Chapter 9

Hedwig knew it was time for her to give a part of herself to Harry so that his core could expand. She knew he was safe, having had her friend Sebastian watching over both Susan and Harry to make sure that they were going to make it to safety. If at any time Harry had faltered, then she knew Sebastian would have saved them and gotten them to land. When he had called out to her to tell her about Harry's daring rescue, her pride in her boy knew no bounds. This is why the court seer had told her that she would only bond with one in her long existence, there was none in her opinion who had come before him that were worthy of her devotion, and there would be none after. Her friend Fawkes had chosen to bond with Hogwarts when she became sentient, and served as the watcher of the wizard or witch in the position of headmaster to make sure they cared for the students in the way that Hogwarts wanted. He had been there since the four had built their school and put a little bit of each of their souls into her birth, and he would remain until she was there no more.

Now it was her turn to bond fully, and Hedwig wasn't afraid to admit that she was a little bit scared at the commitment she was about to make. For millennia, she had been on her own, answering to no one except her father, and he was always away in some dimension or another hiding from her mother. Hedwig gave a sigh of regret at the things she hadn't got around to doing yet, and then she merged her soul with that of her destined one.

Inside of Harry's mindscape, gale force winds swept through each environment ripping to pieces the protections that he had built up. His false room of memories, his endless ball pit, his town, everything except the library was torn to pieces as his core merged with the soul of an Emperor Phoenix. For a brief moment, the black soul that had inhabited the vault in his mind escaped from its containment and laughed at what it would do to the world now that it was free to consume its host. The expanding power of Harry's core, put paid to that ambition as its essence was vaporized by the magic of two pure souls merging. In the outside world, a black mass erupted from Harry's scar, followed by a burst of white lightening that engulfed the darkness obliterating it with one last scream of rage. Moments later, the door to the room that Harry was in opened and two women looked in.

"The poor dear is still unconscious." Said the older woman.

"I thought I heard a scream from in here, but I must have been wrong." Replied the younger one. "I wouldn't have been surprised if he had woken up screaming though. After what he did to save the Admiral's little girl, it's no shock that his body needs the rest."

"Aye, lass. You would be right about that. Well, time to get back to our rounds. The families have gone home to change, but you can be sure they will be here in the morning." The door closed behind them, and if they had waited a moment more; they would have seen his whole body shudder before Harry lifted off the bed, surrounded by a cocoon of warm white light.

Inside Harry, Elric was using all of his embedded knowledge to protect Harry's library from the storm of energy raging around it. If this didn't end soon, He would be destroyed along with all the knowledge that Harry had so far accumulated. "Stupid, bloody bird." He muttered as once again he had to move the entire store of knowledge away from the ravening storm, this was shaping up too be a very long night.

Harry slowly awoke to the sounds of machines beeping and humming, which he quickly determined was the most annoying sound on earth. How was anyone supposed to sleep with that sound constantly repeating over, and over, and over? Before opening his eyes, he took a quick mental inventory. Was he sore? Check! Was he in pain? Check! Were any of his bones broken? Negative! Okay, it looked like he survived his ordeal, though he felt as if he had been super charged while he was sleeping. He had so much energy available, that he felt as if he could fly around the room shooting flames and lasers from his different body parts. He knew that he needed to burn off some of this energy, so he focused it on healing himself from the inside out. The first thing he started on was his bones, since he knew that they were not as strong as they should be because of his lack of proper food and vitamins. He realized his mistake when waves of pain hit him as his bones were growing, tearing away his muscles and pushing against his skin. Harry diverted power from his bones to push the muscles into growing with the expansion that his bones were going through. He also focused on making his skin grow and stretch with his expanding size, as well as making sure that his blood flow and volume kept up with his growth.

If a doctor, healer, unspeakable, or any scientist had asked Harry what he was doing, his answer would've thrown them all into shock. What he had to do to make sure that his body was healing, was to focus down on a cellular level, replicating and distributing his cells at an almost instantaneous speed. Since that night in the office on Downing Street where Harry had found out that he could change his body like Dora, he had spent at least an hour every day learning how to control the changes his body could make. At first he did the exercises that Dora had been taught to gain the skill to control her gift, but after taking just a few days to master those, he began to branch out and explore on his own. At first he was very frustrated because no matter what he did, he could never make himself more than 6 inches taller. It was when he thought about it from a physics perspective that he found the answer to this dilemma. His body only had so much mass, and even though it appeared as if he was growing 6 inches what his gift was doing was actually redistributing his mass without actually changing it. So even though he appeared to have grown, he still weighed the same whether he was taller or shorter. This meant that his gift was following the laws of conservation of energy and mass.

Then he remembered a conversation that he had overheard between Ted and the Grangers where Ted said that magic quite often makes a fool out of physics and the laws of the universe. This sent Harry's mind searching for a way to use magic to overcome his physical limitations. Unfortunately, though he was an exceptional thinker, Harry got stuck because his mindset was still in the mundane world. It was watching Andi conjure a spoon at the breakfast table for Hermione that led to Harry to his next breakthrough. Though his initial mass was just 80 pounds, using magic he could increase or decrease his mass at will, allowing him to change his body to virtually any size. The one drawback to this was that when he lost concentration, or needed to focus on something else, he would return to what he called his default size. He theorized that this was because his conjured mass was only stabilized by his magic when he thought about it, and the added mass began to disappear as soon as his magic was diverted elsewhere. He also believed that if he could only add more power he could make his added mass more or less permanent. So now that he was sitting in a hospital room with abundant amounts of extra power, he was trying to test his theory by adding mass and growing his default size. Sending power to his bone marrow, he increased his stem cell amounts, allowing those to create more and more red blood cells as well as all the necessary fluids and building blocks that his body needed to grow naturally. By the time he was done, Harry had put on over seven inches in height and almost twenty-five pounds of muscle and general mass to his default frame.

Once he was satisfied with his new height, Harry decided it was a good time to check into his Mindscape to find out how Elric was doing. Morphing back to what he looked like before he made his changes, bruises, contusions, and all; Harry focused inward in deep meditation with the intention of using the rest of this excess power to reconfigure and strengthen his mental defenses. What he found reminded him of news footage that he had once seen of the destruction left in the aftermath of a class five tornado that had swept thru some part of middle America. Here and there stood parts of his interior landscape, but the only thing still standing was his core, which appeared to have grown since it was taking up more of his mindscape than ever before, and his internal library with was much the worse for wear. Willing himself into the entrance of his library, Harry was relieved to see Elric, Hedwig, as well as the mental constructs that he used to maintain order and efficiency were all safe inside the building.

"What happened in here," asked Harry? "It looks like London after the Luftwaffe Blitzkrieg came through."

Hedwig answered him, though she looked sheepish about what had caused the destruction. "While you were unconscious, I decided to use the opportunity to help you with your power levels by merging some of my essence with your core. To my knowledge, it has not been attempted for at least a millennium, and never with anyone who had not gone through their final magical maturity. In my Quest to keep you safe from Whiskers and others that meant to control you or bring you harm, I jumped right in like a Gryffindor without thinking about the consequences. I retreated to a cave far in the depths of the Alps where no man has ever been, and there under the watch of a good friend of mine, I forced myself into my burning day many years early. Doing that allowed me to use most of my power in your mind, since my body cannot use or access it while it is newly re-formed."

"What do you mean by burning day," Harry asked?

"As I have told you, I am a phoenix and in essence I am immortal. Depending on how much magic we use, a phoenix will have a burning day every five hundred years, unless we are hurt too much for our magic to regenerate us. What this does, is to make every cell in our body combust, setting off our pyre and turning the burning phoenix to ash. Out of that ash, we are reborn, continuing the cycle down through time. The race of phoenix were here at the beginning of the universe, and unless we choose not to continue on, we will be there for the end of all as well." Hedwig took a moment to let Harry absorb what she said before she continued. "Since I was already bonded with you, I was able to send much of my essence into you to expand your core, leaving only enough to continue maturing my newly reborn body. Unfortunately..."

'Here it comes, ' thought Harry. 'with my luck, I am going to sprout feathers in awkward places and I will have flames shooting out of my butt.'

" ... When I merged with you, it caused you to go into your first maturity, increasing your available power to unheard of levels for someone your age. Actually, it boosted your magic up to the level that you would have normally achieved when you reached your final maturity at age twenty-one. You were already a powerful wizard Harry, but now there is no telling where your power level will end up. There also may be side effects that we don't know about yet, but I am confident that we will be able to deal with them if and when they appear."

Elric saw the look of panic that was on Harry's face and so he interjected. "Don't worry Harry, while this sounds like a bad thing, it is in all actuality very, very good that this happened. Do you remember the thing that was trapped in the bank that we thought we got rid of?" Harry nodded and Elric continued. "It turns out that it was a piece of soul from the wizard that gave you your scar, and once released, it set up a diversion that Hedwig and I fought and banished, while it hid out in the deep reaches of your mind. We have surmised that it was slowly working its way back to strength and it would have eventually tried to take you over. If it had been able to merge with your core, then no power on earth would have been able to stop it from assuming control over you and your magic. When Hedwig merged herself with your core, it released a maelstrom of light magic and love which spread to every corner of your psyche; destroying the darkness before it as it went. Hedwig and I pulled your guardians in to the library to preserve them, and then she used her light driven power to destroy the darkness and shadows lurking in here so now no trace of his soul remains. Your inner librarian meanwhile, was busy saving all of his magical knowledge and gifts, both natural and stolen, along with memories that were fortified or kept as important to him. This included his true identity, how he survived the night he attacked you, and others that have not been catalogued yet."