Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches

Chapter 15: BOOK TWO: The Foundations of Power

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text
Welcome to Book Two of Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches.

*Read in deep baritone voice*

Previously...

Harry Potter has come back in time to stop the Dark Lord winning — to remake the wizarding world how he wants it. To help him stay out of Azkaban, Death and Fate gave him a lordship, and Harry became Lord Slytherin. Keeping his time travel secret, Harry used the knowledge and skills he learned from Voldemort to amass a small fortune, smuggling drugs in the muggle world.

As Lord Slytherin, he befriended the Greengrasses, and took the reins of the neutral faction, rebranding them the Gray, and saving them from assimilation by the Dark and the Light.

And as Harry, he started gathering a group of witches to become the core of his many hidden plans. He became betrothed to Daphne Greengrass, who loves exploring and could put Machiavelli to shame. He vassaled Hermione Granger, who applied her viscous intellect to the magical and the social side of the wizarding world. He become the future consort of Luna Lovegood, who is as mysterious as she is devoted. He made inroads to befriending Alexandra Black, whose ambitions and frustrations make her prickly to friend and foe alike. And he snatched up Ginny Weasley, who has come to see her former crush as the archetype of everything she loathes.

That crush was Harry's twin brother, John Potter, who was given a chance to come back in time to defeat Voldemort, but really messed it up. Harry's travelling back three years before him changes a lot, and time-traveller John now deals with a world very different to how he remembers it from his original time line.

Now, Harry, Daphne, and Hermione are off to Hogwarts, with their sights firmly set on the legendary artefact that could easily fund a dozen wars. But will all go according to plan?

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Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches

Book Two: The Foundations of Power

Chapter Fifteen

The First Year's Train Dance

Platform Nine and 3/4 was a marvel of magical space folding. The enchantments surrounding this icon of the British magical world had to hide, not only the platform, but also the rail track, which snaked out of the station and cut its way straight through a city of eight-million muggles. After it left the city, the rail line had to stay hidden for the entire eight-hundred kilometre journey, all the way to Hogsmeade station. A thin slice of magic, indelibly cutting the country in two.

Muggle repelling charms and standard ruin-illusions would do no good here.

Figuring out a way to hide such a conspicuous tract of wizarding world territory was to be one of the greatest engineering feats of the arithmancy revolution — or rather, that's what the 1827 minister of magic, Ottaline Gambol, told her contractor, Lord Woodson Hawking. To which Lord Hawking deadpanned, "You're havin' a jape, Gambol."

Nevertheless, after nearly twenty years of work, the Noble House of Hawking did crack the problem. The solution was in reverse-expansion charms. Instead of creating more space where there was none, Woodson figured out how to create no space where there was some.

All the way up and down the country, whenever anyone crossed the five metre wide slice of land that contained the Hogwarts Express line, they bent through an undetectable, space-contraction ward, none the wiser of what just happened. New muggleborns on the Hogwarts Express would shriek in fear and delight as motorway cars barrelled straight towards the train, only to disappear mere inches from the track and instantly reappear on the opposite side.