บท 66: qa
What the fuck was a Wizard's Coven? Well no, from context alone Harry was pretty sure he knew what she was talking about. Still, uncovering ancient magic not seen since the likes of Merlin himself? Harry had developed the binding ritual in the future of his own intellect and power. Bella had helped, and she'd also modified the ritual to work through close male relatives, but Harry had never heard of a Wizard's Coven before, or Merlin having similar magic to what he was enacting.
"Your choices are thus, Harry James Potter. Kill me and see knowledge of your actions released to every corner of the world. Convince me that your Wizard's Coven is necessary and secure my silence. Or… swear an Unbreakable Vow here and now to leave my daughter out of your Coven and never touch Fleur again. In turn, I will swear an Unbreakable Vow not to reveal this information about you to anyone."
Choices. None of those were very good choices, outside of convincing Apolline that what he was doing was necessary. That said… those weren't his only choices. There was no world in which he was going to kill Apolline Delacour. And he certainly wasn't going to swear an Unbreakable Vow to the woman either.
… But when it came to convincing her, he definitely had options. It was just a matter of how far he was willing to go.
-x-X-x-
Harry might not know what the hell was going on with Fleur's mother, but he knew one thing for certain… he could convince her. It was just a matter of how far he wanted to go. Looking at the beautiful buxom blonde as she stares back at him defiantly, Harry realizes that he's willing to go pretty damn far.
Smiling thinly, Harry spreads his hands apart.
"You want to be convinced that what I'm doing is necessary? Fine."
Apolline raises an eyebrow at that, her lips pursing together.
"… Then tell me, Harry Potter. Tell me what justifies your creation of a Wizard's Coven."
But Harry just grins and shakes his head, his hands already closing into fists as he calls upon his magic.
"Tell you? I could, but you'd never believe me. Better if I showed you."
The Delacour Matriarch's eyes barely have time to widen before he hits her with the gathered magic. Fortunately for Apolline, he means her no harm. The wordless spell is merely a memory transference without the pensieve. She can't exactly resist it given how much power he's put behind the spell, meaning that she's effectively insensate until it's run it's course, but then… she was the one who wanted to know.
While he waits for the memories to play out, Harry takes a seat across from Fleur's mother. Thankfully, Apolline herself had already been seated at a table, one leg crossed over the other. Otherwise, he doubted she would have avoided collapsing to the floor. As things stand, he makes sure to apply a bit of unseen force around her so she doesn't fall out of her chair, even as her glazed-over eyes widen and her mouth opens in horror.
He'd had mere moments to decide all of what he was going to show her, but Harry was still rather pleased with what he'd wound up with. It was a well-curated selection of the Future's Greatest Hits. Most of it was general apocalypse stuff, but he'd found the time to throw in a couple of tidbits that would be personally meaningful to Apolline as well.
The most important thing he'd made sure to infuse the spell with, however… was authenticity. He was showing Apolline Delacour some truly unbelievable things, but he didn't have the time or the patience to have her question him. It was why he was showing instead of telling in the first place, so that she would believe him sooner rather than later.
Finally, it ends. In total, it only takes five minutes of time in the real world before she comes out of the spell. But for Apolline, time was dramatically slowed down. She's just watched hours and hours of memories from the end of their world.
For a long moment, the Delacour Matriarch is silent. Processing. Harry might be worried about her mental state, but he knows she's stronger than that. Eventually, the beautiful half-veela recovers enough to shake herself out of her stupor and remember his presence. She stares at him across the table and Harry gives her an apologetic smile of understanding in response.
"Sorry. But you wanted to know."
"It… it all ends. The muggles kill us."
She sounds like she doesn't want to believe it, but also can't deny it. The truth of everything she just witnessed had been hammered into her psyche. She might manage to reach a state of self-delusion strong enough to pretend that it was a lie, but deep down inside she will always know it to be true. Fortunately, it sounds like she's not going to try and convince herself otherwise.
"Are killing us, actually. And not the muggles exactly… their technology. Magic cannot coexist with the scientific wonders they've created. The more they make, the more they expand, the quicker we find ourselves being pushed to the fringes. Soon enough, those fringes won't even exist. Magic itself will die off in less than a hundred years if nothing is done. But as you saw… it can happen a lot quicker than that if things are pushed in the wrong direction."
A shiver runs down Apolline's spine and he can tell that she's thinking about the fallout from the Nuclear Armageddon. He can also tell the moment that her mind turns towards the more personal tidbits he'd slipped in there for her. Harry and Apolline Delacour hadn't been particularly close in the original timeline. He'd known her, and they'd exchanged pleasantries a few times, but nothing too in depth.
That said, he was a friend of the family, so he'd been outside of the room when Fleur, Bill, and their daughter Victoria had all said goodbye to her. Magic had been declining rapidly by that point. The protections put in place to keep them safe from the muggles' wars had been able to maintain their health but not prevented the decay of their magic.
For Fleur, Bill, and Victoria, it was as simple as slowly becoming squibs. Fleur lost her allure, but she was only a quarter veela to begin with so other than that, there were no averse effects. Same for Gabriella.
But Apolline was half-blooded. And magical creatures, as it turned out, where far more susceptible to the death of magic than magical humans. Being even half-veela was a death sentence, and while Apolline should have had another fifty to a hundred years of life easily, she'd wasted away in just one after the bombs fell.
The other memory Harry knew Apolline would have a personal stake in was her Veela Coven. After her mother's death, Fleur had asked him to go with her to check on them, to see how they were doing up in the Alps of France where they had nestled themselves away in secret. She wanted to make sure her mother's people were safe and had enough supplies and protections to weather the storm.
Harry wasn't sure what he or that Fleur thought they were going to find. He hadn't really understood how bad things were getting at the time. They were bad, yes… but it wasn't until he'd seen the dead veela, strewn about their Mountain Compound, that he realized what they were truly facing. Not a single veela had a visible injury. They hadn't been shot or cut down or even killed by magic.
They'd just… wasted away. Many of them had at least made it to their beds first, but even the ones who had tried to keep going had eventually fallen wherever they stood and died. The entire Veela Coven had been struck down by the spreading radiation that was covering Europe by that point.
Not because they'd been hit by a Nuclear Blast or anything, but rather because Nuclear Winter was even deadlier for magical creatures than it was for muggles. The dust blotting out the sun carried with it magic-killing particles that had hastened their demise all the faster.
"… You don't even know what a Wizard's Coven is."
Harry smiles faintly at that, even as Apolline gets over those memories only to look at him in a whole new light. He'd included his actions, his research, his plans and intentions of course. It wasn't enough to show Apolline Delacour the end of the world. He had to show her what he intended to do to stop it.
"I didn't before today. Now, based on context clues alone, I can certainly guess."
The Delacour Matriarch flares her nostrils as she presses her lips together tightly. Then, she seems to come to a decision.
"Yes. What you've created here in your desperation is a Wizard's Coven. Witches permanently binding themselves willingly to one wizard, giving him all of their power to do with as he pleases. The last to create such a thing was Merlin himself. He entrusted the veela with making sure the information on how to do so stayed lost to time forever. Many have forgotten that purpose, but not all."
Harry considers correcting her for a moment. His ritual doesn't actually require consent, he's simply drawn a line in the sand for himself. More than that, there's also Bella's modification to the ritual allowing him to reach through a witch to her relationships and take the magic of the wizards on the other end for himself.
But he stays quiet about all of that. The clarifications aren't really relevant or necessary at this point in time.
"I… I cannot condemn you for what you have done, Lord Potter. You face an even greater threat than Merlin himself when he formed a Wizard's Coven. This is… this is all of magic at stake. There is no price too great to pay to save it. But… your intentions are to meld magic with muggle technology?"
He can tell this part is the biggest hangup for Apolline. She doesn't look remotely convinced that his plan of developing Magitech alongside Hermione and a bunch of other brilliant minds, is the best path forward. Still, Harry doesn't back down.
"Yes. There are too many muggles for us to fight, Lady Delacour. The world is too interconnected by their technology at this point in time for us to have a chance of dismantling it."
The mulish look on the Delacour Matriarch's face makes it clear she's not convinced. Harry sighs and shakes his head while smiling.
"There are over seven billion muggles at this point in time, Lady Delacour."
That causes her eyes to widen. Funny, in most places in the muggle world, that sort of knowledge was commonplace. You would have to go to a third world country to find muggles who didn't know how many of them there were. But the magical world was insular and isolated by design. They had blocked themselves off from the muggles for centuries, and most of them barely interacted with the non-magical side of things, if at all.
Even over in France, things weren't all that better than Britain. French Wizards and Witches were a bit more tolerant of magical creatures, in no small part because of the lobbying from vampires and veela covens and the like all across Mainland Europe, but besides that, they didn't spend any more time in the muggle world than their British Counterparts did.
So when Harry tells Apolline that there are seven billion muggles, he shocks her to her core.
"To be clear, that's seven thousand million muggles. By comparison, the Wizarding World… the entirety of magic across the whole of Planet Earth, is nothing but a drop in that ocean."
Apolline looks even fainter than she did before as she realizes the true scope of the problem.
"S-Seven… seven billion. No wonder their technology is killing magic. How… how did their numbers get so out of hand?"
Harry chuckles at that, because the answer is rather obvious and he can't help but state it to tweak the beautiful woman's nose a little bit.
"Sex, I presume."
Apolline Delacour is not some fair maiden who would blush at such things, but she does still give him a look for a moment before huffing.
"… You're right. They're beyond our ability to contain, aren't they?"
Humming, Harry nods.
"Yes. We could take them back to the Stone Ages. We could try to tear their technology out of their hands, to end their world before they end it themselves and kill off magic all the quicker. But it wouldn't truly solve the problem. There would still be those who remembered the way things were before, and those who recalled how to rebuild what we took from them. Stamping out knowledge, at this point in time, is impossible."
Harry allows himself to adopt a wolfish smile as he leans forward, looking Apolline in the eye.
"But consider what we could accomplish if we made technology our own. Right now, their technology creates invisible waves of differing types of radiation, all of which are harmful to magic. But what if they weren't? What if magic could be made to harness those waves? We could use muggle technology to bring magic to greater heights than ever before."
He can see Apolline is intrigued by the idea now that she knows simply subjugating the muggles isn't possible. Of course, there's just one more issue in her eyes.
"… But what of the wars? Do we have time to subvert their technology before they destroy themselves and us with them? If they bring about Nuclear Armageddon, then will all our work be for naught?"
Not bothering to sugarcoat things, Harry nods.
"Yes. It would be. Which is why I've been collecting power in the first place. No amount of magic will allow me to take on the entire muggle population or remove every trace of muggle technology from Earth… but if I can get my hands on enough magic, I CAN take control of their weapons of mass destruction and neutralize them once and for all. No nukes, no apocalypse, no Armageddon. They might still have their wars, but they won't kill everything in the process. They won't kill us."
In the end, that was Harry's plan in full. Prepare things so that they could develop magitech in the next few years, while also accumulating enough personal power and influence that he could deal with the disparate muggle nuclear arsenals all by himself if necessary. He wasn't going to let World War Three happen the way it did last time. That was for shit sure.
For a long time, Apolline is quiet. Harry lets the Delacour Matriarch have the moment to process everything. He knows it's a lot, but now she knows. And hey, she'd already said she couldn't condemn herself for the very thing she was haranguing him for when they first started talking, so mission accomplished, right?
It seemed to him that he'd managed to convince Apolline Delacour that the need was great enough for her to leave him-
"I will join you."
Harry blinks, tilting his head to the side as he eyes the beautiful half-veela.
"Excuse me?"
Lifting her own head, looking him right in the face, the gorgeous woman straightens her spine. In doing so, she also thrusts out her sizable bust, puffing out her chest as she sets her jaw.
"Bind me, Lord Potter. Use your ritual and bind me to your Wizard's Coven. Make my magic your own."
… Seriously?
"I thought you were opposed to the idea of a Wizard's Coven, Lady Delacour."
Apolline has the good grace to flush at his inquisitive and slightly chiding tone. But she doesn't back down. The beautiful half-veela, who could have passed as Fleur's older sister instead of her mother, simply shakes her head.
"I was opposed to the idea of my daughter joining your Wizard's Coven. I… still am. If possible, I would prefer she be able to live her life free of such obligation. But that is a mother's concern. This and that are two separate things. Bind me to your Wizard's Coven, and you will have not just the full might of the Delacour Family behind your efforts, but also the entirety of the Veela Coven I and my daughters are descended from."
Harry can't help but furrow his brow at that.
"Explain that last part."
Smirking, Apolline shrugs, something that causes quite a lot of movement below her shoulders.
"Our Veela Coven remembers Merlin. We still hold true to the pact we made with him, all that time ago. If they find out that I have joined your Wizard's Coven willingly, they will know that the situation is serious. I can persuade them to assist us, I promise. All you have to do… is accept."
… Was he really going to do this? Was he really going to- ah, who was he kidding? Of course he was going to take Apolline up on her offer. Harry smiles, even as he rises from the table… and watches the Delacour Matriarch do the same on the other side.
-x-X-x-
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