Pre-Chapter A/N: Please do check out the first chapter of the novel I'm working on up on Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)- it's completely free to access. What can I say except you're welcome? Here we go. Lovely to have you all here, and I hope you enjoy this one. If you do, feel free to head over to Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) and read the next two chapters- I update there on a daily basis so there's always something for you to read.
One more day until I had to go back to Hogwarts, and I had to admit it, the holiday had grown on me. Especially when Sirius had gotten bored with resting and laying about and decided to help me with my training and figuring out the benefits of the ritual I'd undergone at the end of the previous year. He might have opposed some of my testing ideas, but we'd managed to narrow down the seven benefits I'd gotten. I felt the first one as my muscles strained to perform the hundredth pull-up as the clock hit 60 seconds. I smiled as I dropped down from the bar. Agility. That had probably come from the acromantula and Cwn Annwn in concert. It was the easiest to feel, and had funnily enough been the last one to kick in.
The first to kick in had been my newfound affinity for fire magic. It was so great that every fire spell in Alekhine's elemental conjuration book had been mastered in a matter of four or five tries. I hadn't tried the one spell that he didn't describe how to cast yet, but something told me I wouldn't have much of a challenge with it as well. Another benefit was that I found it even easier than before to learn Dark Magic.
Sirius had been teaching me what spells he wanted to from the Black Family Magic and none of them had taken long to learn, which was impressive considering most of the spells were so old that they were only useful when cast non-verbally— it was a common thing among older spells to have incantations that were more like full sentences than simple words or phrases. So the third benefit was clearly an easier time learning dark magic. The fourth benefit was one I noticed when duelling Michelle Jones. For some reason, when I was in combat, and only then, my eyes could lock into some sort of hyper focus that let me track things in real time that I had no business tracking. I could just tell that when I combined that with the enhanced agility, I was going to be a nightmare to duel against. Sirius had only managed to win two of our duels after the ritual, which was a marked departure from the previous trend where we were beginning to approach equality with all the progress he was making with getting his body on track.
"Harry!" Sirius called out from the entrance hall.
"A minute" I said as I returned to freshening up and putting my things in order. The fifth benefit was that my magic felt even more potent than it had before. That was noticeable and readily apparent almost from the moment it came through. The sixth was only noticed in our second duel when Sirius executed a complex strategy that ended up with me nailed with a sleek underhand, disarming charm. It would have been his win, except that the low-powered spell hit and did nothing but loosen my grip slightly. We'd tested it, and it was far from the magic immunity that Class 5 beasts enjoyed, but it was still better than nothing. I could wake up from stunners faster than normal, I could resist disarming charms if they weren't sent with enough power, and I could just ignore some low-level hexes if you didn't put enough vim in it.
And the seventh? Well, Sirius had opposed the testing, but we now knew I as basically immune to most low-level poisons.
"Harry, magic help me if you don't get down here in the next—"
He fell silent as my silencing charm hit once I walked into the room.
"Finally" He said after a slash of his wand to cancel out my spell.
"Let's go"
—
"I don't like it" I said when Sirius turned to me to get my opinion and I could see the way the Greek witch showing us around flared up. The Manor, for what else could something this massive be, was beautiful and artistically designed, but the problems weren't limited to the fact that it was soulless. No. It was even worse than that. It was boring. It was also far too much space for two men who didn't have a house elf. Cleaning charms were handy, but keeping something like this running could be a full-time job, and that I said as much.
"Besides, we're in the mediterranean, why would we live somewhere that looks like it would be right at home in the Scottish mountains?" I concluded.
"Pretty much exactly what I was thinking. Alright then. So do you have something a bit more mediterranean, Callista?" Sirius asked, stepping closer to her and winking. The man was an insatiable flirt, and this real estate agent— a representative of Constantinople's Dwarvish bank— was more than willing to put up with and even encourage him.
"Well, I do have something that might fit the bill, but I'll warn you, it's a fair bit out of your price range," She said with a finger on her chin in what she must have felt was a coy manner.
"Out of my price range? Preposterous. I'm Sirius Black, madame. Show it to us" Sirius said with a hearty laugh. He was also good at playing along.
"Of course." She said, ushering them outside to the Hippogriff drawn carriage. She whispered some words to the driver and then they were off.
They all trooped into the expanded space and Callista passed around another set of glasses. This entire thing was like one long party. From my first life, I knew what it could be like to be wined and dined while property viewing, but it was still a surprise to note that the wizarding world had something of the sort.
"What you should know before we get there is that the property is not a standalone like this one, with neighbors and the like. The property stands on an island that comes with it, so you'll be both buying a house and an island at the same time" She started.
"And who used to own it?" Sirius asked. More than in the muggle world, the previous owners of a property mattered here. Most wizarding families built for precisely that reasoning. Curses could seep into buildings, and while there were a few purification rituals that were more or less standard practice, they weren't foolproof.
"The Lyriakos family" Sirius hummed as though he could recognise the name, and I shot him a look laced with
"And for the benefit of Harry here who is not as worldly and well-informed as one such as I, would you mind telling us about the family? Well, you'd be explaining it to Harry, of course. I already know." He said with a wink that made me chuckle. Callista did much the same before humoring the clearly lying man and turning to me.
"The Lyriakos family has existed from long before Greece became one Nation. They were, at a time, one of the richest and most powerful families on this side of the world, but things like that rarely last. The Romans came and while they managed to maintain some of their status by accepting Roman rule rather than resisting, they were always second-hand citizens. Even after the fall of Rome, they had been crushed and ground so smoothly that it was difficult for them to do anything to return to their former glory. Fifty years ago, the family line finally died out with the Death of their Matriarch Cassandra Lyriakos in her sleep at the ripe age of 204. She survived all her direct relatives and after a lengthy succession battle, the property was placed on the market by the Greek Ministry last year so it could be liquidated, and the money divided among all the parties with some claim to the family's inheritance. The same is being done with properties across the isle, she assured us."
"Well, that sounds pretty above board, don't you think, Harry?"
"I'll know once I see it" I said non-commitantly and Callista just smiled smugly in my direction. That kind of smile that screamed— 'I know something you don't'.
Thankfully, I didn't have to wait long to find out what she was so smug about. The house took my breath away from the second I stepped outside the carriage. It was beautiful. The house, nay villa, rose from the hillside like it came straight out of a Greek myth. Pristine white walls gleamed under the gentle beating of the mediterranean sun. It stretched wide, a sprawling, elegant masterpiece stretching so wide across the land that I couldn't fit the whole thing in a single gaze. Crowned with terracotta tiles, and classical columns that framed arch windows with grand entrances, it was unmistakably hellenic. We stood before an ornate wrought iron gate, flanked by statues that had lost none of their beauty to the ages— a man and a woman, naked as they were born, but armed with spears and seeming to dare intruders to enter.
Behind the gate was the broad, mosaic-tiled courtyard that led up to the entrances and veranda. The villa's colonnaded veranda ran the length of its facade, providing a shaded sanctuary where generations of Lyriakos' must have sat and admired the beautiful landscape they called home. It was the kind of place that whispered wealth rather than screamed it to the heavens, and even beyond all that physical beauty, there was the magic in the air. It felt like home.
"Sirius?" I whispered.
"Yeah, I know," He said, taking a gulp.
"How much?" He asked, turning to Callista. It hit me then that we hadn't even gone inside. It mattered little, though. This was it. This was the place.
"Thirty million for the island and twenty million for the Villa, making an even fifty million." She said.
"Done" I turned to give him a look. Even I had been left reeling at that that price. Sirius' settlement had been substantial, but nowhere close to this, and I was more than familiar with the Black holdings from my time in the vault, and while they were rich as sin, spending more than half your money on a house when you didn't have reliable means of making more did seem a bit careless to my estimation.
"Don't look at me like that, I know what I'm doing." He said in my direction.
I shrugged and turned my attention back to the house. "Nothing like that. Just wondering why you're agreeing when we haven't seen inside the place yet".
"You're right. Callista, if you would" Sirius sai with a gesture to the place. The Greek witch had been taken aback by his easy acquiescence to the price, and the woman who had displayed incredible composure so far was almost nowhere to be found as she practically fell over herself to obey Sirius' instructions.
We moved inside the building ext, and the inside was no less impressive. It was clear that there were elves hanging about the place and maintaining it to keep it so clean. There was not a single spec of dust or even the barest thread of a cobweb anywhere to be found. The rooms were large and airy with en-suite bathrooms which had to be a later addition. Wizards hadn't bothered with proper bathrooms for the longest time, as they had the option of simply vanishing all waste and scourgifying all dirt. Of course, when both wands and magical education stopped being the sole domain of the elite, they began to need something else to convey how much better than the rest of the word they were— thus came the bathrooms back again. Of course, they couldn't just be muggle-level bathrooms. Each one was basically a mini-spa and swimming pool dedicated to every member of an obviously large family.
"So how many bedrooms all together?" Sirius asked Callista again like he hadn't heard her the first time she'd said it or counted when we looked through them.
"Ten bedrooms and twelve bathrooms in all. But of course, you can remodel the existing bedrooms at will once you receive ownership" She started, still clearly selling Sirius on this careless idea. I wanted the place. I wanted it so much. The magic practically sang at me. It wanted me to have it, to put it to use, to draw out its potential.
"Good. I have some ideas. Harry, do you think we could design the best duelling training room the world has ever seen?" He asked, drawing me into their conversation again.
"Depends. Nothing can really compare to the place, you know?" By the place, I meant the Room of Requirement but advertising its existence to someone who didn't know wasn't high on my list of priorities and I tried to convey that to Sirius with my eyes alone.
"That's fair. But I think I'll manage to make do".
"A duelling room, Mr. Black. I did not know you had aspirations of one day competing on the circuit" If there was ever a competition for which sentences changed the shape of history, then that one would have been a top contender. There was an instant light in Sirius' eyes that would not bode well for the duelling circuit, or even the world at large.
__
The atmosphere in the train station was a muted one as families said tearful goodbyes and children were ushered to join their mates with more reluctance than I'd ever seen. I did not care for this at all, but even with how little I cared for rules, I couldn't just be publicly seen flouting them for long. The consequences would have to arrive at some point, and I'd rather not face said consequences for skipping a train ride, of all things.
And so that was why I kept a straight face and walked past the crowd, careful not to draw undue attention to myself, but also unwilling to hide and skulk about like a common rogue. Time spent in Greece had allowed me the space to do some thinking about how I handled things, and I realised how stupid I had been. It was just my luck that the newspapers weren't already calling for my imprisonment in Azkaban.
People were always going to be curious, and I knew how to manage and deal with that curiosity in my first life. The key was to give them enough that they didn't care to look for more. That was the exact opposite of what I was doing here. By basically becoming a complete shut-in, I'd made sure that the only news that spread about me was negative. Negative stories sold better as a basic fact, and since I was being uncooperative, the media had all the justification they felt they needed to just more or less make things up and peddle them to the public.
No more. This was to be the first of many ways I repaired what I had broken.
Of course, it wasn't like I could avoid attention just by walking and not making myself a target. I became one once the first person's eyes flicked up to see the scar on my head and meet my green eyes. He turned, whispering to the student at his side, and from there the tide shifted. More and more eyes followed me as I cut through the crowd, but no one stopped or bothered me as I made my way through. Even the presence of what passed for a celebrity in these parts was insufficient to cut through the pail that the incoming g hostilities in Asia had cast over the collective.
It was telling that something as serious as Sirius Black being found innocent and Peter Pettigrew being on the run was only front page news for one day. The rest of the holiday coverage— when it hadn't been about Snape and the Hogwarts drama there— had been on the ICW's decision to refuse to recognise the governments of Magical Korea, China, Mongolia, and a few other countries during the session and hear their petitions. In a decision with only Britain as the major opposition, the ICW had essentially voted to do what it had abstained from doing for decades, and recognising Japan's conquest over much of Asia.
Of course, opinions were split. The rebels in Asia were not well liked because of the deaths they'd caused in their attack on the Yule Ball. And wrongfully or not, the average magical brit had somehow come to identify with Japan's royal family on account of the fact that both parties had lost someone in the attack. On the other hand, while much of the government decried the rebel action that led to the deaths and losses, they still recognized the Japanese royal family as the true threats, it had turned into a war for public opinion. One that the Government had been losing and badly. And then Japan had gone ahead and pushed the tentative border that the ICW enforced as a result of the ceasefire that contained their conquest of Asia. They had taken the Himalayan Mountains again and were now threatening to push into Southern Asia, the point where the rest of the world had managed to convince them to stop on threat of unified action. They were at it again, and now the world seemed unlikely to stop them.
With all that in mind, I must have been last year's news, and yet someone seemed keen to bring that state of things to an end. My ritual-enhanced senses and agility were the only reason I was able to catch the wrist that held a knife the assailant intended to stab into my ribs. I met the glassy eyes of the brown haired woman and felt a snarl building. A snarl that I was forced to swallow in favour of gracelessly falling to the ground to avoid the green curse that passed where my head had been.
A/N: Shit happens.. As always, the next two chapters are up on Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga). If you just want to read complete chapters and not my work in real-time, then feel free to purchase this story as a collection on my Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) page so you get to read each chapter after I finish it and not necessarily the daily updates available with a regular Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) membership- nice way to support this story and me while you're at it. Enjoy!