Enchanting Melodies (HP SI)

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23 May 1995, Hogwarts, Scotland

"Alright, I have a good idea about what happened, so, let's start with a few ground rules while you're here. You will not interact with anyone. You will not try to stop anything from happening in the future. You will also not say anything to anyone about your future. Believe me, you will not like the consequences. Am I clear?" They all nodded briskly, "Good. Now, I need you to tell me everything."

The three time-stranded kids looked at him hesitatingly, and Harry rolled his eyes in frustration. What could they have possibly been so cagey about? Oh, right, he did technically just threaten them to make sure they wouldn't screw something up too much and kill them all by destroying the fabric of time itself.

The fact that they had genuinely time-travelled meant that they were still part of the timeline they came from, and as fascinating as this was, it also caused a lot of potential damage to the passage of time. And so, he reassured them, "Look, I can tell when you're about to say something damaging and I'll warn you. My threat remains if you don't stop when I tell you to."

"How can you possibly know that?" Alexander Granger asked, confused, "Just saying something here would change a future, our future."

Harry rolled his eyes, "You're thinking of time as a strict progression of cause to effect, but that's not quite accurate."

"What is it then?" the boy asked, with hope in his eyes.

"Well, from a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, time-y wimey stuff. Actually, it's not much of a ball at all. Forget the ball entirely."

The three time-stranded teenagers gave him very dry looks as if struggling to believe that Harry was saying something like that, "Oh, that made it a lot clearer."

Harry grinned, "I always wanted to say this. Anyway, time isn't as rigid as you'd think but it can be surprisingly stubborn when dealing with fixed points, or more accurately, fixed events. Branches of the same timeline could technically exist at once, but only if their fixed events are the same. The dangerous part is the fact that the number of fixed events from your perspective is everything that occurred that you know of, which is immense. You can't change what has already happened to you. Even when using a normal time turner, you create a projection of yourself at that time, and you can't change the past because it already happened. Anyway, my point is that you can essentially make small changes in history as long it doesn't happen to anything that would change your lives up until this point."

The three children just gaped at him, and the Davis girl spoke up, "Did you guys get any of that?"

Harry rolled his eyes, "You know what, that's not important. The gist of it is that you can answer my questions as long as you stop when I tell you. So, what's the World Tree, and why do you need to save it?"

The three of them gave each other looks before nodding, with the Marinakis girl speaking up, "The World Tree, also known as the Tree of Life, is the single greatest piece of magic the world has ever seen and likely will ever see. It came out of nowhere, which is insane given the fact that it's almost as big as a mountain, and it appeared in the middle of Britain. There were wards surrounding it, protecting it, which a muggleborn reported to the ministry when detecting a very powerful source of magic, and even then, it took the entire ministry almost a year to break it, revealing a golden glowing tree, that radiated magic like nothing the world had ever seen."

Harry nodded, motioning to the girl to continue her story, "It didn't seem to do anything harmless and researchers from all around the world seemed to come, trying to unravel its mystery. It took almost a decade until people figured out what the tree did, and even then, every once in a while, some researcher would find another thing it did and how it worked. It took a muggleborn Obliviator of all things to note a large discrepancy in the number of incidents that broke the Statute of Secrecy. Despite the fact that muggle technology was growing rapidly, especially their surveillance methods, the number of incidents decreased over time, practically halting all over the world. Building on that, someone discovered that the World Tree created a veil of some sort, essentially separating the magical and muggle world while staying in the same place. Muggles and their technology simply couldn't perceive magic even if it was performed before them, even if they were told of it. They refused to accept it, and in exchange, mages needed a lot more energy to affect muggles directly. We call it the World Tree because it is what maintains the magical world as something completely separate from muggles. It even seemed to pump more magic into the ley lines, which increased the amount of ambient magic all over the world. It's a sacred symbol for some, with a few civilizations seeing it as some sort of divine sign or whatnot. All in all, we could cast magic like we wanted to, like in the old days. Children could use magic openly, and almost everyone liked that."

Harry noted that almost was a very key world, "But not everyone, right?"

It was the same for everything. People would always find a way to complain about anything, and it seemed like Harry's guess was correct given their winces. The Davis girl was the one who continued, "It's really not that simple. The World Tree helped our people a lot, but without wasting any resources maintaining the Statute of Secrecy, a lot of magical governments decided to truly separate themselves from their muggle counterparts. They started to take ownership in areas that were already densely magical, and there's been a resurgence of magical nobility all over Europe to maintain these areas. Family crests suddenly became a lot more important, and, well, that sidelined a lot of muggleborns. Magical research is on the rise, but the gap between the Old Families and the rest has never been wider all over the world because of the advantages that they can now take care of. Muggleborns just didn't bring anything to the table anymore, and without the threat of muggles discovering our affairs, they are, by far, at their weakest."

The Granger boy interrupted her, "That's understating things, and you know it. If you didn't have a crest, you were second-class citizens. They've already started to build schools just for muggleborns, whose numbers have been steadily rising since the sudden increase in ambient magic. Those are the ones that are affected the most. They're separated from their families – who can't even comprehend what they can do due to the World Tree. Can you imagine the idea of fading away from your family's memories with every moment, with the only consolation prize being the privilege of becoming a third-class citizen in a society that actively shuns you? No wonder they're angry."

The Marinakis girl glared at him, and he winced slightly. This was obviously not a new argument between them, and this was definitely not the time to have a political debate. She then quickly took over the conversation, "Anyway, there's been discontent for years, and more than a few attempts at destroying the tree, which the government really didn't like, sentencing the perpetrators to even life in prison, and even executing the leaders of this movement. But one day, someone noticed that the tree started to rot near its root. It wasn't anything drastic, but it was spreading. Everyone blamed the muggleborns, and let's just say that there could be a war brewing on a global scale. Governments from all over the world have been trying to investigate it but to no avail. The World Tree was rumoured to be indestructible, but someone managed to hurt it. We were all waiting for a war to start out any minutes, and for the government to call for the arrest of all muggleborns."

Alexander interrupted her, "We had to do something. I found a bit of research in my mum's study, and specifically her time turner. Mum was one of the most prominent researchers of the World Tree in the world. If anyone could have figured out what happened, it would have been her. I wanted to show her what happened and then save the World Tree."

No, he didn't. Harry could see that very clearly in the boy's eyes. He was still mourning his mother, still. He most likely wanted to save her using the 'special' time tuner, which, to be fair, Harry still didn't know how it worked. Or he could have just wanted an excuse to see her one last time. The last Potter wasn't really in a place to judge him, as long as he didn't try to do something extremely stupid.

Instead of prodding the boy, Harry spoke up with something else entirely, "Maybe, but this isn't Hermione's work. It's mine."

"My mother," Alexander started, only to be interrupted by Harry, "I have no idea how she got her hand on this, but I can recognize a few of my own styles of magic. The creation of something like this required a way to perceive time that Hermione would never be able to possess, and I mean that with no offence. I can see the parts where someone tried to tinker with how the artefact worked, so that was probably your mother's work."

Harry didn't say that it was mostly Solomon's magic, mixed in with his own time manipulation, that sealed the deal. But there were traces of someone blindly trying to manipulate the enchantments, trying to brute-force them into also sending living beings to the past, instead of just inanimate objects. It was done badly, very badly even. It was like someone took the Mona Lisa and started to draw over it with crayons.

The weird thing was that his future self was obviously left some gaps on purpose in the enchantments. He could have easily made it so tampering with it was impossible, and yet, he left it like that, as if hoping that someone would mess with it.

Even then, the modifications were completely inefficient, especially given the nature of time sand. And where would it get the power to sustain something like three people in the past, while also protecting the timeline from fracturing?

The sheer amount of magic needed was beyond mind-boggling. You would need… You would need something insanely powerful, a connection to an outer dimension, but that was very hard to pull off. It would have been easier to have a connection with an already very strong, very powerful source of magic, and according to his time-travelling acquaintances, there was one very powerful one that actively separated the magical and muggle worlds.

Harry quickly touched one of the runes, while getting the pyramid to open up slightly, revealing a small golden sampling that seemed to glow. The World Tree in the future was what maintained its presence in his time, doing its best to make sure that the timeline wouldn't fracture. The sheer energy could theoretically weaken something as powerful as the World Tree, enough for it to be affected by a curse or something.

As he analysed the constitution of the tree, he had to restrain himself from gasping in realization. It was a marvel of magic that evolved over time but at a very accelerated rate, growing like a weed, connecting itself to the very planet's magical heartbeat. However, its core enchantments were very familiar, even if it was surrounded by countless improvements over what seemed to be millennia of growth. Of course, it was familiar, he had been the one to make them, not too long ago.

Suddenly everything clicked. His future self must have already experienced this. Assuming that something didn't go drastically out of control and that the timeline didn't shatter into pieces, then he must have arranged things to occur as he experienced it in his own personal timeline.

He now had a hint as to what he had to do, but he felt like there was something missing with the children, something more. Ah, right, he needed to fix their own World Tree to prevent a war or even possibly genocide.

The last Potter took a deep breath and spoke up, "Alright, I think I have an idea about what happened but now let's talk about what you've been planning to do."

"For what exactly?" one of the girls answered.

Harry gave her an incredulous look, "To save the World Tree. You must have come here with a plan of some sort, even if it was somewhat shot."

Alexander Granger scowled. "It was supposed to be simple. Travel back, find my mother, show her a sample I managed to buy from Knockturn Alley with the rotten roots of the tree, get her research, and go home. It's not my fault that these two interrupted me in the middle of my ritual and messed everything up."

"And you didn't think for a second that messing with time travel might be a bit more complicated than that?" Harry deadpanned.

The boy looked like he wanted to protest, only for Harry to raise his hand and exhale through his nose. "Alright. Here's what's going to happen. First, you're going to give me that sample you were planning to give to your mother. Second, I'm going to figure out what's causing the rot. And third—" he paused, meeting each of their eyes in turn, "— I'm going to find a way to get you all home before you kill us all in your recklessness, and you better hope that I never see you again, because believe me, I'm really close to snapping."

The boy looked both angry and ashamed and slowly handed Harry a small box surrounded by runes. The last Potter looked at it hesitatingly, before opening it. Immediately, he could feel the magic try to infect everything around it and consume it utterly. When he took a closer look, he saw a small grey piece of root that was surrounded by black veins that were circulating around it.

Weirdly enough the branch was resisting the corrupting influence, but Harry had immediately recognized the energy. After all, he'd just seen it just the past couple of weeks.

Nidhogg.

What the hell was Nidhogg's corruption doing in the future and how had it infected the World Tree? Well, that made things a lot of confusing, but also, a lot more complicated.

He just knew that this was probably going to spiral out of control.

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AN: To be honest, I didn't like this chapter, and I was tempted to not upload it. Maybe it's because there's too much lore at once. The revelation regarding the World Tree will be paid off later, but I'm guessing a lot of you will see where I'm going with it. The idea is to show a bit that even after everything, assuming that the Light and Dark are gone, that the threat of the muggles discovering them is over, that people will still find a way to fight each other, and that society will always have conflict. I don't think I quite pulled it off, so, as usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.

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If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr

I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.

Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.