Even ignoring that, Occam’s razor suggested that every instance of observed ‘relativity’ could more easily be explained by sensory illusions. And, in the case of that clock that supposedly ‘proved’ time moved slower on Earth than in orbit, by the error margin of material properties at different weights.

  “And vectors of attraction, very important,” Charlie said dryly. “Consider this scenario: if a random light beam shoots off into deep intergalactic space, it stands to reason that it will eventually be subject to only – or at least mainly – the pull of the next galaxy or star in its path. The effect needn’t be as strong as a broken tug of war, but it will exist. At that point it will accelerate for the whole time it takes to cross the distance, increasingly so the closer to the source of the gravitational pull it gets. Since light speed has only been measured within the Milky Way, specifically the Sol System, what does that tell us?”

  “We’re assuming that the space in between is totally empty, right?” said Sirius. “In zero gravity vacuum, acceleration has no reason to reach an upper limit, right? It would be like the sucking power of a black hole, except in reverse. So… light can travel faster than light?”

  “Well, technically the bigwigs say light is massless, so it’s space that gets bent out of shape around black holes,” Harry hedged, recalling talk about black holes. From Evan Lorne’s future. Before people found out that black holes don’t work like they thought at all, even further in the future. “Never really made sense to me though, it just sounded like people getting bent out of shape to stay right.”

  Charlie smirked. “Nikola Tesla agrees with you.”

  And wasn’t that something?

  “What about all the time dilation then?” Sirius asked before Harry could. “There were those black hole through stargate incidents, and a spaceship full of ancients suffering time dilation from traveling at just under light speed.”

  Harry still thought that all the rambling about ‘relativistic speed’ and the ever-invoked gospel of ‘from whose perspective’ sounded like people were trying to make too big a deal out of optical illusions. Well, sensory illusions. And misinterpretations of sensor readings. That said, there had been some weird incidents at Stargate Command. And elsewhere too.

  “More Ascended reality warping, probably,” Charlie huffed. “For the black hole – first off, a star doesn’t turn into a singularity nearly that fast. Also, when you have two singularities in close proximity, especially one with supergravity, relativity is unnecessary for weird things to happen.”

  It certainly didn’t take magic to figure that out.

  “Honestly, the wormhole shouldn’t have stayed connected at all, the smaller singularity would’ve been disrupted at the other end, or the stargate would’ve warped and bent enough to destabilize the connection immediately. Even if it somehow didn’t, the Cheyenne mountain complex should’ve just been crushed into a small ball before anyone could even blink, maybe even sucked through. Probably the Ancients intervened to offset that pull with their superpowers. In any of those scenarios, the ‘time dilation’ was just an illusion.”

  Vindication? “Everything gets slower when it’s heavier,” Harry mused. “Feels slower too.”

  “Or maybe the Ancients intervened to slow everything down themselves,” Nicolas guessed. “They simulated the relativistic effect as a way to give the SGC enough time to fix the problem on their own.”

  “More like they generated antigravity and everyone had differing experiences based on where they were and what they were doing,” Charlie disagreed. Mostly.

  Harry had something of a different idea, because… Maybe that was the point? To create a reality where relativity was the law, not an elaborate make-believe setup? Referring back to the Lego model, if the elder Brother was all-in on defense, what better defense would there be than to rip your home out of the ground, foundation and all, and go start a neighbourhood of your own with all-new rules you yourself set up? Somewhere the jerk neighbour could never go?

  Or just run everyone out of your neighbourhood, including the bad neighbour.

  “What about the spaceship then?” Sirius asked. “The ‘Tria’ or whatever it’s called? The one with the Lanteans in the Pegasus galaxy?”

  “Perhaps it was a mercy.” Dumbledore, paradoxically, remained the one among them most inclined to assume the better of people. “Since their hyperdrive was damaged, their Ascended kin could have stretched their time so they would not die of old age before they reached the Milky Way at sublight speed. Or go mad.”

  A time capsule from which to repopulate their race, eons after they lost everything and their enemies forgot about them?

  “Or the crew lied,” Charlie was more cynical. “Just because relativistic time isn’t real doesn’t mean time dilation itself is impossible. In fact, we know it’s not, or more extreme stuff like time travel would be impossible, and the Odyssey wouldn’t have stayed frozen in time for fifty years. The Tria might have just done something similar, and then the crew lied to the Pegasus mission because the Alterans are all about keeping stuff from the lesser races.”

  “Until they aren’t,” Harry muttered.

  “Until they aren’t,” Charlie agreed.

  After that, the topic was apparently exhausted, so Harry decided to be brave for once and broach the topic of who would go on the test flight. Or ship toss. Both.

  To his flattered dismay, everyone was against Harry doing it. Too risky, too dangerous, if magic reaches too far he might end up on an indefinite ballistic flight – or more likely crash. If he passes beyond the edge of magic he won’t be able to portkey back or apparate. If he tries to ‘dive back under the surface’ of Magic, the ship will just lose power as per scenario one and they’d lose either him or the ship, most likely both. Maybe the flight array would reactivate, if they were still intact which was unlikely, but they had no precedent yet to be sure.

  Harry argued that Charlie was just as indispensable, which everyone agreed on too, taking the wind out of his sails. Then, because the adults in his life insisted on being annoyingly responsible ever since they dropped the ball in the Chamber of Secrets, they decided that Harry would just have to teach someone else to fly the ship. And, since Charlie, Dumbledore and Nicolas were the least expendable, the job would have to fall to Sirius Black.

  “Unless you’d rather train that Hufflepuff friend of yours?” Sirius blithely asked him when Harry wouldn’t stop pouting at his rapidly perishing dream of being the first Terran-born man in space. Well, past moon orbit at least. In an alien spaceship. “Or maybe it’s miss Chang you want to lure away from her beau’s graces through regular one-on-one sessions, for shame, Godson mine! I get wanting to follow in your Pa’s footsteps but Diggory isn’t the deserving type!”

  Like Snivellus?

  The most annoying part was that Harry had already let it slip that he’d fancied Cho in those other lives, so he couldn’t even accuse Sirius of slander because no one would believe him.

  Ugh.

  “Harry James Potter!” Came Hermione Granger’s entirely expected outburst when the Tarnished Trio finally dropped by. “What are you doing to those elves?!”

  “Oh no it’s her,” Doby panicked with poorly hidden glee. “The Dark Lady!”

  “Indeed,” Kreacher nodded sagely, not a single stutter in his fan. “Just as the Half-Blood Master had foreseen.”

  “The who? I’m what?!”

  Harry opened his mouth to let Dobby drop the next grape, and chewed it with deliberate slowness while beholding the one and only girl among his friends. “Dark Lady Spew,” he said solemnly. “We need to talk.”

  S.P.E.W. Spew. A fake slur invented by Ronald Weasley in a different time, when Hermione Granger created the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare for much more ignorantly noble reasons than here.

  As admirable as Hermione’s abhorrence of slavery was, they had to set her straight on everything before she did something the magical world wouldn’t come back from. One would think she’d have grown out of it by now, knowing what Nicolas told them about the origin of the house-elves, and especially what Herla went through that led to it. What Harry himself went through, might go through again…

  It was fortunate that Nicolas was there to coax Hermione’s reasoning out of her, because Harry was now sure he would have made a mess of it. He’d have lost his temper for sure, if he had to talk to her knowing that she was doing it all despite knowing what he’d suffered – good god, he might have to suffer what Herla went through again-

  No.

  Stop.

  Deep breaths.

  Wait, what did Hermione just say? “Hold on, say that again?”

  “Well, isn’t that what this is all ultimately about? To see if Magic works off of Earth, and get it there somehow if it doesn’t? I know their ancestors did something terrible, and I wasn’t there, I can’t judge – but surely their descendants have suffered enough for their ancestors’ crimes?”

  As opposed to not having to suffer for any original sin at all? Harry was as against that as anyone, but now it sounded like Hermione was willing to believe it might be valid for house-elves, so then why start SPEW at all if-

  “We’ve even got a spaceship now. Even if we can’t use it for most things you’ll obviously want to make more, maybe even one of those spelljammer things, and the stargates! You’ll get them to work again, I’m sure of it! If there really are so many planets out there already terraformed, we could just – drop them all there? It should be possible to find a world out of the way. Spreading to the stars is the whole point, isn’t it? If you don’t trust them, just don’t leave a stargate behind.”

  … In hindsight, maybe he shouldn’t have expected Hermione Granger to do something against all common sense without considerably extenuating circumstances of the ‘research way ahead of everyone else’ variety. Even if those extenuating circumstances were mostly wishful thinking.

  …

  Wishful thinking for now.

  “Charlie, open a new folder,” Harry ordered. “We’ll call it ‘Real Estate diplomacy’ for now.”

  “As you say, sir.”

  It wasn’t like the idea of just relocating the Magical World wholesale hadn’t occurred to Harry Potter before.

  Now, though, with someone else coming to the same conclusion completely independent from him, he didn’t feel completely insane for wanting it anymore.

  He did feel completely insane for going on the Yearly Walk that year, when the time finally came. He’d have felt insane if it were just any normal yearly walk too, but it wasn’t.

  By the old lunar calendar, 1995 would be a leap year where the time loss of the prior years – the margin of error between the year’s length and the actual time of revolution around the sun – would be offset by a thirteen-month year. Since this was humanity catching up to the rest of reality in regards to time’s passage, Harry couldn’t just go on the first New Moon after Samhain as normal, which would have been November 22.

  Then, too, 1995 was doubly unique in that the new moon after that fell on December 22, which also happened to be this year’s winter solstice. A leap year where the new year began precisely on the winter solstice as all of them should, but didn’t because the overwhelming majority of humans were not occultist mystics.

  It figures that the other shoe would drop tonight, Harry thought glumly as the last rays of sun vanished from the air. The sky was overcast. There were no stars. Nothing weird happened at Hogwarts, but the rest of the world may as well be on fire with how everything around the world is either too good or too bad.

  All Hallow’s Eve. The Winter Solstice. The Darkest and Longest Night of the year. All on the same date.

  The seven-day fast had never left him hungry before, but there was a pit in his stomach now, and his back felt tight around his spine, like being crushed.

  On this Yearly Walk… On this night of December 22, 1995…

  Either something very good was going to happen, or something very, very bad.

  The phantoms of his dead and buried family had nothing to say, whichever way.

  He only stood up and descended from the mound when he felt like he was about to miss his chance. The cleansing pool was frozen solid, so he used a bucket of well water to cleanse himself this time instead. It was ice-cold, but he powered through it with only minimal help from his not-metamorphmagic.

  Harry felt unnaturally exposed in his white robes, especially after half a year of constantly charming his clothing to be as sturdy and protective as possible, but what was one more fear on top of the rest?

  He still double checked to make sure his knife, axe and sword were as close at hand as he could make them.

  He walked the hedge maze until midnight. He stepped off his property just as the old year made way for the new, even though he had no clock or stars to see by. He walked counter-clockwise around his property twelve times, then twelve times again in a tightening spiral until he did the last circumambulation around the manor proper.

  He didn’t feel the world drift, he didn’t get any feeling or glimpse of events, new or old. No visions of his loved ones manifested, there was no one to show or miss their head because no one appeared to him at all, loved or hated. Dreaded.

  There was only the feeling that the future did not know which way to fall. Or at whose feet.

  Harry James Potter turned away from his home and set off through the forest.

  The normal wood did not stop being a normal wood this time. Harry got none of the vague signs about distant wars, or anything else far off. No battlefield sounds and passing sights of blood and worm-filled corpses, however vague and remote. Even though the Earth had been full of disasters this year – catastrophic earthquakes, fires, and some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in human history that couldn’t possibly not have far-reaching consequences that would stretch into next year and beyond. Then, too, Britain still had people fighting in foreign wars somewhere, officially or not.

  Eight miles he walked to the edge of the woods, and still his only companion was that feeling of tense unrealization. There was no future to see glimpses of. Because…

  Because every possible event of the future, no matter how small, would be affected by whatever happened tonight.

  By the time he reached the end of the forest, Harry Potter was past the worst jitters of his life, but only because they’d completely exhausted his energy.

  Even so, he was nearly overwhelmed by the sight of the colossal portal within the King’s Men stone circle. Like a scrying pool’s crystal-clear surface, wide as the circle itself but vertical and completely flat… Harry hadn’t hoped to see it. He’d thought – he’d hoped he’d lingered too long at home, started too late, missed his chance after all, but there it was, wide as the circle itself, but vertical and completely flat.

  He could see it with crystal clarity now, there was no hazy feeling of walking through a dream. As the portal turned so that it always faced him even as he walked, the sight of it felt like looking at inescapable reality that had no mercy for him, not the bliss of ignorance or any other sort.

  Even so, sailing ships still meandered on the other side, some small and close, others so far away and gigantic that Harry only saw their side passing in and out of view through the misty ripples. There was no water where they flew, or even the emptiness of space, but there was a rippling, multicolored gas instead of water.

  The smallest of the vessels were floating in and out of the gate like the year before, back and forth from the gigantic vessels that had no business flying. There were no tentacle sea creature ships the size of galleons this time, but there was a tentacled flying castle, in the very far distance. It dwarfed every other vessel even that far away.

  Harry hadn’t thought the sight would throw him for a loop again, the shock should have passed the last time. But it did rattle him, for a completely different reason – Harry understood it now. Not all of it, only some of it, but it was enough similarities with what he experienced last year at Hogwarts that Harry almost couldn’t keep walking in the face of the realization.

  That’s not a dimensional portal, he thought in shock as the fractal reflections of reality at different stages of existence refused to stop being almost completely identical to what Hogwarts had done, except… a lot more distant from each other. That’s not a dimensional portal, it’s a portal through time.

  Why had he even assumed – it wasn’t like he had a frame of reference for what dimension travel looked like either, back then.

  He didn’t know how he kept walking, but he did.

  The dwarf of last time was there too, on the same white plastic lawn chair as before, getting packets and letters.

  Harry tried not to look at him. Even though he didn’t know where he would go from here, he just wanted to pass by the Rollright Stones in peace if he could. But he had to, because the dwarf looked different. Like the same person but… not? Last year he appeared like a squat man with a barrel chest, broad shoulders, thick arm muscles and short stumpy legs. He was bald and had a short black beard, bushy but barely enough hide his thick neck.

  Now… he looked the same except the proportions were different? Less like a tall dwarf and more like a very short and stocky human.

  The dwarf saw him. Just like before, the dwarf saw him, but this time he only turned his head to glance at Harry briefly before turning back to his packets and letters-

  The dwarf snapped his head back in Harry’s direction with shocking suddenness, and a startlement on his face that instantly turned to fury.

  Like a comet, the dwarf turned into a white cloud that shot up and back down to cut Harry’s path with earth-flattening force.

  Harry jumped back by reflex as the white mist buffeted him, Godric growing to full size in his hand to aim at the dwarf’s face like death promised in poison-green light. The glow reflected off the dwarf’s suit of silvery plate armor that he now wore, and the short man’s even whiter hair because he was no longer bald, and had a beard that reached his shins, bunched in several braids each locked in clasps that looked like books. A cloak was about his shoulders, bright and blue like his eyes, and there was a broadsword at his side. He didn’t draw it out.

  The dwarf just stared at Harry. Glared at him. Glared at something about him that he found completely outrageous, and Harry didn’t know if he should run or attack when the dwarf lifted his right arm to reach into that beard of his, he should run, attack, what hope did he even-?

  The dwarf pulled out a rotary telephone, set it on a floating disk that was suddenly at his elbow, lifted the handset and began turning the wheel.

  Tk-tk-tk, tk-tk-tk-tk, tk-tk-tk, tk-tk, tk-k-tk-tk, tk-tk, tk, tk, tk-tk-tk-tk-tk.

  Ring, ring, ring.

  Harry stared.

  Click.

  “Ed,” the dwarf spoke into the receiver, not looking away from Harry the whole time. “Get over here.”

  The dwarf closed the phone, stuffed it back into his beard, and continued to stand in Harry’s way and stare at him in outrage without explaining anything.

  “Well now!” Ed’s voice came from somewhere to Harry’s left, but he didn’t dare look away from- “This isn’t the last thing I expected, but it – was…” The jollity in that tone turned cold and frosty. “Who dares?”

  “Ed,” the dwarf said again, his sight finally meeting Harry’s eyes and staying there. “One of us has to mind the portal.”

  “I’ll damn well-!”

  “Ed,” the dwarf said a third time, but more softly this time. “We did this your way, and it went too far.”

  Harry still didn’t dare look away, but he didn’t need to. He felt the bubbling anger and indignation and all-destroying rage burning like a sun to his left just fine, and since last year it was his curse that he could see in all directions too.

  Just when Harry thought Ed would start bleeding from his clenched fists, he unclenched them, exhaled explosively, and forced himself to calm down somehow until no one could accuse him of being anything more than Old Man Canadian. Finally, the man gave one sharp nod, walked forward, stopped behind Harry with hand raised as if he was going to pat his shoulder in passing, before reconsidering and walking on without further contact. He didn’t stop until he was in front of the portal, next to the lawn chair. He didn’t sit.

  Oh my god, Harry thought numbly. The bartender wasn’t talking out of his arse?

  But it was crazy! Ed Greenwood was a Canadian nerd who played board games and wrote terrible romance novels. Which were supposedly fantasy novels but they were really romance novels, some of them about harems!

  This can’t be my mysterious master? Harry begged wildly to himself. I don’t have a master, no matter what that creep said, I only ever did what I wanted to do, didn’t I?

  Harry felt like he was about to go insane, like he was already going insane, what was even happening right now? This was too much! Too much of too much, who could even – how? Why? What should he do? What should he say? Should he even say anything? Who were these two, who planned to – what? What were they? What did they do? What did they know?

  Herla’s story ended in a thirteen-month year! Harry remembered in horror. New moon on New Year’s eve of a Thirteen-Month year, three evil omens thrice over, it’s happening again I have to – I need – I can’t let-!

  It is hard in the beginning to know when- a memory ripped its way into Harry’s mind, like a hot poker through his skull and water down his back. For one, wretched, hideous moment, he thought his mind was being violated again, that this thing in front of him was crawling through his brain to dredge up memories to manipulate him, maybe even make entirely new ones to lie, Harry turned his inner eye to see their path-

  It wasn’t him.

  It was Godric.

  The sword spirit – he’d been trying to calm Harry, talk to him, yelling for his attention the whole time but Harry hadn’t heard him in his panic. So Godric resorted to throwing words at him in one of only three voices Harry would always latch onto in distress.

  It is hard in the beginning to know when you’re going too far in living by visions, Nicolas Flamel’s words came, from one of the memories where they drank honeyed tea on the back porch after a hard day’s learning. It’s not that different from letting yourself be driven by emotions, in that way. You have the privilege of having me to tell you: it’s about actions actually having decisions behind them. Use reason first, always and you’ll be as close to fine as a diviner – and a man – as anyone can ever be.

  Harry still trembled, his throat was tight and his lungs unable to do anything but breathe terror in and more terror out, his arm felt like its muscles were tearing up as it shook from the grip he had on the sword’s hilt. But somehow, he didn’t know how, he managed to make one step back.

  He didn’t lower the sword. He was too scared to. But he managed to pull his arm back enough to form a proper frontal position, instead reaching as out as he could to point his sword at the dwarf’s face like the most terrified and desperate novice that didn’t know what a guard was.

  As if he’d been tensing up for the opposite, the dwarf man slowly relaxed. As he did, the bright mantle around his shoulders disappeared, his hair pulled back into his head, his beard shrunk and changed color until it was the black, short cut of before, and many other little changes too, until the dwarf once again looked less like a dwarf and more like a very stocky and short but not too short little human.

  “I go by Dougan.” Said the short little human who wasn’t a human. Not ‘my name is’ but ‘I go by.’ “Doug to my friends.”

  Harry didn’t say anything.

  “The secrets of the world are screaming to be revealed. Are you ready?”

  “I’ve been discovering the secrets of the world just fine on my own, thanks.”

  I did not just say that.

  “Independence. Even now. Good.” The short little human who wasn’t a human reached into his much reduced beard, pulled the rotary dial phone out again, formed a new number, and watched Harry Potter calmly while the ring, ring, ring sounded from inside.

  Click.

  “Hello?” Came the voice from the other end, because Harry had enough presence of mind to remember that he could hear inside his omnidirectional bubble as well as see – wait a minute that was-!?

  “Charlie,” the impossible dwarf-man said because that was Charles Gordon, Charlie, this person knew Charlie?!

  “Doctor Flannhamr?” Doctor who? “How on earth did you get this number-?”

  “Charlie,” the dwarf-man cut him off, polite but firm. “Put the kettle on. I’m coming over with your employer.”