The Call

Chapter 1

There was a door, and a soft light shining from the gaps in the doorframe. There was a snake, somewhere in the room, probably curled up next to the open fireplace. How he knew this, he was not sure, but he was a hundred percent positive that it was the case.

There was the servant, scurrying to and fro, bringing forth a meal for the master. The terrible, terrible master residing in the large chair particullary turned towards the fireplace. If he could only get a glimpse of this man, he had a feeling that he'd knew him. But alas, the chair was situated so that all he could make out was the slim lines of a thin, aristocratic face, beautiful yet somehow twisted, as if there was nothing even remotely human left in the beings soul.

There were words.

”Remember well, Wormtail, that your place is now and forever by my side.” the silent voice was supposed to be more hissing, more... otherworldly. He was sure of it. Yet somehow, it was a perfectly normal, slightly deep tone that shook him to his very core. Why, the listener did not know. ”You have tried to many times to fullfill that foolish blood-oath of yours, and though your pathetic attempts at double-talking me has indeed been quite amusing at times, it is now a time for it to come to an end.” The servant recoiled at these words, lowering his head towards the ground.
”Yes master, if it pleases you.”
”It is not a matter of pleasing, as much as a matter of practical needs for our... cause. I suppose that if you devoted your entire life to pleasing me, you could perhaps come close to doing so if you by some outside grace managed to find a semblance of intelligence inside that thick head of yours. But, since that is not really something even close to happening, sadly Wormtail, you are left being a tolerable nuisance to me.” The man... no, not man, thing, residing in the chair shook its head. ”Still, I suppose you want to make yourself useful. After all, it is in the servant's nature to wish to please his master. Very well,” the creature raised its voice ”Severus, Lucius!” Two men who had been standing hidden in the shadows swiftly approached the chair, kneeling next to it with their hooded heads lowered. ”Bring your fellow 'Brother' to the Chamber of Rituals. There, he shall be instructed in his task. Wormtail,” the master turned slightly towards his servant, ”I hereby charge you with the task of finding the Potter boy! You shall not sleep, no, not even for a minute, nor shall you linger in any place longer than absolutely necessary in your task to unravel his whereabouts! Your fellows will grant you the tools required for his retrieval. Now, go!” The last words where spoken in the all to familiar hiss, and for a minute, the listener feared that he'd been uncovered, that his careful work of concealing himself was in vain. After all, you could only cheat Death himself for so long, could you not?
And with that last thought, he faded back into darkness, unwilling to tempt the fates by staying any longer.

-*-*-*-

Harry James Potter jerked upright in his makeshift bed. It was still early in the morning, and the sun hadn't even begun to rise on the far horizon outside his tent, making it near impossible to even see the slightest detail in the two-times-two meter area that was his only shelter against the cold, damp weather the fall had brought them. He shuddered as he thought back on his dream.

Fuckin' Tom. Always up to something eh? Well, I might as well get started with my business too, then.

Harry's exact business, or perhaps more his sole raison d'être at the moment, was hiding. Hiding and preparing. Since that fateful summer eight years ago, when the Final Battle of the Wizarding World turned into a full scale massacre on both sides, leaving a crippled Order of the Phoenix and an equally crippled organization of struggling Death-Eaters, no-one really knew where he'd gone. Not even his old friends, people he knew would care and find much strength in the fact that he was still alive and about, could be informed. Not for their safety, but for his. If there was something the war had taught him, it was that the survival of the general and figurehead of an organization was imperative to its success. He could not risk his life anymore, not like the teenage boy he'd been did during those fateful hours that marked the end of a struggle almost a decade old. He'd been foolish, bravely so perhaps but still foolish, to think that he could stand up to a wizard more than three times his age and with a plethora of spells and experience at his command, while he had a disarming spell and a couple of students backing him. As he thought back, it was with a mixture of distaste and amusement.

I was truly a Gryffindor back then. Always the gallant fool, rushing head-first into action without pondering the consequences. That's what killed Remus, and Dumbledore too. That's why I have to learn.

Truly, after the battle, the one reason he'd gone away was because he was afraid. Not for his friends, or his surrogate family, but for his life. As he crawled away from the raging Lord Voldemort, the one thing he'd felt above anything else was true, hopeless, mind-numbing fear. He had nothing to offer, no secret power or ancient heritage that could match up to the ferrocity of the self-proclaimed Dark Lord. He was truly a mere child in the face of such unlimited, unrestricted power.

He still remembered the sneer on the pale wizard's face, those taunting red eyes, tainted with the craving for more and more power, mad beyond belief yet still so intelligent, so cunning, that he had no plan that would ever bring about the downfall of the man he'd been bred to kill. He was truly, utterly alone in that moment, and the monster knew it. Oh, how he'd revelled in that very moment. Harry sighed; it had been but a stroke of sheer luck that'd brought him out of harm's way. A lone, brave soul had sacrificed himself for his leader, yelling a command to the would-be saviour of the Wizarding world to run far away, and not look back. Remus Lupin died with the Dark Lord in his savage claws, a fearsome snarl marring his otherwise calm face, a face that was soaked with the blood of many an adversary. He'd died giving the Dark Lord yet another taint, in the form of Lupin's werewolf heritage, and giving Harry the few seconds needed to make a Traceless Apparation, one of the few things he'd actually learned which was above average for a wizard his age.

Average, that word kind of marked me as a human being back then. Nothing to fancy, not someone anyone would notice, just a boy tossed infront of a beast, hoping that luck'd grant me some kind of opportunity to strike him... it down.

And since that night, he'd been on the run. He'd first appeared in the countryside outside London, quickly moving towards the city itself to get lost in the urban jungle of 13 million people, a crowd big enough to swallow even the most prominent of magical signatures.
Back then, he'd still thought himself special, that he was somehow to blame for all that had happened. Luckily, however, he met a man who opened his eyes to the truth. The funny part? The man himself was not a wizard, not even a Squib. He was a muggle, a man of low standing to say the least. Harry Potter, The-Boy-Who-Lived, member of the Golden Trio and all around Good Guy of Gryffindor, Saviour of the Wizarding World became best pal with a bunch of beggars in the London Underground.

There was a man there, everyone called him Keatan. Nobody knew where he came from before his appearance at the Embankement, where he staggered into the shadows with a bottle of cheap gin in one hand and an even cheaper cigarette in the other, but there were whispers that he'd been in the army as a ranking officer, and that he got a dishonorary discharge after getting his platoon slaughtered in some small conflict near the Afghani border. Still, the talk went like that about most of the 'prominent' people of the slummers, and Harry learned soon enough to not take it too seriously. However, if there was something else he learned, it was to take Keatan's words very, very seriously.
The man was a philosopher-in-rags, a diamond in the rough and one of the best examples of what a human being should aspire to be in Harry's eyes. Not long after he'd arrived, the boy caught Keatan's eye for one reason or another, and then he simply took him in. Apart from teaching the boy how to live, eat, sleep and simply survive in the most hostile city in western Europe, the aging man also proved to be a seemingly endless source of good general advice to the young ex-hero.
”Oy kid!” he'd said one day, ”Something tells me you got a lot'a weight on your shoulders. Remember this:” he'd put his finger right along his nose, looking cunning and disarming at the same time (if that was even possible), ”you are not what other people wish you to be. Look inside yourself, and you'll find your cause. Until you do, stay clear of trouble, you hear me?” At Harry's vigouros nodding he'd just chuckled, and ruffled the younger one's hair. ”That's a good boy, Harry. I think we'll make a decent man outta you yet, don't you think?”
Sadly, the years of living in the sewers and tube-tunnels of London had taken their toll on the old man, and one day Harry returned to their shared shelter with a can of soup, only to find the old man passed out on the floor. Without any means to bring him to a hospital, the only thing Harry could do was to keep him as comfortable as he could whilst they both waited for the inevitable end. Keatan died roughly ten hours after Harry's return, coughing up blood and cursing his fate and his beloved cigarettes. His last request of Harry was that the boy got out of the slums and moved away from London.
”The past'll never catch up to a moving man, Harry. But stay in one place too long, and it'll find you. Mark my words. It'll find you...” had been his last, mumbled words as he fell into death's cold, comforting embrace. Harry, eager to get as far away from any place where he was largely known, took the old man's advice to heart. Starting from London, he travelled north, towards Scotland and the small fishing town of Fraserburgh, where he enlisted on a trawler bound for the North Atlantic. He worked hard, thoroughly enjoying the harsh life as a sailor, but never stopped for even a second to make himself at home. As soon as one ship anchored, he would leave, enlisting on a different one. He served with Scotts, Norweigans, Russians and even Icelanders on a dozen different boats. He never stayed long enough to build up a reputation, never made any enemies or any particular friends. When he left, it was as if he was never there to begin with. This carried on for three years, whilst he slowly built up his financial reserves and planned the future.

However, all good things must come to an end. Harry had been careless, one night in Reykjavik, blatantly mentioning his name to get into one of the more exclusive nightclubs in the wizard's part of the town. He'd been drunk, in a bad mood and not really eager to stand outside in the cold, when suddently he heard a voice from times long passed.
”Harry Potter? Is that really you, mate?”
The man speaking had been tall, though not overly so, with short, dark hair and a distinct irish accent. Seamus Finnigan, one of his old dorm-mates from the time at Hogwarts, had pushed through the line and hugged him close, whispering prayer's of thanks to Merlin and whatever deity magic users tended to worship. Harry, suddently uncomfortably recognized by anyone within five square meters, felt that he was all of a sudden very, VERY pleased with the prospect of a cold night on the streets of Muggle Reykjavik. So pleased, in fact, that he could not wait to get to it. Turning around on the spot and walking very quickly away from the crowd might not have been the most subtle escape, but he was after all drunk out of his mind and caring less about subterfuge and more about simply getting as far away from any old, partially irish friends who showed up at the worst possible time.

The following morning he'd set out on a ship bound for Norway. The plan was to hike through the mountains to northern Sweden, and then move across Finland, down the Karelian Isthmus and into Russia. However, as most plans tend to do, this one did not survive close contact with reality.

When he arrived in Bergen, Norway, Harry began moving across the border into Sweden. He'd rented a light motorcycle, not really wanting to move to quickly but still not fond of the idea to traverse the quite imposing mountain ranges by foot. As he came southwards, towards the town of Lillehammer, his luck however took a turn for the worse. In Lillehammer he was ambushed by an old nemesis, Draco Malfoy, who believed that the head of his master's most hated enemy would bring him back into the Dark Lord's good graces. What Malfoy did not take into consideration was this: Harry had been preparing for any eventual wizards coming his way and descided that the most effiecent way to deal with them would be the muggle way: with a gun instead of a spell. Before he'd even drawn breath to speak his first incantation, Draco's chest was pierced by a 9 mm bullet from Harry's Glock. Not liking the idea of being held up by eventual law enforcement, the young man then took to speeding out of town, travelling with haste more now than before and racing towards the Swedish border. He then stopped, shortly after the border, in the immense woods of Värmland, in order to confuse any eventual followers that he'd simply left the country as fast as he could. Taking residence outside a small village, he begun living of what nature had to offer him, dodging the search parties of Voldemort and the Order of the Phoenix alike. However, he now knew his days were numbered. Not liking the fact that he was still ways behind his adversary in terms of pure, magical strength and skill, he began to search his surroundings for strong magical sources, eventually finding a trace of some sort of primal magic in the woods to his east. Travelling that way, he'd sought it out and, with a combination of persuasion and strong-arm convincing, got the old witch he met to teach him the ways of the metsäsoumalaiset, or Forest Finns.

Today he was well versed in the ways of primal magic, calling upon both the spirits of the earth and the ancient energies of the elements as his allies. He was, however, still no match for Touvi, whose sheer power was frankly quite scary to witness first hand. He still did not know why the old hag had appeared frightened by his firearm and let him 'convince' her to teach him; everytime he mentioned it she simply muttered something in finnish and told him that 'her destiny was to help him realize his'. Though he did not understand her reasons, Harry knew by now that it was never a good idea to be picky when it came to accepting help, especially not help from someone who could start a fire big enough to consume a medium sized city by uttering two words.

And now, Lord Voldemort was taking measure's to bring him in. The dreams had been getting more frequent as of late, though Harry still had a sneaking suspicion that the old 'I see you and you see me' communication that he'd shared with the evil man had turned into more of a private peepshow for him. It could have something to do with his new kind of magic, or the fact that the Dark Lord no longer knew his physical whereabouts (which still wouldn't explain how Harry could see and hear his thoughts), but whatever it was it'd work in his favor, which meant he'd not easily pass up on the opportunity to spy upon his enemy. No matter how dangerous it would prove.

Lord Voldemort was coming for his blood, but Harry'd hate to see the man get his prize without any kind of resistance. As he began his routine morning exercise he couldn't help but grin at the tought of himself walking up to the old, powerful wizard like a lamb to the slaughter, sacrifizing his life to the 'Greater Good' or whatever.
That'd only be too anti-climatic.