"Hey Charlotte, got a minute?" Harry caught up to her after breakfast the next morning. "There's something I want to try."
He led her to an empty classroom nearby, closing the door softly behind them. Charlotte hopped onto a desk, legs swinging slightly.
"Is this about that healing story in the Prophet?" she asked. "The one from France?"
Harry nodded, pulling up a chair. "You saw that?"
"Hard to miss," Charlotte smiled. "Golden light healing people's injuries? Though nobody seemed sure if it was real or just accidental magic. The Prophet loves writing dramatic stories about you."
"Well, they're right about this," Harry said. "It's real. I can heal people." He glanced at her scarred hand. "I'd like to try it, if you're willing?"
Charlotte looked deeply at her own robes for a moment, then extended her hand. "It's worth a try."
Harry's Hun soul drew on the faith invested in him. It felt like there was much more available than before - probably all those Daily Prophet articles that had focused attention on him. Golden light gathered around his hands as he refined the raw faith into pure divine healing energy.
The moment he released the healing wave, his Inner Eye activated on its own. He could see one second into the future, watching how the divine energy would flow into the cursed scars - and how the dark magic would respond.
The curse wasn't just blocking his healing - it was feeding on it. Each time the divine energy touched the scars, the dark magic absorbed it, using it to maintain itself. Harry tried redirecting the flow, using his brief glimpse of the future to outmaneuver the curse, but it adapted just as quickly.
"Haah," Harry sighed, letting the golden light fade. "The Oracle was right after all."
"The Oracle?"
"…someone I met in Greece who warned me about curse scars," Harry explained, running a hand through his hair. "She said they maintain themselves through the belief and fear of the caster, target and whatever tries to heal it. The dark magic is literally using my own… magic to keep itself alive."
He'd failed this first attempt, but watching through his Inner Eye had shown him exactly how the curse tried to respond. Maybe with some more thought...
"Let me try again," Harry said, straightening up. "But this time..." He took a deep breath. "I'm not going to stop."
Charlotte nodded, extending her hand once more. Harry gathered divine energy, but instead of releasing it in a single wave, he kept refining more and more faith into divine energy. His Hun Soul strained with the effort of continuous refinement.
His Inner Eye too burned as he pushed it further than ever before, stretching his future sight to two seconds instead of one. The extra second of foresight let him see the curse's flow more clearly - how it would reach for his divine energy, trying to consume it.
Sweat beaded on Harry's forehead as he maintained the healing wave. The curse kept adapting, but now he could see its movements far enough ahead to start predicting its flow. It was like his lightning art - understanding where energy wanted to flow and working with those paths.
Then he noticed something very alarming. The well of faith he drew from was depleting rapidly. He had maybe thirty seconds left at this rate.
"Come on," Harry muttered, focusing on a tiny section of one scar. Instead of trying to overwhelm the entire curse at once, he isolated a small portion and directed all his remaining healing power there. The dark magic tried to feed on the divine energy as usual, but this time there was too much concentrated in one spot in comparison to the amount of dark magic.
Just as the last drops of faith ran out, Harry saw the curse's grip weaken slightly. He collapsed forward, catching himself on the desk while panting heavily.
"Harry!" Charlotte grabbed his shoulders, steadying him. Then she looked at her hand and went very still. There, in one tiny spot, a scar had faded ever so slightly.
Charlotte's hands trembled as she traced the tiny spot. She pulled Harry into a hug so tight he could feel her heart racing. "You did it," she whispered, voice breaking. Her next words came between shaky breaths. "Even just this little bit..." Her grip tightened. "Thank you."
Harry hugged back, still breathing hard. "We'll figure it out," he promised. "It'll take time for me to gather more… energy for this, but now we know it's possible."
"…I just wish I could have Seen like this earlier," Harry muttered lowly. "Those two seconds of foresight made all the difference in getting around the dark magic."
"Two seconds of what?" Charlotte pulled back from the hug, wiping her eyes.
Harry winced, realizing what he'd let slip. After thinking on it, he decided to explain. She'd trusted him with the vaults and her scars - he could trust her with this.
"My Inner Eye," he said. "It's... well, it lets me see a second or two into the future. Usually just one second, but I managed to push it to two while healing. That's why I was so exhausted - maintaining that level of foresight while using magic like that was intense."
Charlotte blinked. "You can see the future? Like Professor Trelawney says she can?"
"No, nothing like that," Harry shook his head. "Just a second or two ahead, and only if I really focus. It's more useful for seeing how things will move- like with my lightning art, or in this case, seeing how the dark magic would react to the healing."
"That's how you knew exactly where to direct the healing energy," Charlotte realized. "You could see where the curse would try to block it before it happened."
Harry nodded. "It's usually easier with things like predicting where lightning will strike. Fighting against dark magic was... different. The curse kept changing how it acted, so even with two seconds of foresight, it was hard to keep up."
"Still," Charlotte looked at her hand again, touching the slightly faded spot. "It worked. Even if it's just this tiny bit, it worked." She smiled at him. "Even if it takes years... knowing these can actually be healed..."
"I'll keep trying," Harry promised. "Now that I know what to look for with my Inner Eye, I can work on better ways to counter how the curse feeds on the healing energy. Maybe if I-"
A loud growl interrupted them. They both turned to see Chrysa in the doorway, looking particularly unimpressed about missing breakfast with Harry.
Charlotte laughed, the sound lighter than Harry had heard yesterday. "I think someone's jealous of our private chat."
"Sorry, Chrysa," Harry grinned, standing up on slightly shaky legs. "Let's go get you some food."
They left the classroom, and Charlotte bumped his shoulder gently. "Thank you," she said again, quietly. "Not just for trying, but for showing me it wasn't hopeless."
After leaving Charlotte, Harry spent the rest of the day in his room, trying to distract himself from the morning's partial success. His brushes lay scattered across the desk, azure flames flowing between them as he practiced maintaining different temperatures. But his thoughts kept drifting back to those cursed scars.
Chrysa watched from her cushioned platform by the window, tail swishing whenever Harry's flames flickered too high. The spring breeze carried the scent of blooming flowers from the greenhouse, reminding him he still needed to show Sprout his sketches of those Brazilian fire-flowers.
"Maybe that's what I need," Harry muttered, setting down his brush. "A break from all this..." He gestured at the half-finished flame painting. The colors were wrong anyway - he couldn't quite capture the exact shade of divine healing light.
In the private potions laboratory Dumbledore had set aside for him, Harry laid out some of his personal set of silver knives - a gift from Nicolas that had seen heavy use these past months. The wooden box still carried a faint scent of France, bringing back memories of long afternoons spent learning how to prepare ingredients.
"Veritaserum," Harry whispered, arranging his workspace. He'd never attempted it before, but the recipe was clear in his mind. A month-long brew, technically restricted by the Ministry, but Nicolas had always encouraged experimentation. He would probably be delighted to see Harry attempting such an advanced potion.
Harry selected a pure silver cauldron, checking its surface for any imperfections. Truthfulness required absolute purity in the brewing vessel. He arranged his ingredients - moondew collected at midnight, powdered jobberknoll feathers, and crystallized water from a natural spring.
His fingers traced the edge of the cauldron as he considered the first step. Most brewers would need a wand to activate the magical properties of moondew, but Harry had discovered something interesting during his first try at making potions. If he drew in in ambient magic using his Po soul, just as it did when he created mist, he could direct it into the ingredients if he was intensely focused.
"Let's see..." Harry crushed the jobberknoll feathers with sharp, diagonal strokes. The typical recipe called for powder fine as dust, but his instincts suggested leaving some slightly larger fragments would create anchor points for the truth-compelling magic. He added them to the spring water, watching how they settled in a spiral formation.
The moondew came next, three drops exactly as the first ray of afternoon sun struck the cauldron through the high window. Harry guided a thin stream of magic into the mixture, watching with satisfaction as the liquid began to shimmer with an opalescent sheen.
"Perfect first stage," he noted, setting a timer. The potion would need to simmer for exactly three days before the next ingredient. He'd have to transport it carefully when returning to France, but Nicolas had taught him several methods for safely moving in-progress brews.
It was still strange to think how far he'd progressed. The potions taught at Hogwarts felt like they were being taught at an exaggeratedly slow pace - even NEWT-level brewing didn't feel so difficult now. Harry smiled, imaging Snape's face if he knew he had almost finished learning whatever he'd be teaching Harry in a couple of years.
A loud crash from the corridor interrupted his thoughts. Harry stepped out of the laboratory just in time to see Peeves zooming past, juggling what looked suspiciously like Mrs. Norris's favorite cat toys.
"Ickle Potter-wotter!" Peeves cackled, doing a backwards loop-de-loop. "Want to play catch with kitty's strings?"
"No thanks, Peeves," Harry grinned, ducking as a fuzzy mouse sailed over his head. "Though you might want to head toward the astronomy tower - I heard Filch muttering about cleaning the trophy room earlier."
"Ooooh!" Peeves' eyes lit up with mischief. "Peevesie thanks you!" He zoomed off, singing at the top of his lungs: "Here kitty kitty, where's your pretty toy? Asked the poltergeist to the caretaker's joy!"
Harry shook his head, still smiling as he climbed the moving staircases. A group of second-years hurried past, their loud discussion about transfiguration homework echoing off the stone walls.
One of the portraits - a dignified witch in medieval robes - gave him a friendly wave. "Evening, young Potter! That lion of yours left muddy paw prints all over Sir Cadogan's frame this morning. He's still throwing a fit about it!"
"Sorry about that," Harry called back.
The gargoyle guarding Dumbledore's office seemed to eye him knowingly as he came closer. Harry could have sworn it winked at him, though that might have been a trick of the fading sunlight.
"Fizzing Whizbee," Harry told it, which shifted aside with a grinding of stone. The spiral staircase carried him upward, the gentle motion giving him time to clear his thoughts after the intense focus of potion-making.
A warm trill greeted him before he even reached the top. Harry smiled - Fawkes always knew when he was approaching. He knocked on the heavy oak door, breathing in the subtle scent of lemon drops that seemed to be permanently infused into the wood.
"Come in, Harry," Dumbledore called.
"Good evening, Grandpa," Harry said, entering the circular office. The last rays of sunset painted the room in shades of gold and crimson, making Fawkes' feathers gleam like living flame.
"Ah, Harry." Dumbledore smiled, setting aside some papers. "I notice your bracelet has been very silent these past months. It seems you've mastered the Control phase entirely?"
"Yes," Harry nodded, slipping off the red bracelet. "Even at maximum interference, I could maintain focus." He hesitated slightly. "After... well, after that situation with the Oracle was resolved, anything involving my mind seemed to become easier."
"Ah yes," Dumbledore's eyes twinkled. "The 'Snow in Summer' you mentioned?"
"Right." Harry shifted in his chair. "Though I know you're not happy about that entire situation..."
Dumbledore gave him a pointed look over his half-moon spectacles. "Indeed. I trust you've learned better than to accept such gifts from entities that aren't truly alive?"
Harry's gaze dropped to his hands, the Oracle's silver tears a phantom taste on his tongue. He slowly nodded his head.
"Well then," Dumbledore smiled, changing the subject. "I believe it's time we moved on to the third phase of your Occlumency training – Active Detection."
He leaned forward slightly, folding his hands on the desk. "This phase will be different. No special bracelet this time. Instead, we'll meet every two days to work with actual Legilimency probes - very light ones, with your consent of course."
"You'll learn to detect when someone is trying to enter your mind," Dumbledore continued. "We'll practice maintaining that clear mind we worked on while under actual probing, and you'll learn to suppress specific memories during light intrusion."
"Over time," he concluded, "this will help build your endurance for maintaining mental defenses. Are you ready to begin?"
Harry straightened in his chair, nodding firmly. After everything with the Oracle, he understood better than ever why these defenses were important.
"We'll start very lightly," Dumbledore said, drawing his wand. "Just a gentle touch against your outer thoughts. Try to notice when you feel it."
Harry nodded, taking a deep breath and settling more comfortably in his chair.
"Legilimens," Dumbledore whispered.
A slight crease appeared between Dumbledore's eyebrows. "Curious... your mind seems quite different now."
"Different how?" Harry asked, having felt nothing yet.
"It's trying to evade my probe on its own," Dumbledore explained, maintaining the light touch. "Though I can still establish the connection without much difficulty..." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Perhaps this is due to your Hun Soul's influence? Or that 'Flexible Soul'?"
Harry started to respond, but Dumbledore shook his head. "No matter for now. Let's continue with the lesson. Focus on trying to sense my presence."
The first probe felt like nothing at all. The second was just a whisper against his thoughts. By the fifth attempt, Harry started noticing something - not quite a sensation, but a feeling of... otherness.
"There!" Harry said suddenly. "Just now, like... like someone walking past me in thick fog."
"Very good," Dumbledore nodded, maintaining the gentle probe. "Now that you've noticed it, try to track where it goes."
Harry focused on the strange presence. It seemed to drift through his surface thoughts, barely touching them. "It's moving toward... memories of breakfast?"
"Excellent." Dumbledore increased the pressure slightly. "Most students take weeks just to notice the initial contact. Your Hun Soul seems to make you particularly sensitive to mental intrusion."
The next hour passed quickly. Harry learned to distinguish between different types of probes - some felt sharp and direct, others soft and diffuse. He could track their movement through his mind with increasing accuracy, even predicting where they would go next.
"Very remarkable," Dumbledore said after Harry correctly identified a probe's target before it reached the memory. "Your Inner Eye is helping you anticipate the probes, isn't it?"
Harry nodded. "I can see about a second ahead where the probe will try to go. It makes tracking them much easier."
"Let's try something more challenging then." Dumbledore raised his wand again. "I'll send multiple light probes. Try to track them all."
The first dual probe was manageable - Harry could feel them moving in different directions, one toward his recent memories of Charlotte, another toward thoughts of Chrysa. Three probes were harder, but his Inner Eye helped him stay ahead of their movements.
"Four," Harry announced, sweat beading on his forehead. "One near memories of France, two around this morning's thoughts, and... one trying to sneak behind the others toward deeper memories."
Dumbledore ended the spell, looking impressed. "Most adult wizards with a bit of training in Occlumency struggle to track three probes simultaneously. Though I notice you're not actually trying to block any of them yet?"
"No," Harry admitted. "I can feel and track them, but stopping them..." He wiped his forehead. "That feels like trying to catch smoke with my hands."
"That will come with practice," Dumbledore assured him. "For now, your detection abilities are advancing remarkably fast. We should be able to move on to actual defense much sooner than I expected."
Harry smiled tiredly. "The Oracle gave me a lot of motivation for keeping unwanted things out of my mind…"
"Indeed." Dumbledore's expression grew serious. "Sometimes our greatest lessons come from our most difficult experiences. Though I would prefer you not seek out such experiences in the future."
"Don't worry," Harry said quickly. "I've had enough ancient beings trying to get in my head for one lifetime."
Dumbledore chuckled. "Quite. Now, shall we try one more set before ending for today? Perhaps see if you can track five probes at once?"
Harry's green eyes suddenly darkened, and Dumbledore immediately noticed the change in his expression.
[Tomb Blade - Warhammer Fantasy: Dogs of War] – Costs 300CP, 350CP available to spend.
A cursed, fell weapon made magical by centuries of steeping in the foul dark magics that swirl and coalesce in long-forgotten tombs. This blade now harbors hate, the spirit of its former wielder trapped inside the rusted iron shard, hungry to tear away the warmth and life of the living. Its bite leaves terrible wounds that never heal.
"Another offer?" he asked quietly.
"Yes." Harry's lip curled in revulsion. " A cursed weapon called a Tomb Blade. It's... well, it's horrible. The spirit of its previous owner is trapped inside, and it leaves wounds that never heal." He shuddered slightly. "It's made from centuries of dark magic in forgotten tombs."
"And your thoughts?" Dumbledore leaned forward, though he seemed to already know Harry's answer from his expression.
"After everything with Charlotte's cursed scars?" Harry shook his head firmly. "I just spent all morning trying to heal wounds that 'never heal'. I don't want anything to do with creating more of them."
Dumbledore smiled warmly. "I'm glad to see your experiences have taught you wisdom rather than tempting you toward darker paths."
"Besides," Harry added, "trapping someone's spirit in a weapon? That's..." He trailed off, looking troubled. "After what the Oracle tried to do, the idea of trapped spirits makes me uncomfortable."
A soft chime from one of Dumbledore's silver instruments signaled the end of their session. Outside the tall windows, the sun had begun to set, painting the office in warm golden light.
"I believe that's enough for today," Dumbledore said, rising from his chair. "Though I must say, your progress is beyond exceptional. I do expect us to move towards the next phase very soon."
Harry sank deeper into his chair, his shoulders dropping as Fawkes glided down his perch to land on Harry's shoulder, offering a comforting trill.
"Thanks, Fawkes," Harry smiled, reaching up to stroke the phoenix's warm feathers. "I think I needed that."
"Phoenixes have an uncanny sense for when someone has pushed themselves too hard," Dumbledore noted, walking to one of his cabinets. "Which reminds me - would you like a chocolate frog? I find they help after mental exertion."
Harry accepted the candy, but one of the portraits spoke up. "In my day, we didn't coddle students with sweets after lessons!" But the former headmaster's stern expression softened when Fawkes turned to give him an unimpressed stare.
"Same time in two days?" Harry asked, unwrapping the chocolate frog. He easily caught it mid-jump - some skills never faded.
"Indeed. Though perhaps we should move our sessions earlier," Dumbledore glanced at the darkening sky. "I noticed Chrysa gets rather anxious around dinnertime."
Harry laughed. "She's still mad about this morning. I had to give her extra treats after keeping her waiting."
"Ah yes, about that..." Dumbledore's eyes twinkled. "Severus came to me quite distressed about finding golden fur all over his chair at breakfast. Would you happen to know anything about that?"
"Pure coincidence," Harry said innocently, but couldn't quite hide his grin. "She just really likes him for some reason."
"Mmhmm." Dumbledore didn't look convinced. "Well, you'd better head down to dinner before she decides to redecorate more furniture."
Harry reached the door, and Dumbledore called after him. "Oh, and Harry? Well done today. Particularly with that offer. It's not easy to reject power, even dangerous power, when it's freely given."
Harry paused, hand on the doorknob. "Some kinds of power aren't worth the cost," he said quietly. "I learned that the hard way."
The phoenix song that followed him down the spiral staircase felt like approval.