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After the war, Harry was determined to have some time for himself.
Every student at Hogwarts had decided to retake the year they had lost when the Death Eaters were ‘teachers’. It meant that the population of the year group of the first years would be twice the number of the others, but the war had dropped the numbers quite significantly anyway, so no one had minded. Harry, however, decided against it. Headmistress McGonagall had sent the letter concerning the year re-takes as soon as Hogwarts had been rebuilt, in the middle of July and Harry gave himself a week to decide what he would do. But, he didn’t have to wait that long. He found out the next morning that the idea of going back to school and being treated like a student as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't just led an army to war, as if he hadn't just killed a man, bothered him greatly. So he wrote to his old Head of House and declined, saying that he would be handling the matters of his education privately. The summer after the war had been quite brutal for everyone, the sun shining so bright that it made even the biggest lover of the warm season hesitate to do more than laze away the summer. Harry, a hater of wasting time as he always was (courtesy of the Dursleys and their sick pleasure of giving him far too many tasks to finish in a day), spent the summer inside, under heavy-duty cooling charms and went over the entire curriculum of Hogwarts like a man drowning in the Black Lake and took his NEWTs at the end of August, mere days before Hogwarts started and finally gained his freedom from the educational system of Britain.
But, after all his friends went to Hogwarts and he was all by himself in London, he found himself in a bit of a conundrum. You see, his life had always been centred around Voldemort. It had even been predicted as such before he was even born! He was born in secrecy because of Voldemort, he was an orphan because of Voldemort, he was raised by the Dursleys because of Voldemort, his school years were incredibly chaotic (mostly) because of Voldemort, he became a murderer because of Voldemort and now, Voldemort was finally dead and he was free to do whatever he wanted with his life.
Except, Harry didn’t quite know what to do with his life. Sure, there were things other than surviving and duelling that he was good at, but those had always been his strongest points. He was good at Quidditch, but he had also been forced on the team by McGonagall under threat of expulsion and he wasn’t quite sure whether or not he wanted to continue doing it. Besides, he hadn’t played it in nearly a year and a half and he found that he liked his life the way it is nowadays, with much less adrenaline. He was good at teaching, as had been proven by the DA, but he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with hundreds of students hanging on his every word as if it were gospel because he defeated a Dark Lord. He had seen what that did to Dumbledore and had no desire to emulate the man in this regard. No, he wanted to be normal and live a normal life from now on, learning to live like a normal wizard and trying to be as unaffected by the side effects of killing a Dark Lord as possible.
So, Harry Potter, at the young, ripe age of 18, decided to become a hermit.
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Harry’s first step towards becoming a bonafide hermit was to find an excuse to become a hermit. That was a bit tricky. He would have to find something that wouldn’t offend the delicate sensibilities and worldviews of the general public and something that would fool his friends, who, despite being at school right now, knew him much better.
In the end, the answer came in a way that both surprised him and he should’ve been expecting anyway. Luna, the absolute goddess and probably the seer that she was sent him some pamphlets on different Masteries and the requirements expected to enter and complete one. There were quite a lot of them. Magizoology, which Luna had expressed an interest in and was a good read; Potions, which sounded much better on the pamphlet than they did in Snape’s class (Merlin bless his soul, he was both awesome and an absolute git); Ancient Runes, which he really should’ve taken instead of Divination and Defence, which sounded like a dream. The public would love the idea of him wanting some space and privacy to get a Defence Mastery so that he can ‘protect them better’ (as if) and his friends would probably see it as him trying to live up to his parents’ memory seeing as they had both had double Masteries. James with Defence and Transfiguration, and Lily with Charms and Ancient Runes. Maybe he would be able to really milk this excuse by going for a second one after Defence. The best part?
Wizards, Witches and other Magicals aiming to get a Mastery in Defence had to invent 3 spells to prove their worthiness to achieve the title of a Master. This was the way that most areas of magic improved themselves nowadays, with requirements for a Mastery. But because Defensive and Offensive spells, especially experimental ones, had the potential to be extremely volatile and go out of control, applicants were encouraged to either work or live in a place ‘that wouldn’t bring the attention of muggles to itself and not harm nearby Magicals, as well as be under heavy wards that prevented apparating directly into the work area.’ Harry could quite literally build a house for himself in the middle of nowhere and live there under the excuse that he was practising potentially volatile magic. It would even give him an excuse not to key in people to his wards, as the Ministry forbade it. That way, he wouldn’t be a hermit, no sir, he would be a hermit disguised as a law-abiding citizen, contributing to his country. It was amazing! Luna seemed to think so as well, seeing as she had underlined the part about the living and working conditions for applicants on the pamphlet. He ought to send her a big bouquet of sugar quills for this.
After Harry put in an application for a solo-Mastery, (otherwise there would be a Master who would be tracking his progress and guiding him but that didn’t sound very in line with his current goals in life, so solo it was) he found out that he would have to take an exam to prove he can solo his Mastery but then the overworked guy filing his application looked up and saw who he was and immediately proceeded to give him his permit for a solo-Mastery. Normally, Harry didn’t like to utilise his fame, but he had to admit that it did come in handy several times. Not worth the stress or the public scrutiny, but still. He had to count his wins somehow.
After he got his permit, Harry was told that he would have 3 weeks to either change residence or find a new workshop seeing as Grimmauld Place, where he currently lived was in the middle of London and unsuitable for an aspiring Master. He was also told that the permit would update itself from dormant to active when he found a new residence, seeing as, apparently, him filing his address on a public form like the Mastery practitioners would violate some sort of law about the privacy of public figures (which he had never heard of) and that no one would know his new address, a major bonus of this whole thing, really.
In the end, Harry decided against building his own house because of the time limit, even if magic would’ve speeded up the process a fair amount. But instead of buying a wizarding home, which would’ve resulted in his address probably getting leaked out somehow by the seller, he decided to buy an old Muggle house in outer Cambridge and fashion it into a wizarding one instead. Fireplaces were installed, the electronics in the house were either removed or replaced by their magical counterparts, and a little farm was added because despite having been forced to work in a garden by the Dursleys, he had still found it a little enjoyable to see things he had planted grow but decided to grow some vegetables and a few potions ingredients instead of flowers. He had also happened across a place that sold fully grown magical fruit trees that gave produce year-round while he was looking for some fences suitable to hold wards and now he had a brand new orchard of fruit trees that he was very much looking forward to eating from. His cherry tree was even a breed especially suitable for pies! And so, in mid-October of 1998, a few days shy of his deadline, his permit became active as Harry Potter moved into his new house, the Lightning Cottage. (He didn’t name it, okay. Apparently, the house was built over the ruins of another house that was set on fire by a lightning strike and because the last owner believed in a myth about lightning never striking the same place twice, he proudly told his friends and family that his house was lightning-proof and over time it gained that nickname.)
Things were fine for about a year, he continued to exchange letters with his friends at Hogwarts and told them about his Defence Mastery. Hermione was the only one to notice that it would require him to change residence, but he told her that he handled it, and that had been it, until, of course, they graduated and insisted on seeing his new house. He first gave them excuses on why they couldn’t but as time passed they became exceedingly obvious and even Ron noticed that he didn’t want them to come to his new house. However, the others seemed to have had a conference over who would confront him about it and in a revolutionary move, selected Neville for it.
Neville, despite having been disliked by his family growing up, was still raised as a proper pure-blood heir and knew the best places to have a private conversation over lunch in Britain. They went to a nice place that wasn’t over the top too much and had a nice meal on one Saturday. There, he told Neville about just how important the secrecy and privacy the house afforded was to him. Growing up, Private Drive No.4 had never been a place he would call home and Hogwarts, while a place he would call home, was still far from what the ideal home in his mind was like. He was tired of the criticism, the gawking and the lack of privacy. Now that he had a fresh start with the Lightning Cottage, he wanted to keep it to himself. Besides, if they ever wanted to have a get-together, Grimmauld Place would suffice. Neville had been the perfect person to understand him because he had also suffered through something similar to him at the Longbottom Ancestral Manor. All of his relatives, dozens of Aunts and Uncles, judging his every move to gauge his worth as an heir to their noble house, his worth as a pureblood, his worth as a wizard and sometimes, his worth as a human. Even though that had mostly stopped when he came to Hogwarts and was remembered only by just how bad at Potions he was and later on by how awesome he had been as he killed Nagini with the Sword of Gryffindor, Neville wasn’t the kind of person to forget, to forgive so easily. And so, he understood Harry and gave him his word to try and keep the others at bay.
Harry heard later on that Ron had thought up the ridiculous idea that he didn’t want anyone to come to his house because he had a lover to whom he was too shy to introduce them all, which, while wrong, at least had the pleasant side effect of finally getting Ginny off his back, who had been not-so-subtly pressuring him to get married, of all things. Honestly, Harry had no idea where she got the idea that their brief relationship would result in a marriage. He had found out over the two years she had to stay at Hogwarts to graduate that she was, 1. Far too much like what he imagined his mother would be like for him to feel comfortable marrying, and 2. The wrong gender for him anyways. That had certainly been a shock to Ron and Hermione not so much to Luna when he had come out to them.
Life continued on for Harry, he worked towards his Mastery, decided to take up Ancient Runes as a side project after reading how passionate his mother was about it from her diary in her Gringotts vault, worked on the field behind the Lightning Cottage and discovered that he could produce the sweetest fruits and the most flavourful vegetables if he were to mix some of his magic with the fertiliser. He learned how to use a bow and an arrow from a herd of centaurs who camped in the forest by his house one summer. He bought some more land behind the house, by the forest and dug out the earth a little to make a little man-made lake to swim in the warmer weather and play Quidditch over. Potentially falling into water is much better than falling on land after all. Especially since he had placed some anti-drowning runes onto the seabed of the lake, something he thought of as a necessary precaution ever since the Second Task. He managed to come up with 2 out of three of his Mastery spells in a little over 2 years, significantly shorter than the average of three years per spell and made some headway into his Ancient Runes study and took the OWL exam for it shortly after he turned twenty.
And so, Harry finally had achieved what he had been dreaming of his entire life, normalcy and peace.
And then, the third spell he was working on for his Mastery, his pride and joy, an impenetrable shield spell that, by design, was meant to stand up to an Avada Kedavra, blew up on his face.
Now, Harry was always very careful when working towards his Mastery, he was aware of how dangerous Spell Creation could be, he did switch houses for it, but this particular shield spell was very important for him. It was his one chance at becoming completely normal, to fade into the background, to not be gawked at as if he were an alien whenever he walked down Diagon Alley. But in retrospect, he should’ve probably guessed that the potentially most powerful shield on Earth would be able to pierce the current most powerful shield on Earth if it ever exploded. As the shattered shield pierced his face and entered his skull, as he lay on the floor, gazing at the roof of his workroom, Harry didn’t think about how long it would take people to figure out that he had died, no one could enter his house after all. He didn’t think of his friends, who would probably miss him and cry for him when they found out or little Teddy, who would lose his godfather as well at the age of 3.
As he lay on the hardwood floor of his house, feeling the blood that kept him alive pooling around him as the edges of his vision slowly went dark, and he stopped being able to feel his limbs, all Harry could think about was that, maybe, just maybe, he could find the peace he could never find in life at the arms of his old friend, Death, who had been dogging his steps his entire life and had finally caught up to him.
And then, he woke up.
As he took in a deep breath to clear his lungs filled with blood, Harry couldn’t believe that this was reality.
Because he had died, hadn’t he, he had felt the shield shard piercing his forehead, the way his blood pooled around him, the way that the pain had been so blinding it almost made him feel numb to it.
He brought his hand to his face, slowly so as to not irritate the injury that must be there and almost felt like crying as his hand scoured his entire face and couldn’t find a single injury.
He made to stand up, sick of the feeling of lying in his own blood but he slipped on the slick blood and simply laid there in it. For a second time in his life, he lay on the floor and accepted the cards that the Fates had dealt to him as they laughed at his misery from above.
He laid there, feeling his blood under his cheek and hoping that he would succeed in dying this time as felt his consciousness slip away from him once again.
“I salute you, Harry, Son of James.”
Harry, Son of James, turned around- wait turned around, wasn’t he lying on the floor- oh, this wasn’t his house.
He was in a field now, an everlasting field that didn’t seem to have an end to it. Just grass, black like ink, stretching towards the horizon and an incredibly beautiful night sky above. The stars were bright, brighter than he had ever seen stars be before. He had never considered Astronomy a favoured lesson before, what with the sleep he had to sacrifice for it. But he could remember, faintly, that one time his uncle had kicked him out of the house for breaking a plate when he was 6 and sitting outside the house, his back to the wall and just looking at the night sky for hours as sleep eluded him.
For some reason, he could recall feeling incredibly safe that night. Feeling like nothing would happen to him as the night sky brought him peace, like a warm, dark blanket with stars glittering on it like sequins.
That night, he had slept the best he ever had in the Dursley House.
He could still feel that feeling. The darkness settled over him, not choking but comforting, bringing him a sense of freedom rather than fear. He took a deep breath then, much calmer now, and the faint scent of wildflowers filled his lungs. He opened his eyes that he had closed without realising and turned towards the person who would probably be able to answer all his questions about his current predicament.
There stood a woman, silent in the midst of the everlasting field like him. She, though he wasn’t sure about that, to begin with, seemed humanoid in design, but the similarities mostly ended there. He could see from the neck of her black robes and the feet barely visible amongst the grass that one-half of her body didn’t have flesh but was merely bones. When the wind swept aside the long black hair that had been covering most of her face and revealed half a skull, half a face, Harry finally realised who this was.
“I salute you Hela, Daughter of Loki, Queen of Niflheim.”
“So you know who I am. Good, that will make it easier to explain. Sit, this will take some time."
There was a black table now, to their left. Two chairs, equally as dark, across from each other accompanied it. As they sat down, Harry, the Brit at soul that he was, conjured a tea set for them and poured them some. Had this been another situation; drinking tea at night, under the stars, in the middle of nowhere, with a stranger would have been right up Harry’s alley. But as it was, he was here to understand how immortality had snuck up on him without his notice. ‘Though’, he thought, as he saw the ring on his finger, which had certainly not been there before, ‘I think I have an idea about what the explanation could be.’
Hela, completely nonplussed, simply sat down and took a sip. Harry wasn’t sure whether or not she had ever drunk tea before, courtesy of her exposed neck where he saw the tea travel down to somewhere in her robes or even knew what it was, but if she didn’t, she didn’t make it known to him.
They sat there for some time, enjoying their drinks under the stars. As they did Harry let himself examine the stars and realised that he didn’t know the names of any stars or constellations here, leading credence to a theory about his location that had been simmering at the back of his mind for some time. His attention turned back to the goddess in front of him when she put her teacup down.
“Tell me, Harry, what do you know about Ragnarok?”
That had not been the direction Harry had been expecting this conversation to go. But he acquiesced nonetheless. “It is the end of the world in Norse Mythology. You were foretold to be one of the catalysts, I believe.”
“You are correct. My father, two of my brothers and I were all warned against ahead of time in a prophecy by the Allfather. We weren’t even born when it was seen by Odin. So, when father had the three of us, Odin took us from him as newborns and sent us to different corners of the Nine Realms and found ways to chain us down, to try and prevent us from, according to his prophecy, starting the end of the world.”
She drank her tea for some time after that. Clearly, the discussion pained her, even after the thousands of years that must have gone by.
“My eldest brother, Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, was thrown into the vast oceans of Midgard when he was born but in time he grew so large that he could bite his tail from the other side of the world. Odin put him to sleep with magic, which he scorns my father for using, and Jörmungandr remains asleep to this day. My second brother, Fenrir, was tied to a rock by special chains and gagged by a sword soon after he was born. Father fought against Odin for both of them, but it made the Aesir scorn him even more because they saw it as a monster defending monsters, rather than a father defending his children. And then I was conceived, but because the Fates had dictated that I was fated to rule over Niflheim as its Queen even before I was born, Odin couldn’t be too obvious about the chains he placed on me. So, when I was just born, only a few minutes old, he came to Jotunheim, where our mother, Angrboða, was giving birth and fought my father, who had stood guard over her during her labour. He lost, eventually, but he fought hard and I respect him for that. Odin took me from my mother’s arms and proceeded to craft the chains that would keep me in check for an eternity.”
Hela looked very deep in thought, then. There was none of the cool and collected fearsome goddess that she had been when I first came left in her. Instead, she just looked tired. Tired of life, maybe? A funny thought, indeed, especially when it concerned the Goddess of Death.
“My body was half skeleton, half flesh, so he tore one of the bones from my exposed arm, the ulna, and whittled it to fashion a wand out of it. He took a handful of my father’s hair and put it inside to gift it with exceptional magical power. He gave it bumps to symbolise the hurdles in life one would have to overcome to face death. He said that it would be a wand unparalleled by any other because Death was a force that no one could run away from forever and would catch up to any stragglers eventually. He gave it the name of the Elder Wand because you would have to be superior even amongst your own people to be able to master it.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t ignore the Elder Wand in my back pocket, ominously silent and unassuming yet I now had a lot more reason to hate it than I used to.
“Next, he cut off all my hair, though I had little of it and had Frigga weave it all into a fabric like no one had ever seen before with her loom of prophecy. She resisted at first, for the Allmother is wise and knows the dangers of tearing apart children from their parents and fears the devastation that their parents could wage in the name of revenge. But Odin, as he always seems to do, just or not, won at the end and Frigga wove it with soft clouds from the Asgardian sky and, inevitably, her own tears as she cried while doing so. The result was a cloak, completely unremarkable from afar and invaluable up close. The Allfather paid no heed to the warnings or tears of his wife and said that the cloak would have the power to protect anyone wearing it from Death, like a curtain of hair, covering my eyes. Almost invisible from my sight, and that was what he ended up naming it, the Cloak of Invisibility, eternal protection from Death.”
Harry had always treasured the Cloak. It had been an ancient family relic, a memento of his father and a reminder of all the mischief and good both of them had done with it. It was definitely the one he used the most and favoured the most. But watching Hela caressing her hair with a blank look in her eye as she recounted the first minutes of her life, he knew that this would be something he would remember every time he used it in the future if he ever did.
“Lastly, he took one of my eyes, for the visage of Death has seen and will see any who has surrendered themselves to the inevitable but would never forget a single one of them. I never do. The names and faces of the countless people who have passed through me to the Afterlife, to Niflheim, I shall never forget and neither shall my eye. He fashioned my own eye as a traitor to me, an eye that would harden with time and turn against me, and steal my subjects from me, even if only temporary. And in a final act, like the final link of the chains that bound me, he carved a symbol that would damn me to servitude for eternity and grant Mastery over me to any who could be the rightful Master of the Deathly Hallows.”
His throat felt clogged up, and he couldn’t even make a sound. The horror of the lengths an obviously insane man had gone to delay the inevitable made him furious and anguished beyond belief. Suddenly, he empathised a lot with her. He could remember, clearly, how he had felt when he found out about how Dumbledore had raised him to die. How he had later on realised that the reason why he had never received proper training had been so that he wouldn’t put up too much of a fight when the time came for him to be sacrificed for the Greater Good. How he had been sent back to the Dursleys, even after the blood wards had been neutralised in his fourth year, to keep him docile and pliant of Dumbledore’s grand dream for the future.
He had gone to Hogwarts, just to spit on Dumbledore’s grave after that.
But, the fundamental difference between what Odin did to Loki’s children and what Dumbledore did to him was glaring. The world would have gone on had Voldemort killed him, sure, the lives of muggleborns and muggles in Britain would get harder and the Statue of Secrecy would be threatened, but Harry had always believed that even if he failed to kill him, Europe would be able to prevent him from expanding his circle of influence. They had taken extensive measures to prevent the rise of another Dark Lord after Grindelwald. There was nothing inevitable about it.
But Ragnarok is inevitable.
Odin knew, Hela knew and Harry knew that. It would come one way or the other and Odin’s feeble attempts to prevent it wouldn’t change much in the grand scheme of things. In fact, his treatment of the catalysts of the End of the World probably would cause it to happen even earlier. Harry, in a way, understood why Dumbledore did what he did. That didn’t mean he forgave him for it or condoned his actions, but he understood why he went down that route. But Odin’s actions weren’t like that, they weren’t about preventing something preventable. They were about delaying the inevitable and Harry couldn’t ignore the fact that Odin had absolutely no qualms with taking his grandchildren from his son and torturing them and then imprisoning them for an eternity just to live a little longer when he had already lived for thousands of years. It reminded him of Voldemort, a little, whose fear of something inevitable had pushed him to do something monumentally stupid, without caring about the side effects it might have on others, or even himself.
Any other would say sorry to Hela at this point, even if what caused her anguish had nothing to do with them. But Harry knew better. Knew that she wouldn’t want pity. And so, he simply looked at her and knew that she understood his feelings without needing words. “How did the Hallows end up on Midgard, then? How did the Tale of the Three Brothers come to be?”
She smiled at that. It caught him off guard, a little.
“It was my father. When Odin enchanted the Hallows, he couldn’t make them give the power of Mastery over Death to him, so he made them give it to someone worthy, someone deserving of it. Like Thor’s Hammer, Mjolnir, in a way. His reasoning was, that if there was anyone worthy, it had to be him.”
Harry snorted at that, not even bothering to suppress or cover it. Hela smiled and continued.
“Of course, the Hallows didn’t deem him worthy. They fled and hid in different corners of Asgard. Odin eventually came to the conclusion, after a few tantrums, that he wasn’t ready for them yet and that they would reveal themselves to him when he was and let the matter go. But my father didn’t. He spent years tirelessly searching Asgard and eventually found them all and one by one, took them to Midgard, where he believed that there would be no one to be found worthy and that the position would remain empty for an eternity. He made up a false tale, intertwined with the truth to lay false trails over what they were and what they could do, made them seem like nothing so much that, if anyone were to ever happen upon them, they wouldn’t think too much. Or, if they did, the greed of others would prevent a single person from mastering them all. It was a plan that relied on the nature of humanity to be the shield against the foul nature of humanity. It was, in my opinion, a brilliant plan, one that held true for thousands of years without Odin even realising that the Hallows had even left Asgard. But then, you came.”
Harry shifted in his seat a little, suddenly uncomfortable. Thousands of empty excuses and pointless platitudes on the tip of his tongue, ready to placate the lady that he had somehow ended up as the Master of without even meaning to. However, Hela didn’t allow him the time to do that.
“Don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. I let you access the Hallows because I knew you were worthy of them. You were chosen by the Hallows as worthy because they deemed you to not have the misgivings of the rest of humanity, the rest of the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil. You are not selfish. You are not greedy. You wouldn’t use the Hallows to better yourself. I know that you will treat the title and the responsibilities and entitlements that come with it with honour and respect, as they should be.”
It took Harry some time to formulate an answer to that. It’s not really every day that a goddess tells you that you are worthy of having power over them.
“Thank you, Lady Hela. I’m honoured that you think so. But I don’t think I understand exactly what all of this entails. I’m, admittedly, a little confused. What exactly happened to me? What am I now? What is expected of me?”
“Not much, to be honest. As I said, Odin crafted the position with himself in mind. He wouldn’t give himself responsibilities that he deems unnecessary, he is lazy like that. The basic idea behind it is to keep me in check, as you deem it fit. You are also, technically considered the Regent of Niflheim right now and can refer to or introduce yourself from now on. About what happened to you, I have little knowledge. I know that you are immortal but you’re not Aesir or Vanir or a god of another Realm. Midgard has never had gods born there or ascend to godhood from there before so the terminology is a little lacking in regards to what to refer to a god of Midgard. You can fashion a new name for yourself, as you’re, technically, the first and only one of your kind. Have anything in mind?”
“Right now? No. I don’t think I’ll be able to come up with one anytime soon as well. This is a lot more than I could have guessed, considering I hadn’t even put that much stock into the Tale of the Three Brothers, to begin with. Also, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have a panic attack later on about this and it’s a little delayed right now.”
Hela laughed at that. Truly laughed. It was a little weird, to be honest, to see a face that was half flesh and half skull laugh but honestly, the fact that she was able to let go of the stress that must have weighed her down for thousands of years would do that to people. She looked a little crazed anyways.
“Sure. You do that. I’ll let you go back to Midgard soon. But before that, I have something to ask of you. It is a little selfish, I’m afraid, but I hope you won’t think badly of me for requesting something of you so soon.”
Harry shook his head. “As long as it’s reasonable.”
“If you ever meet or get the chance to meet any of my family, my brothers and father or even my stepmother, please treat them kindly and help them. I’m not asking you to go out of your way, but knowing the Potter luck, you’ll probably happen upon one of them in the future. Just reassuring them of my well-being and of another person possibly on their side would do wonders for them. I worry for my father, especially, you know. I know from the occasional oddity that dies on Asgard that they don’t treat him well there despite being a Prince of the Royal Family. A little kindness would do wonders for him, knowing how unused to it he probably is. Can you do that for me?”
Harry laughed at that. She was right, in a way. Now that his life was upended in such a way, he would probably end up coming across all of her family within the year.
“Sure, I’ll do that.”
Little did Harry know, just how soon that meeting would be.
When their conversation about the Hallows and their control over Hela was done, Harry did three things,
1- Develop a deep hatred for Odin and deepen his hatred for prophecies.
2- Swear to himself that he would never mistreat Hela and the power of the Hallows.
3- Find a way to return to Midgard from Niflheim.
As it turns out, it was much simpler than he was expecting it to be. The reason for the existence of devices like Bifrost was because warriors like most of the Aesir didn’t know how to control their innate magic well enough to open their own portals. Loki was an exception, as he had spent over 2000 years refining his control over his magic. Harry’s situation, on the other hand, was both simpler and much more complicated than Loki’s. He was a wizard and could technically open his own portal to traverse realms. However, his presumed godhood was very new and he didn’t know enough about it yet that he didn’t want to risk trying it here. His core had grown exponentially between his acceptance of his fate as a god and now. It had been growing since he took over the Hallows but kind of like a zit, its speed of growth increased exponentially when he noticed its existence. Hela had predicted that he would be a full-fledged god in a month or two and that he shouldn’t try any abilities that came with his godhood until that time passed. He would also have to relearn how to shape and control his magical core once again, lest he overshoots his spells, or worse, do accidental magic like a five-year-old.
Back to how he would return to Midgard. Turns out, being the Master of Death came with more benefits than just three items that wouldn’t leave him and chaining a goddess to him forever. It also allowed him to become a ghost. Kind of. The ‘body’ he was inhabiting here was not his body, his body was still in Midgard and sleeping on the floor of his workroom. When he had slept, Hela had summoned his soul to her and only his soul had travelled to Niflheim, something that required much less magic than travelling with his body. The form of his body had been created by the half of his core that came with him and was semi-permeable. As a semi-permeable ghost, he could pass through walls when he wasn’t in his body, but others could also touch his form if he wanted them to. He would also automatically return to his original body if he did something that would have killed a normal mortal. But if he wanted to return to his mortal body without having to jump off of a building every time, the only thing he needed to do was sleep. And so he laid down on the inky black grass of Niflheim and stared up at the unfamiliar constellations on the sky, so bright across the eternal night sky that it was as if there wasn't an atmosphere. Though considering dead spirits didn't need air, maybe there wasn't.
How long had it been? Moments? Minutes? Hours? According to the clock on the wall, only 7 hours, that is assuming it was still the same day. He would’ve done a Tempus to check, but he felt like crap right now and if he really was going to have to relearn the entire Hogwarts curriculum to accommodate his newfound godhood, he should start with something easier than Tempus. Looking up at the roof of his workroom, Harry allowed himself a moment to come to terms with the fact that he had just died for a second time. At least, this was the last time. He still wasn't sure about his feelings on that topic though. He stood up and didn’t do anything about the blood on the floor, which he was doing his best to ignore. Instead, he went to the kitchen and made himself some tea.
He sat there until the sun rose once again. The tea, now cold and Harry not having moved yet. Because he could feel it now, the changes that Hela had said would be completed in two months’ time, slowly, surely, irreversibly, changing his body into something he never wanted it to be, completely outside of his control. His core was significantly larger, though he would have to do a ritual to measure just how many times it had grown. His magic felt different to him, foreign. It used to flow smoothly, surely like crystal-clear water in his veins. It was slower, denser now, like honey dripping from a beehive, like chocolate melting in his hands. But he knew that this was wrong as soon as he thought about it. It wasn’t the flow of his magic that had changed. It was his blood. He could still see it now, in the back of his mind, the way the floor had been sparkling in the nighttime, glowing like molten gold with the moon shining on it. He knew even without testing it again, that he would never bleed red from today on. He knew even without looking up from the table that, despite the lights never having been on, he hadn’t had trouble finding what he needed in the cupboards as he made his now cold tea. Oh, and had he mentioned that he had forgotten his glasses in the workroom? And yet, next to all these things what he saw in the mirror after he finally turned the lights on, a face so pale that it might as well be dead, was so trivial that he didn’t even spare it a second look before he went to do what he always did when life threatened to drown him.
He went to his bedroom and let the tiredness that had been haunting his bones for hours overtake him as he dreamt of the eternal night sky of Niflheim laying over him like a particularly interesting blanket.
The next morning, Harry got up and wrote letters to all of his close friends except Luna that he was departing for North America for a research trip that might last several months. His excuse was to find out how the Native American Magical Tribes had been able to use magic with the smoke from their pipes and nothing else. But Luna, the one friend of his that he knew could handle the truth, he didn’t lie to. He told her that he didn’t want to be disturbed for a while as he sorted through some things. A couple of hours later, as he was cleaning up the workroom from the fiasco of the day before, her owl arrived with a cryptic letter and a couple of books on meditation and control exercises for a magical core evolution. He loved her, honestly. He double-checked that his contract with the grocer in Diagon that transported his groceries to his fridge was still active, Harry went over what he would need for the next several months to sequester himself to his home without leaving to relearn magic. After everything turned out okay, Harry sat down on his porch to take a breather before he dove into his first-year curriculum - again.
And then, right before his eyes, a man in battle robes and a horned helmet fell from the sky and right into his vegetable patch. After everything that had happened to him recently and in the past, Harry honestly couldn’t find it within himself to be surprised that the Fates hadn’t even waited for a day before sending a new disaster his way.