Chapter 55

June 6th, 2020. Ravenhead, Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

Harry Black, aged somewhere around thirty, carefully connected the electrodes to the sample of crystalline metal.

"Experiment number four hundred and sixty-two…" He murmured, the scratching of a dicta-quill so familiar that it barely registered to him. "… success?"

"Success?!" Harry blinked and doubled-checked his readings and calculations. "Success!"

For a moment, he just stood there and basked in the feeling of scientific and magical accomplishment.

Then he started cackling like a proper mad scientist. It was tradition.

"YES! THE WORLD SHALL TREMBLE BEFORE THE MIGHT OF MY ALCHEMICALLY DERIVED ROOM-TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTOR! BWAHAHAHAHA! Alright, that's enough of that. What should I name it?"

He peered at the material, watching its shifting hues of pale green as he turned it around in his hand.

"I wonder if Blizzard kick up a fuss if I called it saronite? The Black Blood of Yogg-Saron, corrupting all it touches, minus one Old God, his blood and any actual corruption besides greed… On second thought, that might carry some unfortunate connotations, especially since I am sort of planning to take over the world with it."

Harry stared at the little bar of metal in his hand mournfully. "I really do want to call it saronite though…"

"Luna, I did it!"

"Congratulations!" Luna said enthusiastically.

She had no idea what 'it' was, but Harry was clearly excited about 'it'.

"This calls for a celebration, where's our wives and kids?"

"They went to visit Andromeda and Ted." Luna explained patiently. "You kissed them goodbye an hour ago."

"Oh, right." Harry scratched at the back of his head, clearly still suffering from temporal disorientation. "Well, we can celebrate with them later then. What do you want to do?"

"I want to make babies." Luna replied. She'd carefully considered all the pros and cons like Nymphadora had taught her to do and come to the conclusion that she was better off just acting on her feelings.

"Alright, let's go make babies." Harry agreed, threw her over his shoulder and started marching towards the bedroom.

"I hope it's a boy this time." Luna said, idly watching the hallway pass by in reverse.

"Lightning-eyed and cloven-hoofed." He snickered.

"That doesn't seem very likely." She contested with a puzzled frown.

"Yes, I'd say us making a satyr god baby is statistically improbable."

"The hooves would probably hurt my vagina coming out anyway." Luna speculated.

"That's a good point. And the horns too. Do baby goats even have horns?"

"I don't know." Luna tried to remember if she'd ever seen a baby goat. "We need to go look at some baby goats."

"Right now I'm in such a good mood that I'll even let you adopt one."

"Really?" Luna squealed in excitement. Best. Day. Ever.

Later that day.

"When did we get a baby goat?" Dora's confused question summarized the thoughts of her parents and Fleur as they observed the tiny quadrupedal animal clopping around.

By contrast, their children were not confused at all and eagerly crawled towards the equally curious creature.

"Luna and I were talking and figured that we were missing a pet." Harry explained with a straight face.

"So you bought a goat?" Andromeda asked bemusedly.

"Well, 'bought' may be a strong term…"

"So you stole a goat?" Fleur corrected.

"Adopted." Luna counter-corrected.

"Without permission or payment, because the ownership of living creatures is a barbaric practice." Harry's face continued to be perfectly straight.

"Really?" Dora asked archly. " You are going to say that?"

"Why not?" Harry countered. "I'm pretty barbaric."

Fleur snorted in amusement and shook her head. "Well, I suppose there are worse pets than goats. The children seem to like it at least."

"Her. She's a female, we named her Betsy."

June 8th, 2020. Spellhaven.

Adrastia turned the little bar of crystalline metal around in her hands, admiring the way the light reflected from it. Or more likely, the power it represented. She hadn't understood at first, because despite being well versed in the mundane world, her focus was on the social aspects more than the technical. It hadn't taken her long to gasp the implications once he explained what a room-temperature superconductor meant though.

"You continue to outdo yourself, my dear." She praised. "With this, you have become the master of the world."

"Not yet." Harry contradicted.

"Of course, you still have to give out samples and wait for the scientists to inform the politicians of how valuable it is, but it is a foregone conclusion. Everyone will want this, so everyone will listen when you speak." She amended. "Is there a limit to how much of it you can transmute?"

"Yes, I'm obviously the only alchemist that knows how and I don't plan to share the secret. Still, with the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, I can make quite a lot of it in a relatively shot amount of time."

"Hmm." She hummed thoughtfully. "What about distribution? Is it difficult to work with?"

"Very much so. In fact, it gets ruined if melted and breaks rather than bends, so it has to be transfigured into the proper shape in order to retain its properties."

"How extremely convenient for you." She said, vastly amused. "If you control both the supply and the use of it, unless they have skilled wizards of their own employed, then you have tremendous leverage."

"Quite, but what kind of pushback can I expect?"

"I couldn't accurately asses such a thing with my limited understanding of the technological implications." Adrastia admitted. "But I would assume that it would be as immense as the changes this saronite of yours would bring. Certainly, anyone whose financial empire would be threatened would become your enemy and you would likely have to eliminate them."

"Yeah, that's about what I figured." Harry sighed. "How would you suggest I handle it?"

"Aside from simply forcing your way through their obstructionism and killing those that act against you directly, a fearsome reputation may help."

"Wouldn't that undermine my public image." He asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Not necessarily. As long as nothing definitive can be pinned on you then you can just keep denying it while letting the rumors do their work."

"Hmm." He hummed thoughtfully. "Targets and methods?"

"You have made many enemies, some of them quite vocal. Start paying them visits and silencing them. Not killing, just make them change their stance with suspicious abruptness. And keep making more enemies since you will need to keep it up. You enjoy picking on religion, yes? Do it more, get them angry and when any prominent figures among them speak out against you, pay them a visit. Islam in particular will provide plenty of opportunities, because while it is a religion, it often behaves as a system of law as well."

"So?" Harry asked. He had never bothered to study it in detail after determining that it was inescapably hostile to his own beliefs in its current form, but he knew that Adrastia was an avid student of sociology.

"Mixing law and religion does interesting things to societies. They are more stable than secular ones, but rigid, inflexible, humorless and easily provoked to moral outrage by criticism. Islamic religious leaders have been known to issue kill orders on people in the past that technically legally apply to all Muslims. Find the right lever and they will issue one on you, then pay them a visit and 'convince' them to rescind it soon after. Everyone will know it was you without being able to prove it and your reach, power and ruthlessness will become greatly feared."

"Now that I can do." Harry grinned. "I wonder if I can get the Pope too?"

Adrastia snorted. "Unlikely, the current one is dreadfully dull and unconfrontational."

"Ah well, there's always the next one I suppose."

August 16th, 2020. Iran.

"So much for the Supreme Leader of Iran." Harry said mockingly to the shivering old man cowering before him on the floor. He might not have the sadism to properly cast the Cruciatus, but a master of the Mind Arts could do things that were just as bad or even worse. "Didn't think I'd come all the way over here, did you?"

The old man, whose name he hadn't bothered to really learn, didn't answer, so Harry kicked him in the gut. "That wasn't a rhetorical question."

"N-no." The old man wheezed out.

"Of course you didn't." Harry agreed. "Big man issuing a kill order halfway across the world, but it isn't any fun when your target can come over and smack the shit out of you for it."

To be fair, the old guy had showed more gumption than expected, presumably drawing strength from his faith, but it was no use. Harry had torn through his mind with a viciousness that only a master of Occlumency could have defended against. What he had left behind wasn't merely damage, but a fault line in his psyche that no amount of willpower could overcome.

Adrastia's plan had worked to perfection. There had been no shortage of mouthy idiots around, those advocating for magicals to be either killed or their freedoms rigidly controlled, public figures, already a few trying to demonize him further in order to prevent the spread of saronite, people of loonier Christian denominations, a couple of Orthodox Jews, the odd guy that was simply a loud cunt with no religion involved and of course a lot of Muslims… they all started getting unannounced visits. His current victim was the biggest fish so far though.

"Now why don't you tell me what you're going to do?" Harry prompted. He had implanted the knowledge into the fool's head, none too gently at that.

"I w-will, res-rescind the fatwa." The broken old man stuttered.

"Or else?"

"Or e-else you w-will re-return and m-make me w-watch as you f-flay my f-family alive."

"What do you know, looks like you can teach an old dog some new tricks!" Harry mocked some more. The threat was somewhat unnecessary, as the pretzels he'd twisted his mind into would not allow him to disobey or even speak about what had happened, but it worked better if the fear was tied into something.

His gloating was interrupted by an incoming mirror call.

Harry shot it an irritated glance before giving his victim a look. "Excuse me, I gotta take this."

The faces of all three of his wives appeared, all of them looking very excited.

"Harry, come quick!" Dora and Fleur almost spoke over each other. "The boys are taking their first steps!"

"That's cool, I'll be right there." Harry nodded and shut down the connection.

"It's not actually their first steps." He admitted. "I saw them start walking earlier in the day, but figured that the girls would appreciate thinking that they were there when it happened more than I would. Personally, I'm finding it hard to understand what all the excitement is about. It's just walking!"

The old man didn't reply.

"But we aren't here to discuss my inability to be impressed by the basic biological functions of my kids." Harry continued. "We are here because I provoked you, you fell for it and put out a kill order on me, I tortured you a bit and now you're going to make yourself look like a limp fish by taking it back and looking very contrite about it. Understand?"

The old man nodded jerkily.

Harry kicked him in the gut again. "Words, motherfucker. Use them."

"Ye-yes, I understand."

"Good boy. Keep this up and I won't even have to come back until you retire."

The portkey deposited him in the foyer of his home and he started making his way towards the room that had become some kind of de facto baby center.

He heard the giggling of his children shortly before he got there and stopped in the doorway to observe for a moment.

Dora was encouraging the triplets to walk towards her with a wide smile. Fleur was holding Victoire by the hands to hold her up, her belly already showing from her second pregnancy. Luna was sitting on the couch and cuddling Xena, the last of their kids apparently not interested in walking right now. She was also pregnant again, although not yet showing. Betsy was jumping around playfully.

Narcissa and Septima were also present, watching with smiles and bellies gravid with the late stages of pregnancy. Ye gods but there were going to be a lot of kids around the place.

"Hello, Harry." Luna beamed at him.

"Go over to daddy." Dora encouraged, pointing the triplets his way.

Harry crouched down and beckoned them his way as well, causing the trio of metamorphmagi to turn into miniature copies of him, right down to the scars on his face, as they stomped over. Even he had to admit that it was cute.

"Excellent, soon you'll be terrorizing the island with your fine motor skills." He said as they crowded around him, smirking at the exasperated sigh Dora gave him.

"You want to go too?" Fleur asked of her daughter. "Alright, go on then."

"That's quite the determined face you've got there, Vicky." Harry commented, using his nickname for the little veela.

And indeed, Victoire had her face screwed up in concentration as she put one foot in front of the other and slowly made her way towards him.

"She's doing it!" Fleur nearly squeed, forgetting to be irritated by the nickname in her excitement.

Victoire squealed in triumphant laughter as she was picked up and cuddled into his neck like a limpet. Clearly, the secret to making veela children into daddy's little girls was to be a powerful wizard.

"What about you, Xena?" Harry asked, talking to his human daughter. "Feeling lazy?"

The baby yawned at him.

"She just ate." Luna explained.

"Ah."

Harry spent a a while longer doing his best to wear out his newly mobile kids. Once that had happened, Dora siddled up to him with a clear question in her eyes.

"Did you do it?" She asked.

"Yep, wasn't even hard."

The metamorph nodded. "Good, we don't need any complications next month."

Harry's face soured at the reminder of what was happening next month. He and Dora were going to the White House.

The saronite had catapulted him right to the very top of everyone's 'must talk to' list. There had even been a few suggestions that he be awarded the Nobel Prize, but that had largely petered out due to his refusal to disclose how exactly the saronite was made.

With the elections coming up, the USA's president was especially keen to make a good showing by negotiating a deal. He was already looking slow because Japan had beaten him to it, although that was as much to do with the fact that Harry favored the Japanese cultural mindset as it did with anything else.

The real problem was that Harry did not want to talk to the man that he called 'The Tangerine Twat of the United States'.

Donald Trump was about as eloquent as a confused ten-year-old, told the most ridiculous bold-faced lies, was rather narcissistic and had some astonishingly deluded notions. He was basically Cornelius Fudge with more spine and maybe a glimmer of extremely well camouflaged intelligence. Needless to say, Harry was sorely tempted to murder him out of principle.

The worst part was that it somehow seemed to be working for him. It was a struggle for Harry not to abandon all hope of saving humanity from its own foolishness when open stupidity was a winning strategy. Then again, the covert stupidity of most other politicians wasn't any better and in many ways worse, so that might explain Trump's success..

Still, that was what they had to deal with and Harry had known that using his ability to transmute a room-temperature superconductor, essentially the holy grail of modern technology, was going to involve a lot of tedious politicking with people that he would normally dismiss as too stupid to live. Dora wasn't eager to be going either, especially alone, but she was the only one currently not pregnant and her presence could be beneficial to their public image.

Harry much preferred the kind of politics he'd engaged in earlier.

In late September of 2020, both Septima and Narcissa gave birth, sparing Harry some exasperation by having it happen a week apart instead of simultaneously.

Octis Vector was born with the dark black hair shared by his parents and the emerald green eyes of his father. Calypso Black shared the coloring of her half-sibling, Narcissa's magically supressed albinism having not been passed on to her daughter. Both would later discover the gifts of Parseltongue and Corvustongue, which was the name that Harry eventually gave to his own animagus-derived language.

In late December of the same year, Fleur gave birth to her second daughter, Iliana. She huffed irritably over being outvoted on her choice of a French name and insisted on having two votes for her next one before she would capitulate.

On the 15th of March in the year 2021, Luna gave birth to a blond boy with emerald green eyes, who they named Pan. Like all his human children, Pan also had the gifts of Parseltongue and Corvustongue. As a bit of a joke, Harry cast some spells on Betsy the Goat that made her like him the most out of all his children, something that he would facepalm quite hard for about fifteen years later when his son became a goat animagus.

Much to Harry's exasperated resignation, the arrival of Pan got Fleur hankering for another baby. Now up to nine kids, ten if you counted Arielle, he was so far past the point of no return that he didn't even care and nine months later, again in late December, Arienne came squealing into the world.

That was the end of what Harry dubbed 'the reproductive frenzy', Dora having decided that a single three-round burst was enough for her and the other two satisfied as well.

The metamorphmagus also asked for animagus training while Luna and Fleur were busy making babies, whereupon it was discovered, after much frustration, that her animal form was in fact Homo Sapiens, the vanilla human. This finally allowed Harry to crack open the secret to being a metamorph, something he had been determined to do since he was thirteen. Unfortunately, while it was theoretically possible to change one's animal form before going through animagus training, there was no way to really control how it would change.

Well, that wasn't entirely true. He theorized that Skinwalking could be used to do it, but it would also come with some serious side effects. Nevermind how many people would have to be flayed and their skins worn to force a human animagus form. He never found anyone who was willing to actually do such a thing that he'd want to try it with. And he couldn't do it himself since he was already a raven animagus.

Luna went through the training as well after Pan was born, becoming a completely adorable overfluffed white bunny with very big blue eyes.

February 4th, 2022. Spellhaven.

Adrastia stared out the window of Harry's study, watching the man himself with his not-so-little family.

It was kind of like watching a troll that had been shoved into a tuxedo, so out of place he seemed to her as he roughhoused with his oldest five children, gently pushing them around while they tried to clamber all over him, giggling near constantly. His wives, mistresess and the younger children that weren't quite so mobile yet were spread around, either watching or playing in some other fashion. Even that ridiculous goat was there, acting as an impromptu pillow for the one she thought was named Pan. It was a scene of domestic bliss that you'd normally only see in overdone advertisements.

She supressed a sneer at the sound of the children laughing, the horrible little monsters. It would have completely baffled her how Harry could put up with them if she didn't know how often he used his Hyperbolic Time Chamber to escape. He would be older than her soon at the rate he was going.

But, credit where credit was due, he seemed to be doing a passable job as a parent even if his hands were better suited for killing than nurturing. Certainly, there were worse fathers out there who were not nearly as emotionally handicapped as him. Even if he did have to cheat outrageously to keep his patience from snapping.

It took another ten minutes before Harry deflected his children's attention towards the women in his life and made his way inside, finally. She had important news and just generally didn't appreciate being kept waiting.

She didn't turn around when he entered the room and merely smirked when he pressed himself against her back and gave a little bite to her ear.

"Feeling tense?" She teased, knowing that he would understand her meaning.

"I have no idea how anyone can be interested in the babbling of children, even their own." He sighed, clearly relieved to be able to show his true feelings.

"An exhausting pretense to be sure." She nodded with a grin and ground her rear end against his crotch. "So, what would you like first? Stress relief or information?"

He took a deep breath and spoke almost regretfully. "Information."

"I think I'm insulted." Adrastia laughed and groped his erection through his trousers, trying to entice him to change his mind.

"Later." Harry growled and she desisted.

"Very well then, which information would you like first? The regular update or the surprise?" She asked after they sat down.

"Hmm, let's save the surprise for last. How is the world plodding along?"

"The usual zombie shamble." Adrastia answered mockingly. "Your bullying and eliminations have crippled anyone openly advocating for the death or enslavement of wizardkind, but tensions aren't really settling down."

"Of course they aren't, not with multiple governments crammed into the same space." He grumbled and she nodded at his point.

Despite the years that had passed since the initial reveal of magic, the legal issues between the magical and mundane worlds weren't even close to being resolved. It wasn't helped by curious gawkers wandering around approximate locations of all-magical settlements like Hogsmeade in Scotland in an attempt to find some wizards and witches. Combined with the 'burn the witch!' crowd, it was rapidly exhausting the patience of even the most pro-interaction wizard.

The only bright spot of it was that the smarter people of mundane world, who were unfortunately a rather small minority, were starting to truly grasp why magic had been hidden for so long. Even if everything else was handled perfectly - and it wasn't - envy and fear would still be constant sources of friction. Humans remained petty and capricious creatures, for all that some thought themselves enlightened.

"The European Union is as good as dead, at this point the only reason is still exists is because disentagling each country's economy from the euro will take a while." She went on.

"Good riddance." He snorted.

"Yes, quite. Your scheme to push Islam out of Europe is largely the reason it happened so quickly. The issue was divisive enough to tear the EU apart. Now the movement to begin deporting immigrants, by force if necessary, is quickly gathering momentum and encountering stubborn, but futile, resistance from those your magic did not reach. They have sad photos of children behind barbed wire fences, Nazi comparisons and all the usual tripe."

Harry waved her on, clearly not interested in sentimentality. She always did like that about him.

"Christianity is still experiencing a slow revival due to the swell of hatred against Islam, but it does seem to be losing momentum."

His face gained a sour expression, clearly unhappy at the human propensity to resort to religion in difficult times, but he said nothing and gestured for her to go on.

"The pushback from the Middle East is also intensifying. As you might imagine, the accelerating expulsion of imams, destructions of mosques, the threat to their income from your push towards cleaner energy and now the possible deportation of their people is not to their liking."

"Maybe I should pay them a visit?" Harry mused, giving thoughtful glances to Bjomolf's axe hanging on the wall. "Teach them what happens when you meddle in the affairs of wizards."

"You could do that." Adrastia conceded with a smile, amused by the reference. "Of course, you might also start a few civil wars by doing so, which would almost certainly have both the United States and Russia sticking their fingers into the mess as they are prone to doing, possibly others as well."

"And I should care because…?" He prompted.

"Well, there would likely be even more people trying to flee the area if it is further destabilized."

"What good would that do them? Europe's borders are closed, nobody in the rest of Asia will have them and neither will the Americas or Australia."

Adrastia smiled amusedly, thinking of his ongoing effort to box the Muslims into what he called 'the quarantine zone', otherwise known as Africa and the Middle East.

"It wouldn't do them any good, obviously, that's beside the point. The point is that you should be wary of ratcheting up tensions any further. This age is not as prone to open war as the previous ones, but every situation has a breaking point. It may be wiser to bully them into silence than to kill them."

"Would a war be so bad?" He wondered, mostly to himself apparently. "Something actually serious like that would certainly wake people up a bit."

"Harry, I've told you this already." Adrastia sighed. "You won't be able to 'wake people up'. The rot has sunk too deep for anything short of a full societal collapse to get rid of it."

"I have to try." He said stubbornly, surging out of his seat and beginning to pace. "Nikola Tesla believed that in the 21st century most of a given nation's budget would be devoted to education, that fighting against ignorance would be the most glorious of pursuits, that newspaper headlines would be full of scientific discovery while crime and scandal was relegated to a footnote. Obviously he was wrong and optimistic to the point of delusion, but that vision is still something I can get behind, even if all I can do is keep the worthless chaff of humanity from holding back the exceptional."

She sighed again. Harry's fixation on the expansion of knowledge was admirable in many ways, but in this case it was making him reluctant to cut his losses.

"In anything resembling a democracy, the chaff eventually floats to the top." She told him. Again. "Let it all fall to ruin and salvage what you can from the ashes."

"That's Plan B. I want to see if mankind can push through the challenges ahead."

"Not without an identity it can't." Adrastia scoffed. "You may sneer at religion with good reason, but at least it makes for an obvious banner for people to rally around. You merely have to look at what kind of threat Islam was to see the truth of it. Had the people of the western nations still had a strong core of shared identity, the antics of the Muslims would never have been tolerated. Your efforts have helped somewhat, but the problem is much older and goes much deeper than magic can reach. Likewise, no amount of technological progress will help western civilization if it continues to descend into tribalism via ridiculous identity politics, which it will continue to do simply because it has had decades to gather momentum."

"Then what does it matter if I give it a try?"

Adrastia rolled her eyes, but didn't bother arguing any further. They had gone through this conversation a dozen times already, always circling back to Harry's uncharacteristic hope that he could somehow preserve a scientifically inclined society while the culture around it self-destructed.

"Fine then. On a related note, the feminists are once again trying to shut down your educational initiatives."

"Useless cunts." He scowled and threw himself back into his chair.

Adrastia chuckled, remembering the rather amusing incidents of the past few years. Some insignificant shrew of a woman had criticzed him for his lifestyle on one social media platform or another and it had gone 'viral' as it was called. When Laura had brought it to his attention during one of their talks, he had returned fire with a volley of positively corrosive comments that made it abundantly clear what he thought of said shrew and anyone who agreed with her. The feminist movement had hated him ever since and the vitriol was returned in spades.

Unlike the usual course of events when feminists picked a man to tear down, Harry was unassailable by their usual weapons - the court of public opinion and social pressure - so this was creating a lot of problems. All the more so because Harry was exactly the type of man feminism touted as being the root of all evil, and his open contempt for them combined with their self-righteousness was merely serving to confirm in their minds that they were justified in their views, so they continually escalated the conflict. Harry would have ignored them if they ignored him, but he was a spiteful sort and returned hostility with hostility.

The very public animosity between the most powerful social movement in the west and the most powerful man in the world had a severely polarizing effect. Feminism had already created a lot of division over the past few decades with its increasingly less subtle hostility towards men, but now those cracks were becoming chasms as neither side was willing to budge an inch.

In the current example, Harry had started financially supporting educational opportunities in the hard sciences, especially in the educationally expensive United States, for anyone who showed a particular aptitude for them. Feminists were trying to shut it down with the justification that it was anti-woman for favoring men, ignoring that women going into the hard sciences were a very small minority.

No doubt Harry would retaliate the same way he had in the past - by threatening to cut the supply of saronite if the government didn't shut them up. He might also use a few of his bought journalists to run a smear campaign for a while.

As one might imagine, the feminist movement had not become more reasonable over the past few years.

From Adrastia's point of view, all he was doing was accelerating the looming societal collapse, but Harry held out some kind of hope that mankind could outrun it if technology advanced fast enough. Foolish, but then, Harry wasn't a people person and at least he had a Plan B. There was even the small chance that he was right, although she didn't think so.

"Anything else?" Harry prompted.

"Well, China and Russia appear to be thinking of abandoning their efforts to entice wizards into their service in favor of focusing on negotiating better deals for your saronite."

"Hmm." Harry hummed thoughtfully. He had previously been unwilling to commit to any significant deals with those two due to their unclear intentions towards the magical world.

"Making it seem as if you favor them would all but force Europe, and the United States even more so, to bend further in order to secure their own supply." She said without being prompted. "They cannot risk being left behind technologically."

"I'll have to talk to their representatives and get a glimpse of their thoughts before deciding on anything."

Adrastia nodded approvingly. Being suspicious of politicians was always wise.

"What about the magical side of things?"

"Little change." She shrugged. "They are still slowly hemorrhaging people, power and influence due to your propaganda efforts and are not very happy about it. I would give it a few more years before you hit the wall of people that are simply not willing to move to Spellhaven for one reason or another. This does bring us to my surprise, however."

"Oh?"

"Yes, it seems that a league of wizards is forming in Venezuela who are intent on taking over the country by force."

Harry blinked in surprise and she smirked at him.

"Explain." He ordered.

"Venezuela is an economic disaster, to put it mildly, and this group of fired up young wizards thinks they could fix it. The one I caught in my web was most enthusiastic about it, explaining to me that most of them were newbloods that had been born in Venezuela and want to heal their country. They seem to mean well, but…"

"But they're not thinking of what it'll look like." Harry concluded. "This reeks of vampire meddling."

"It is certainly unlikely that Baranar would have missed such a thing brewing in his own backyard." Adrastia agreed. She had never personally met the South America-based master vampire, but she did know of him.

"What to do, what to do?" Harry muttered to himself.

"From what I can see you have four choices." Adrastia cut into his mumbling. "The first is of course to do nothing. A path of minimal risk to you personally, but it may have wider consequences in the future depending on how the situation unfolds."

"Doesn't seem wise." Harry frowned.

"It probably isn't." She agreed. "The second option is to eliminate them covertly. This would preserve the status quo in secret, but…"

"It'll be trouble if I'm detected and if this is a vampire plot of some sort, then I will be detected." He finished.

"Just so." Adrastia said with a smile. "The third option is to play world magic police and slap them down as soon as they succeed in their takeover, if they succeed. This would also preserve the status quo, but it would get you more bad press than good in the long run. I wouldn't recommend it."

"Not my style anyway." Harry said wryly.

"The final option is the most risky by far, but it also carries the greatest potential rewards." She went on. "If this is indeed Baranar's doing, then it would have taken many years of careful nudging to keep his hand hidden and events are now mostly beyond his control. He could not have predicted your creation of saronite. Use it as leverage to shield these ambitious upstarts and support them in their goals while I seduce them one by one. When the time comes, they can be made to swear fealty to you with little fuss."

"You're suggesting I usurp control of Venezuela?" Harry sounded amused.

"If there was ever a country ripe for it…" Adrastia trailed off with a shrug. Transitions of power were always the best times for a usurpation, especially when the country in question was unstable. Of course, he'd have to keep his control light if he wanted it to last, but she wouldn't get into that now.

"I suppose it would increase my influence." He said thoughtfully, no doubt already thinking of what he could do with a country the size of Venezuela under his thumb. "Although I'd probably have to seriously get myself declared king if I wanted to do that."

Adrastia smiled to herself, wondering if he realized that being a king and having control of two such diverse territories would make him an emperor by definition. Probably not.

June 11th, 2022. Unnamed island near Spellhaven.

Harry, his wives and his principal advisors all looked around at the newly created island with satisfaction. It wasn't as big or as forested as Spellhaven, but it was already green and spacious. Unlike with Spellhaven, they'd let other people shape it once the magma flow was started and it had come out nice and varied.

The decision had in the end been made to create the new island openly rather than hide it and try claiming Fidelius shenanigans or whatever as had been considered a few times. The pros and cons of showing off their power were deemed to be superior to the pros and cons of hiding it in this case.

"What are we going to call it?" Dora asked.

Harry had been pondering that very question since before they'd started raising it. In the end, the temptation to steal another name from a fictional setting was too much.

"Eldamar." He said with a grin.

"And where did you steal that from?" Fleur asked archly.

"Steal? Me?" Harry replied innocently.

"I like it." Luna said with a dreamy smile.

And so the second island of his realm got named. It didn't take the wider world long to suss out that he'd taken the name from Tolkien's mythology, the ancient elven homeland in Aman beyond the western sea to be exact. Oddly enough, the fondness for non-magical literature that this implied won him a few points. Of course, it also lost him a few from people saying that he was disrespecting Tolkien's work, but it would have been very strange if humanity as a whole ever completely agreed on anything.

This event was deemed the perfect time to get Harry declared a king in truth. He knew that he couldn't just declare himself king without looking narcissistic and power hungry, so Narcissa started working towards a propaganda initiative to make the idea bubble up from the general population.

Aurélie and her veela also helped in this, not just because they genuinely liked Harry, but also because having one of their own crowned a queen would be a huge deal for them.

Despite the reproductive frenzy being over, they still got a late surprise in the April of 2025, when Luna realized that she was pregnant again. After a little mental backtracking, she admitted to having forgotten about birth control. She gave birth to another son in October of the same year.

Her original choice of name had been Lorcan, but after she voiced this to Harry, he couldn't resist and suggested changing the spelling to Lorkhan. It got him much suspicion from Fleur and Dora, and he took much amusement in not telling them that he had lifted the name from the Elder Scrolls games.

They got another, much bigger surprise at the actual birth, when Lorkhan came out with dark brown eyes and brown hair, features that neither Harry nor Luna had. After some Blood Magic relation testing, it was determined that, to her eternal embarrassment, Dora was actually the father.

Nobody ever let her live it down.

This did unfortunately also mean that Lorkhan was born with no magical talents, not even his 'father's' metamorph power, as that one was far more likely to be passed down matrilinealy than patrilinealy.

This time, Harry did put the brakes on Fleur's knee-jerk reaction to another baby. The last thing he wanted was for Luna to get any ideas about 'evening out' the number of children they had.

Fatherhood was something of a mixed success for him. He was good at it from a technical perspective and capable of being a 'fun' dad, but it was only his ability to escape into the solitude of a temporally dilated room when he felt his nerves fray that kept him from becoming snappish or irritable with them when he wanted to do something else. As a result, he was almost forty years old when he should have been twenty-five, but with the Elixir of Life that was a non-issue.

It was the emotional parts that gave him trouble. He did love them, but he just didn't know how to relate to them. They were young and fragile in ways he couldn't remember being, if he had ever even had a chance to be. Many, many times he had to bite his tongue to keep from saying something that would sound callous to an adult, much less a child.

The girls fortunately understood and worked around the problem. He took the role of the strict parent with a sense of relief and left them to be the sympathetic ones.

December 27th, 2026. Spellhaven.

Victoire glared up at him, sky-blue eyes shining with angry tears and pouty lower lip trembling with emotion.

"It's not fair!" She yelled at him, stomping her foot.

"How is it not fair?" Harry asked, a hint of mockery in his tone that he didn't quite manage to suppress.

"Ili and Ari got more presents than me." The little veela explained, using the nicknames for her younger two veela sisters.

"Because they both have birthdays around this time." He countered. "You'll notice than none of your other siblings got extra presents either."

Victoire obviously didn't have a good comeback for that, but she was an angry little princess and too upset to care about salient facts like that.

"It's still not fair." She insisted.

"Yes it is." Harry deadpanned.

"Is not."

"Is too."

"is not!"

"Is too."

"IS NOT!" She yelled back at him, now openly crying from sheer frustration.

"Being louder won't make you right." Harry said unsympathetically, completely unimpressed by the temper tantrum.

"I hate you!" Victoire sobbed, turning her back on him.

"That doesn't make you right either." He deadpanned again, this time complete with eyeroll. "But I won't bother you anymore if that's how you feel."

Harry turned around and started walking out of the room, mentally going through a countdown.

He had barely reached four when a miniature blond missile hit his leg and hung on for dear life.

"I thought you hated me?" Harry asked archly.

"I'm sorry, Daddy." His troublesome veela daughter mumbled.

"Mind your words, Vicky. You can't ever take them back." He scolded gently and patted her head, feeling a tinge hypocritical. "And you still have to apologize to your sisters for trying to take their presents."

"Okay." Victoire mumbled again.

"Good." Harry said and picked her up. "Oof, you're getting way too big to carry around like this."

"Am not." She protested.

"Are too."

"Am not."

"Are too."

"Am not!"

May 10th, 2027. British Ministry of Magic, Minister's Office.

Amelia Bones wasn't looking too good. She was thinner than he remembered and appeared far more tired. Older, too.

"You look like shit, Amelia." Harry said bluntly.

The Minister of Magic glared at him.

"Maybe I'd look better if you weren't constantly causing me trouble." She bit out.

"That's a lie and you know it." He replied, amused.

"Yeah, it probably is." Amelia slumped. "I'm at my wits end over here. The muggles keep trying to push their laws onto us, their banks are slowly taking over our economy, the goblins are pissed at the loss of business, not to mention mortally offended at the idea of digital currency, the purebloods are pissed at the loss of power and you're snatching away most of the muggleborns and a good chunk of our younger population as well on top of it, making the whole thing even worse. We can't keep this up for much longer."

"Why don't you just hand the whole thing over to me?" He asked directly.

She glared at him again. "Even if I could, I haven't been hearing a lot of nice things about you lately."

"What do you expect? I'm a Dark Lord." Harry shrugged.

The blasé reply left her stunned. "What?"

He smiled at her amusedly. "Amelia, I have bribed, manipulated, threatened, bullied, extorted, killed, tortured, murdered and mentally violated people to get my way. I have cast wide-area hate-attracting curses to make things happen according to my design that have, as a side effect, caused the deaths and suffering of many thousands, which I consider to be perfectly acceptable because those people are either irrelevant or actively in the way of my plans . I have my own territory and my own minions. I am a Dark Lord by most definitions even if my end goals are somewhat unorthodox."

And that wasn't even the full list. As predicted, there were many, many people that weren't happy with the idea of a room-temperature superconductor changing the world that was making them rich. Powerful people.

Over the past few years, Harry had faced countless assassination attempts and efforts to disrupt his plans from these people. He had retaliated by using the Palantíri to plague their dreams with horrible nightmares, possessing modified wasps whose weak venom had been replaced with deadly neurotoxin to assassinate them, stealing blood and hair samples to replace their REM sleep phase with terrifying visions that drove them insane, used well-timed confounding spells to make them have 'accidents' and more.

When people talked about conspiray theories these days, his name was right up there with the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Or, to be more accurate, it had replaced them, since members of those two families and others had been among those trying to get in his way and been wiped out as a result.

The Minister of Magic got her composure back and simply stared at him. She didn't even go for her wand, either because she felt safe enough or because she knew it would be futile.

"And you want me to hand Wizarding Britain over to you?" She asked blandly.

"What kind of adjective is 'wizarding' anyway?" Harry grumbled. "Well, nevermind idiotic naming conventions right now. Yes, I want you to hand it all over to me."

"Why should I?"

"Because I'm the only one that has enough clout to save Wizarding Britain." He replied, putting a mocking twist on 'wizarding'.

Amelia slumped again and pulled out a bottle of Firewhiskey and a glass.

"I knew you were trouble from the moment I first laid eyes on you." She said after taking a drink.

"Good instincts." Harry grinned.

"So, what are these 'unorthodox goals' of yours?" She asked after a solid minute of silence.

"Protect and spread magic across the world, support mankind's pursuit of knowledge, do my best to contain the innate stupidity of our species." He answered without hesitation.

"What if I refuse?" Amelia asked after another lengthy pause.

Harry shrugged. "Then I leave and focus my attention on other projects. I'm not Voldemort or Grindelwald, I'm not going to use open force to try subjugating anyone. I'll just wait until you exhaust yourself butting heads with the mundanes some more before coming back and asking again."

"Is that how you did it in Venezuela?" Amelia asked with a pinched expression.

Harry grinned at her again. "All I did in Venezuela was help a few hotblooded young idealists by keeping the international heat off their backs."

That it was an open secret that the current mixed magical/mundane Venezuelan government took orders from him and that he was sometimes called 'The Black Emperor', scornfully or otherwise, as a result was left unmentioned. His hold on the South American country was maintained through a combination of debt, continued reliance on his protection and Adrastia's vagina trap.

Digging the place out of the hole it was in remained an ongoing project, but quite a bit of progress had already been made. Things had been very, very tense for a while there. His threats, bribes and the occasional personal visit had kept outsiders from sticking their nose in and the Raven Host had helped pacify local resistance. Both were in fact still being used to keep a lid on things, with the Raven Host serving the secondary goal of keeping a gimlet eye on the new administration and its actions, but the steadily improving conditions were serving to cool things down and generate some actual support.

Nevertheless, the country was still far from stable and only constant vigilance for anyone looking to rally the people into doing something stupid prevented disaster. Several had already needed to be discretely disposed of. The corruption there ran deep and there was no shortage of power hungry cunts thinking to exploit the situation for their own benefit, just like he'd done except more clumsily.

The previously mentioned secret war he was waging against the old order was also a concern, even if most of his enemies on that front had been killed, crippled, driven to gibbering insanity or terrified into inaction by this point.

"Right." Amelia scoffed sarcastically.

"So what is it going to be?" Harry asked with a cheeky grin. "Are you going to help me take over the magical world, or should I come back in a couple of years?"

Amelia glared at him again, undoubtedly not appreciating his jaunty tone.

November 22nd, 2029. Spellhaven.

Harry kept the grin off his face as Xena unwrapped her birthday present. He had been waiting for this for years.

He heard Dora facepalm and groan as it was revealed.

"What is it?" Xena asked, clearly perplexed by the circular object.

"It's a chakram." Harry explained, using all his skill with Occlumency to keep the shit-eating grin off his face. "Try throwing it like a frisbee."

Xena looked at him dubiously but did as he asked and tossed the chakram out.

It flew across the courtyard as if thrown by a master, bouncing off stones and trees until it finally buried itself into the dirt.

"Wow…" Several of the kids said with shiny eyes.

Several of the adults gave Harry pointed looks of disapproval that he promptly ignored.

"Hold out your hand and will it to return." He said.

Xena did so, this time eagerly rather than dubiously. The chakram flew back into her hand.

"This is so cool!" Xena enthused and for a moment it looked like she would run off to play with her new toay, but then she ran to give Harry a tight hug. "Thanks. Dad!"

"I'm glad you like it." He grinned. "Now go ahead and play with it."

"What the hell, Harry?" Dora demanded once all the children had run out of hearing range. "She could hurt someone, or herself, with that thing!"

"Nah." Harry denied casually. "Training chakram, instantly loses momentum if it hits skin."

The tinkling of broken glass precluded any further conversation and everyone still present turned their gazes on him.

"Ah, I forgot about the glass?" He said, smiling sheepishly.

April 7th, 2031. Spellhaven, Cháteau Black.

Harry stalked invisibly behind his triplet sons as they tiptoed towards the library in the middle of the night. It was kind of funny how they thought they were being stealthy.

"I've got a bad feeling about this." Valerious murmured.

"You worry too much." Antarius was quick to retort. "It'll be fine."

Marius said nothing. He had always been the most quiet and thoughtful of the three.

Harry continued to follow them as they entered the library and went right past the safe sections and towards the restricted one, the silly brats.

Not that he could throw stones seeing as he'd done the same thing at an even younger age.

They browsed the shelves for a time before eventually settling on what Harry recognized as a text on some relatively obscure ritualistic magic.

He left them to it for about five minutes, then he walked up behind them and clapped his hands on their shoulders.

"BOO!" Harry announced his presence.

The triplets shrieked in fear and toppled the desk in their haste to get away.

Harry fired a tripping jinx their way before they could stampede out of the library, sending them crashing to the ground in a tangle of limbs.

They looked at him with terrified eyes and hair that had gone white in response to their emotions as he stepped out of the darkness.

"Dad!" They cried in unison, their tones a mixture of shock, anger and relief.

"Yes, Dad." Harry deadpanned. "What the hell do you think you're doing, boys?"

"Studying?" Antarius squeaked out in the form of a question.

"On the proper way to turn body fat into tallow for ritual purposes?" Harry asked archly after glancing at the book on the ground.

"We weren't going to actually do it or anything." Valerious piped up.

"Yeah, we were just curious." Marius finished.

"Hello, curious one, two and three. I'm Dad." Harry mocked with a smirk.

Seeing his sons facepalm and groan at the terrible joke was one of the better parts of parenting.

"How much trouble are we in?" Antarius asked with resignation.

"Honestly, I'm more upset that you're here because you bragged to your friends about all the dark magic you know and now you're here because they called your bluff and you feel that you have to live up to your boasting."

The sight of blushing metamorphmagi was really quite something. They turned redder than humanly possible.

"In any case, if you wanted to learn the Dark Arts, you just had to ask." He told them, much to their obvious shock.

Harry grinned. Dora would be upset about it, but it was better that they learn from him than on their own. They didn't have the disposition for the really heavy stuff anyway.

January 9th, 2033. Spellhaven, Cháteau Black.

There was a chest in the middle of their room. A chest with a card on it.

Harry exchanged confused glances with his wives before shrugging and snatching the card and opening it.

"'I heard your sex slave retired, so I thought you might appreciate this.'" He read aloud. "'Love, Adrastia.'"

That was true, Septima had retired from being his mistress recently, citing her advancing age and the increasingly more awkward questions of her teenaged son. Harry had been sad to let her go, but understood. Nothing doused the libido quite like explaining to one's offspring how you got that limp or those bruises.

"Please tell me she didn't." Dora groaned.

"Only one way to find out." Fleur said with a shrug and opened the chest.

The contents were both surprising and not surprising. The unsurprising part was that there was a woman in there, the surprising part was that her hands were bound to the underside of the chest, so when it was opened she was pulled up and fully displayed to them like some kind of jack-in-the-box. She was mostly naked, except for the bindings on her wrists and a leather collar around her throat that connected to a nipple chain.

"Hmm, not bad." The girl was quite beautiful and well put together. Latina ancestry, black hair, alluring dark eyes, early twenties, slim figure with very nice breasts and an even nicer arse. She also had some rather interesting tattoos that gave her an even more exotic look. "Not bad at all."

The girl squirmed and made some noises around the red ballgag in her mouth, making the chain connecting the ring piercings in her nipples clink.

"There's another note here." Luna said, snatching it from the underside of the chest lid. "'I know you like breaking them in yourself, but this one immediately made me think of you'. That's really nice of her."

"Yes, nice." Harry drawled, amused. He rather suspected that this was done to deflect any possibility that he might start targeting Adrastia herself with such play. "Terribly rude though. Hasn't anyone ever told her that gifting people with pets just isn't done?

The girl gave him a wide-eyed stare that was all fear and lust.

"It's times like this that I look back on the days when we were dating and wonder how I didn't notice the signs." Dora shook her head in exasperation and started undoing the 'present's' restraints.

"I was really enthusiastic about licking pussy?" Harry offered with a grin.

She huffed, but didn't contradict him.

The new arrival soon had the ballgag removed and her hands freed, so she carefully stepped out of the magically expanded chest and stood in front of him as if waiting to be inspected.

"What's your name?" Luna asked innocently.

The girl glanced at Luna uncertainly and then looked to Harry with an obvious question in her eyes.

"I don't think she has one yet." He smirked, going with a hunch. "Do you, pet?"

"No, Master." She replied with a shuddery voice. It could have been mistaken for fear, but Harry could hear the desire in it.

An obvious lie. A little Legilimency revealed that her name was Sofia and she was from Brazil, but she had a BDSM kink way worse than Septima and got a thrill at the thought of being so completely owned by a powerful man that even her name would be changed according to his whims. She had jumped at the offer of becoming his sub and was in fact nearly creaming herself just from being in his presence.

Adrastia must have invested quite a bit of effort into finding her. Perverts of this caliber didn't grow on trees after all, especially beautiful ones.

"Can I name her?" Luna asked excitedly, as if they'd just gotten a new puppy.

"No, she'll have to earn it." Harry denied, fighting down a grin when his new toy squirmed in place, obviously eager to start doing just that. This one would definitely be fun.

"Just… go find her a room." Dora sighed, rubbing a hand over her face.

"Too bad she's not a witch." Fleur muttered once Harry had taken his new pet out the door.

April 19th, 2034. Spellhaven.

"Daddy, are you in here?"

Harry took his attention off the document he'd been reading over and looked at the door of his study, which was partially open and had two silver-haired heads poking through.

"Obviously." He drawled dryly.

Iliana and Arienne giggled before answering. "You promised we'd have a water fight today."

Harry winced. He had indeed promised that. Between his constant visists to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber and the sheer amount of work he had to do, it had slipped his mind. Still, he was the goddamn king and could clear an afternoon if he wanted to. Besides, his wives would be very upset with him if he didn't keep the promises he made to their children and that was significantly worse than whatever might happen if he put off his work for a few hours.

"So I did." He acknowledged. "Are the others all ready."

"Yep, we're just waiting for you." Iliana chirped.

"Alright, let's go then." He said and got up from behind his desk.

"Yay!" The two veela cheered and burst into the study to grab hold of a hand each.

Harry rolled his eyes above their heads when he saw that they were wearing some extremely skimpy swimwear. He wasn't sure if they were doing it on purpose, but they had been showing themselves off to him ever since they hit puberty. Victoire had been doing the same thing, although she had toned it down a bit lately.

Ah well, that was the price you paid for having veela daughters when you were powerful. It was fine as long as they didn't try to actively seduce him. That would be… awkward. Not so much because Harry was uncomfortable with the quirks of the veela and their alternative sense of morality with regards to sex, but because he didn't need the PR headache since most people were incapable of truly wrapping their heads around it. Plus, siring generations of his own veela granddaughters would get confusing in a hurry.

August 3rd, 2034. Spellhaven.

Harry stared at his children, at a loss as to what he should say.

"How long has this been going on?" He finally asked.

Antarius, Marius, Valerious and Victoire squirmed nervously.

"Well?" Harry prompted.

"About a year." Valerious finally admitted.

Harry rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. What the hell do you say when you learn that your sons have been gangbanging your daughter behind your back? His five eldest had always been close and the triplets shared just about everything between them, so he probably should have been paying more attention given that Victoire was a veela, but seriously! The little buggers had even been careful to only do it when he was busy elsewhere and after putting up loads of privacy spells. He only learned about it because they slipped up.

It explained why Victoire had calmed down a little though.

"You technically didn't do anything wrong given that Vicky is a veela." He finally said, glaring at them to make sure they understood just what he thought about that technicality. "And you're old enough to be making your own decisions…"

"Really?" Victoire apparently didn't catch his tone, because she squealed happily and draped herself over his neck in a way that would be considered extremely inappropriate for a father-daughter relationship if she wasn't a veela.

" But…" He continued after setting the girl down. "I really would rather not deal with the shitstorm that would result if it got out that four of my not-quite fifteen-year-old children are in a pseudo-incestuous relationship. Are there any actual feelings involved in this, or is it just fucking?"

They started squirming again and Harry fought down an amused grin. He'd stopped censoring his profanity around them a while ago and seeing how uncomfortable the bluntness made them was always funny.

"It's just sex, Daddy." Victoire said, looking at him earnestly. "They're my brothers."

Harry snorted at the veela logic.

"Fine then. It's not my place to tell you how to live your lives, but do your old man a favor and keep it private, hmm? And don't tell anyone what you're doing for fuck's sake."

They were quick to agree, no doubt relieved to have gotten out of this without a punishment. Troublesome brats.

June 24th, 2036. Spellhaven.

It was the day of the midsummer festival on Spellhaven and Xena had brought home a boyfriend.

He seemed a decent sort. Polite, handsome, intelligent, reasonably powerful. His daughter knew what she was worth and who was beneath her. He had also thoroughly investigated the boy before Xena had brought him home.

"I expect to see her smiling." Harry said stonily, punctuating his words with the scrape of the sharpening stone over the edge of Bjomolf's axe. Completely unnecessary with its enchantments, but that wasn't the point. He'd never actually gotten to use it for its intended purpose, but it was perfect for intimidating boyfriends.

"Yes, sir." The boyfriend in question managed to stammer after swallowing thickly.

"Good, be on your way then." He nodded. "I'll see you later."

Xena gave him an exasperated look and kissed him on the cheek before leaving with her very nervous date.

Harry sighed once they were gone. He was over sixty years old, it had been approximately thirty-five years for him since Xena had been born, just under seventeen years ago now, but it still felt so fast.

"Harry, I just saw-" Dora's perplexed sentence was cut off when she walked into the sitting room and noticed his 'accessory'.

"You didn't." She finished flatly.

"I had to." Harry defended with a grin. He knew perfectly damn well that Xena could take care of herself and he trusted her to do so, but how was he supposed to pass up an opportunity to threaten someone with an axe?

March 15th, 2038. Mount Olympus, Greece.

When Pan was asked what he wanted for his seventeenth birthday 'to climb Mount Olympus and scatter Betsy's ashes on top of it' had not been one of the expected answers, yet here they were, climbing Mount Olympus with the ashes of their recently deceased pet goat in tow. Pan had loved that goat, fortunately not in the way that a goat loves another goat.

They could have flown to the top, but Pan wanted to make the journey on foot.

They could have used the proper path, but nope, Pan wanted to get up there goat style.

Harry blamed it on his animagus form. Of course a mountain goat would want to climb mountains.

But it was such a Luna thing to do that he couldn't help but smile, even if it was nerve-wracking as hell watching his boy hoof it up the bare rocks, wondering if he'd be fast enough with a levitation charm to catch him if he fell.

"Come on, Harry. He's getting too far ahead." Luna called happily, clambering after the boy she'd birthed with the occasional bit of help from her ability to fly. She wasn't a goat after all.

Harry looked at the goat that was his son, shook his head and resumed climbing after him. He could hardly complain when this entire situation was basically his own fault. Talk about unintended consequences.

March 1st, 2040. Spellhaven.

Harry watched with pride as his son used Will Manifestation to levitate three stones at the same time.

"Alright, that's enough. Take a break." He said.

The stones fell to the ground and the fourteen-year-old boy's eyes snapped open.

"But I can keep going." Lorkhan insisted despite the sheen of sweat on his brow.

"You'll hurt yourself if you push too hard." Harry warned. "You're already progressing faster than your siblings did."

Lorkhan's chest puffed out proudly, much to Harry's amusement. His youngest son, though sharing none of his blood or gifts, was the most talented of all his siblings where magic was concerned. Or perhaps he was simply the most driven to prove himself for exactly that reason.

The triplets were satisfied with their powers which, although still far beyond average, were not the stuff of legend. All of his veela daughters were also impressive examples of their kind, but no more than that. Xena was a fierce one, but in defiance of her name, she had taken an interest in healing more than fighting. Pan did live up to his name and seemed to have inherited his birth mother's fondness of animals and nature, as well as some of her quirky attitude, so his magic was heavily geared in that direction.

Lorkhan was the only one of them who seemed interested in really pushing the boundaries of his powers.

Harry tried not to play favorites, but he couldn't deny that he was especially fond of his youngest.

July 12th, 2050. Ravenhead, The Seeing Seat.

Over the past decades, Harry had kept on making more Palantíri at a fairly regular basis and now had at least one in every major population center in the world. They were an excellent tool for determining the overall mood of the people living there, and for focusing in on particular people that he was familiar with.

He was currently using it to spy on the world.

Most of Africa was irrelevant in the larger picture, but he looked in on them anyway. The mood was desperate, violent, angry… Too many people causing too many problems, many of which had no good solutions and nobody to implement them.

The Middle East could best be described as 'twitchy'. Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran all had nuclear weapons now and were just waiting for an excuse to use them. Fucking morons. The only thing stopping them so far had been the certain knowledge that it would only take one to end humanity, but even that felt like a fraying restraint. The changes that had happened in the last thirty years had not been kind to the Middle East and they felt cornered. Harry had done some of the cornering himself.

The same feeling sparked between India and Pakistan. Also nuclear nations, the two had hated each other for a long time already now. Pakistan was experiencing a brutal drought that hadn't let up for nigh on a decade. Their people were starving and they were getting desperate.

The rest of the world was supposed to be more stable, but it really wasn't. All the more advanced nations of the world were suffering from a general sense of malaise and undergoing a demographic collapse.

Contrary to Harry's hopes, the advancement of technology that his creation of a room-temperature superconductor had allowed didn't fix anything. In fact, it may have just made things worse. Better computers had been made, nuclear fusion had been figured out, a manned mission to Mars was undertaken and many other such milestones, yet it fixed nothing. He had murdered so many obstructionist people for nothing in the end.

It was a perfect example of John B. Calhoun's 'behavioral sink' experiment, which he had first heard about in Bjomolf's Folder of Doom. That man had used rats to prove that having too many individuals in an otherwise utopic setting, with a too high factor of social interaction, led to abberant behaviors and now it was happening with humans. It was enough to make him think that mankind simply wasn't capable of amounting to any more than this.

And that wasn't even close to being the end of it

For thirty years, Harry had used vast flocks of ravens to plant entire forests of trees all over the world, he had invented a non-flammable, heat-reacting, self-replicating slime that decomposed into a nutrient soup if it cooled below a certain temperature which could be used to snuff out wildfires, he had sent out wizards to clean up pollution and generally thrown his weight around to slow down the destruction of the environment, but it was all for naught. The ecosystem had been dealt a death blow before he'd even started. Today, the oceans were nearly empty, land species were going extinct at a phenomenal rate, deserts were spreading, food was getting harder to grow and it had been years since the North Pole had any ice in it over the summer months. The rising global temperatures had the unfortunate knock on effect of forcing people to migrate away from coastal areas as the sea level rose, which was making the societal problems exponentially worse.

His great experiment in Venezuela had also been a failure. Fear, envy and resentment had forced him to abandon it and now it was back to being a shithole.

It was a common theme actually. As time went on, mundane people simply grew increasingly more resentful and jealous of the magical, forcing wizards and witches to retreat ever further away.

There were now four islands in his realm and the whole thing had been named the Sorcerer Kingdom of Myth Drannor, because Harry never stopped being amused by stealing fictional names.

These four islands now hosted more than 90% of the world's magical population, close to half a million people, and, to his great concern, wizards and witches were also showing the first signs of slipping into the behavioral sink because of this social density. They needed more space than this, but it just wasn't safe for magicals outside of Myth Drannor.

Another unfortunate event had been the reveal that he had a Philosopher's Stone. There was no great betrayal or spy effort that spread this knowledge out into the world. People had merely noticed that he knew quite a lot about alchemy, took a look at how very young he and his wives all still looked and put things together. He had tried to deny it, but it had become true in people's minds and it no longer mattered what he said about it.

So, with the third world on the verge of escalating their wars to the nuclear level, the first world steadily descending into depravity worthy of the pre-Fall Eldar and everyone looking towards his lands with covetous eyes, what was a king to do? He had to protect his people at all costs. He had to save what could still be saved, what was still worth saving.

Harry took his hands away from the Palantir and sighed in defeat.

He'd tried. How sad it was that that was the only thing he could say given what he was now planning to do, but he wasn't a god. Some things were simply beyond him.

A few hours later, Harry was sitting with his wives and looking over at his family. They didn't gather in full often anymore, their children having grown up and carved out their own lives.

Narcissa and Septima were there as well, along with the children he'd given them. Both had grey in their hair now, but the true ravages of age hadn't touched them quite yet.

Octis and Calypso had brought their spouses and children, and veela mistress in Calypso's case.

Andromeda, Ted, Apolline, Sebastian Gabrielle and Aurélie were also present, their obviously advancing age a painful sight for Dora and Fleur. His wives had asked that he offer them the Elixir of Life and he had caved to their pleas. To his relief and their grief, they had all declined it.

There was only one possible outcome to using the Elixir of Life where family was concerned. The Flamels had dodged it by not having children, but the very large Black family wouldn't be so fortunate. He had made his peace with the inevitable and he had a feeling that so had Luna, but Dora and Fleur hadn't. That was another tragedy waiting to happen in the future. He had managed to protect his family from all the obvious threats, but there was nothing he could do against the unstoppable march of time.

Harry turned his eyes towards his children.

His triplet sons mimicked their father in stature and appearance most of the time, but they were far more playful. Their habit of sharing women - and sometimes men, because metamorphmagi - kept them bachelors, but at least they'd stopped fucking their sister.

Victoire had snagged herself a married couple and had two daughters of her own now, both of which were peeking out from the skirt of her dress with a look that said they'd like nothing better than to climb into their grandpa's lap. Typical veela, in other words.

Xena was the only other of their children to have married. Not to the boy he'd threatened with Bjomolf's axe so long ago, but another one. They had no children just yet, but they were trying for them.

Iliana and Arienne weren't much for settling down, preferring to flitter from place to place and lover to lover, but they did each have a daughter of their own nonetheless.

Pan was more interested in climbing mountains as a goat and going on expeditions than women. In fact Harry suspected that being a prince was not for him and that he was simply far more comfortable around things with horns and hooves.

Lorkhan also showed little interest in women, much to the frustration of all the ones chasing him. He was short and unassuming in appearance, but the most powerful of their children by far, rivaling his mothers in strength. He was determined to eventually surpass his father, something that Harry was gladly helping him with, but privately doubted he would achieve.

He didn't have all the cheatsy shit going for him after all, not to mention that Harry hadn't stopped growing either.

"Dad, what's going on?" Antarius finally asked, breaking Harry out of his wool-gathering. "Why did you call us all here?"

Harry took a deep breath. "You all know what it's like out there." He said, referring to the world outside Myth Drannor.

"Bad." Lorkhan summed up in a single word.

"Yes, bad." He nodded. "Bad enough that I can't justify waiting any longer. I am initiating Plan B tomorrow."

A palpable feeling of shock went through the crowd, frightening the veela children present. Dora and Fleur tightened their hold on his hands. They didn't like it, but the past few decades had robbed them of any optimism they might have once had for the world's future.

"Is that really necessary?" Xena asked hesitantly. "Surely it can't be that bad."

"It is." Lorkhan replied before Harry could. "Don't shut your eyes to the truth just because it's ugly."

"Enough." Harry said, preventing the blunt statement from sparking an argument. "I've been keeping an eye on the world for decades and I've delayed making this decision as much as possible. Waiting any longer could have disastrous consequences. I've made my decision and it is final."

Not everyone agreed with him, but they knew better than to argue.

July 13th, 2050. Ravenhead Spire.

Harry gave the Arcane Resonator on top of his tower one final inspection before nodding in satisfaction.

It was one of his more impressive achievements, for all that it's purpose was rather simple. A large solar focusing crystal designed to draw power from the Sun and funnel it into a vast network of interconnected, smaller solar crystals filled with liquid magic.

His sons and the Raven Host had spent years planting rods with such crystals in hidden locations all over the world in the event that this course of action would become necessary.

It took a week for the Arcane Resonator to gather enough power, even in the endless daylight of a summer in the Arctic Circle.

Once it was done, on the 20th of July, Harry brought a special guest to the top of his tower.

"Why did you bring me here, Potter?!" Bellatrix spat, struggling to get out of his grip. Although where she thought she could go since they were floating above Ravenhead on his Disc escaped him.

She was an old woman now, almost eighty with hair that was mostly grey, but she hadn't lost any of her viciousness. Indeed, her long imprisonment and constant magic drain had made her more so. The unfading Dark Mark gave her something to cling to.

"Actually, It's Harry Black these days." Harry said conversationally. "I don't think I ever told you that."

"You dare?" She shrieked furiously. "You dare take my family's name for your own?!"

"I dare a lot of things." He replied and ripped her clothes off in a single move.

She let out a wordless sound of rage and tried to use her nails to tear him to shreds, but Harry easily grabbed her wrists and kept her still. Then he caught her eyes and with a quick Legilimency attack, pushed all the information about what had happened to her beloved master, their cause, the Black family and everything else he could think of that would infuriate her into her head.

Bellatrix was stunned for a moment, but the rage returned quickly enough, orders of magnitude greater.

Harry gave her a hard shove off the Disc when he saw the hate brewing in her eyes.

She screamed her fury all the way down, until the spiked top of the Arcane Resonator burst through her chest.

The crystal was designed to drink in outbursts of magic and such a death gave off quite a lot of it. Bellatrix's deathrattle was transmitted all across the world, to the many hundreds of crystals designed to receive the power.

But, as he had learned a long time ago, magic so charged with the last gasps of life, full of desperation, rage and hate, could not be contained in a physical medium. All the crystals exploded, releasing the gathered Light magic that was magnified a hundred fold by the liquid magic stored inside them, causing massive, powerful bursts of magic to cover the entire world.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Harry quoted to himself mockingly.

A pulse of magic that powerful would easily disable all technology it came into contact with. With their complex transporation infrastructure gone, the mundanes would starve by the billions. The old nuclear fission power plants would go into critical meltdown without their cooling systems or backups. Cities would become deathtraps and boneyards, breeding grounds for the darkest impulses of the human soul.

But it wouldn't all be horrible. The magical saturation would make life stronger, more able to survive and adapt in the harsher environmental conditions that human greed had created. It would wipe away the dark taint in the lands once occupied by cultures that practiced ritual human sacrifice. True, there would be a small taint of Bellatrix's own hatred in each pulse of magic, but it had been dispersed across the world, so it would be minor. The extra viciousness it would create in the newborn magical species might even be beneficial. Even first-generation magi would become much more common, in what scattered non-magical communities would manage to survive that was.

Harry hadn't wanted to do this, had done everything he could think of to derail humanity from the self-destructive path it seemed determined to take, but sometimes you had to admit defeat. He had sacrificed many things for his love of magic over the years, both of himself and of others. This was merely another sacrifice.

July 22nd, 2050. Vienna.

Harry stood on the roof of the tall building that gave him a great view of the city. It was burning and there was chaos in the streets. Murder, rape and terror was rampant. Quite horrible really, and it had only been two days. Hardly surprising though, given that large cities could optimistically only store about three days worth of food.

A familiar sensation tickled at his senses.

"I see you survived." He said to the shadows. "I wasn't sure you would."

"Quite a few of us didn't." Bjomolf said conversationally, walking up to stand beside him. "What a nasty surprise you sprung on us, but my decision to sleep deep underground was vindicated."

They lapsed into silence for several minutes, just watching the madness unfolding below.

"I wanted to save them." Harry eventually said, genuinely regretful. "I wanted them to keep learning, to explore the universe and unravel its mysteries. That way, even if I could never leave this world myself, I could still see beyond it."

"It was a good try." Bjomolf's tone was almost consoling. "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."

"You know, I often wondered over the years why you never really got in my way. I suppose you knew I was just pissing in the wind?"

He really had wondered about that. Every so often, something would happen that he was pretty sure had strings attached to vampire fingers, but never was it anything that would really get in the way of his own plans. Sometimes it would even help. Ophelia's little cult was the most open vampire plot and it had actually increased societal cohesion for a while… until she suddenly vanished a few years ago and her following went crazy.

"We were curious to see if you would succeed, but we didn't really expect you to." Bjomolf admitted.

They lapsed into silence again, this time for nearly a whole hour. Neither one of them was in a rush.

"What are you going to do now?" The vampire eventually asked.

Harry's expression hardened slightly. "Mankind can never again be allowed to claim unchallenged dominion over the world. I'm going to fill the seas with leviathan monsters and cover the land in dark forests full of claws and teeth. I will make people relearn what it means to fight for the right to live."

"I like it." Bjomolf declared with a grin. "I don't suppose I could have my axe back? It sounds like I might need it."

Harry wordlessly reached into the inside of his coat and pulled out an axe, but not the one the vampire had gifted to him so long ago. This one also had a long beard with a sharp curve, but it was slightly thicker and had several vicious backspikes. It's most notable feature, however, were the series of holes notched in the head near the end of the haft.

"Oh my, now that is a beauty." Bjomolf said admiringly, taking the axe in his hands. "Where did you find such a thing?"

"Spellforged it myself." Harry answered, smiling at the vampire's appreciation of his craft. "Its name is Gorehowl."

"Now why does that sound familiar?" Bjomolf smirked, experimentally swinging the axe and showing no surprise when the air whistling through the holes in the head made a loud howling noise. "Does this most wonderful gift mean that you aren't interested in incinerating the vampire species anymore?"

"Yeah, I stopped being pissed at you a long time ago. Besides, it would be a shame to wipe out another magical species when humanity is in such dire need of predators."

"Well then, I suppose I should go do some predating." The vampire grinned, obviously preparing to jump off the roof. "Thank you for the gift, my Brother in Darkness. Until we next meet."

Harry leaned over the edge, unsurprised when he couldn't find any trace of the vampire. It was just too obvious of a cliché to miss.

With one last glance at the horrors of post-apocalyptic Vienna, he activated his home portkey. There was a lot of work to be done, but for the first time in decades it didn't feel as if he was trying to drain the oceans with a teaspoon.

February 27th, 2389. Spellhaven.

Luna held on to Harry's hand as they watched Fleur and Nymphadora's funeral pyres burn. Lorkhan stood at their side.

It was just the three of them now, all their other friends and family were gone. Well, there were still descendants, great-great-great-great-great grandchildren and such, but they didn't really know each other too well.

They had tried to keep all their children alive with the Elixir of Life, but then came their children and their children's children. Something had needed to give and it eventually did, collapsing the entire thing like a house of cards.

Harry had become a powerful necromancer over the years, able to drag people back to life unless the cause of death was particularly arcane, but his experiments had showed him that people never came back quite right, as if they had left something important behind in the land of the dead. He didn't dare do such a thing to his family.

Fleur and Nymphadora had tried to stay out of love, but the weight of life's sorrows had tired them out and, at just shy of four hundred year's old, they had decided that they had enough.

Luna wouldn't have minded joining them, if not for Harry.

Harry was more accepting of death and not as wounded by all their losses, but he was a man of grand ambitions that had run out of things to strive for. Boredom was his oblivion and life had become a little stale for him over the centuries. He'd pursued many avenues of research, but he couldn't quite muster the same enthusiasm he had in his youth anymore.

Luna felt that what he really needed was to get away from laboratories and workshops for a while and out into the world instead, but he'd never get around to that if he was left to himself, so she'd be staying with him.

"What are you going to do now?" Lorkhan asked quietly.

Luna looked towards her husband, wondering the same thing. Harry had reigned over Myth Drannor mostly unilaterally for close to a hundred years. A difficult hundred years as the world adjusted to the new reality he had created by saturating it with magic. There had been a frenzy of expansion in the years following that event, wizards and witches suddenly discovering that the world just got a lot bigger.

New magical realms had been established, some by their children and grandchildren. Challengers had appeared, but none had been able to truly threaten him. The goblins had gleefully broken away from human society and wars with them had soon followed. There had even been two blips of trouble when Voldemort's Horcruxes had possessed people, but their ancient enemy had been reborn with an arrogance that hadn't been tempered through defeat and hadn't lasted long. Throughout it all, Myth Drannor had remained strong under Harry's protection and magic advanced in the chaos. Eventually things calmed down and Harry began slowly passing on his duties to Lorkhan and then finally his crown as well some ninety years ago.

The four of them had stayed in Spellhaven as advisors and teachers after that. Harry had personally trained close to a hundred and twenty apprentices in that time, some more than others depending on his mood and their aptitude. Many of them had been his own descendants and he had enjoyed teaching them, but Luna sensed that he wasn't interested in doing that anymore.

"I don't know." Harry said, frowning.

Luna tugged on his hand and smiled at him when he looked down at her.

"Take a walk with me." She said.

"A walk?" He repeated bemusedly. "Where?"

"Everywhere." She answered. "All around the world."

There was still so much to see, so many new things that had appeared over the past few centuries. She'd even found a crumple-horned snorkack! It was a whole different world out there now.

Harry slowly nodded, a small smile appearing on his lips. "Yes, that sounds like a good idea. We might even run into Etal at some point."

"That would be nice." Luna agreed. The quetzalcoatl had been taking increasingly long trips around the world. Part of it because he was an adventurous sort, but partly because he was getting old, although he would never admit it.

"Don't forget to write every few years." Lorkhan said with a smile of his own, instinctively understanding that they wouldn't be taking any faster means of communication with them.

"We won't." Luna promised her son enthusiastically.

"You'd have to take charge of Adrastia." Harry warned.

"I know, Dad." Lorkhan nodded. "Don't worry, I can handle her."

Luna didn't doubt him. Lorkhan was strong and Adrastia had spent the majority of her life in servitude at this point. She was used to subservience, even if she was still proud.

She would have suggested that Harry take her along, as she knew that he enjoyed having sex with her, but Adrastia was at home among people. Hiking through dark forests and over mountains was not for her.

"Alright, I guess there's nothing stopping us from leaving then." Harry said and Luna could almost see a the weight falling off his shoulders. "Let's go pack our stuff."

"Don't forget about the special ointment." Luna reminded him. "I don't want my bum and vagina to be sore all the time now that you won't have any others to put your penis into."

"Mom…" Lorkhan sighed.