Harry Potter and the Red Temple Ch.3 (HP/GoT)

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The corridors of the Great Temple were abuzz with life. Word had clearly got out, and nearly every Priest or Priestess of R’hllor within a day’s ride of Volantis had found some cause to be present.

As she escorted their champion through the temple, Kinvara heard hundreds of voices murmur the words Azor Ahai as they passed. Each bowed, none daring to reach out and touch the chosen of the Lord of Light.

Yet, she knew, they could still feel his magic in passing as surely as if he had taken their hands in his own. The very air settled into a feeling of reverence, which was perhaps how she got away with commanding a servant of the High Priest himself.

Setting her eyes on the acolyte bearing the symbols of service to the High Priest, Kinvara snapped her fingers, an order flowing from her lips. With some gratification, she saw him hesitate for a moment before dipping his head and dashing off.

It was not far from where they were to where the richest dining chambers of the temple lay, where only the mightiest Triarchs and Princes dined with the foremost servants of the Lord of Light. But to give the acolyte and the servants in the kitchens a minute or two, Kinvara guided their champion away with the lightest touch to the arm of his dragonskin coat.

It was not an act of disloyalty, she decided, when the shadow of doubt and fear was cast upon a fiery soul. Was it not fitting that the very Light of the Lord should be shone upon that unfortunate?

He, Azor Ahai—Harry—reached out, a touch of curiosity crossing their growing connection. Kinvara took a moment to bathe in the sheer light and power that suffused his presence as she gathered a response.

She brought up the face of her sister-priestess. In return, he sent a glimmer of recognition, an image of looking up from the tiled floor in the Hall of the Great Hearth into the woman’s face—a face that was somehow both elegant and beautiful, yet stark and harsh.

“Melisandre,” Kinvara informed him quietly.

Melisandre, he acknowledged, now having a name to match the face. Kinvara conveyed the image of her friend and sister priestess, kneeling in prayer before the hearth, the passing of night and day, a plate of food and a cup of wine left untouched.

An audible huff came from Azor Ahai’s lips, and a flutter of exasperation followed across the connection between the priestess and her champion. Coming to the Hall of the Great Flame, his eyes fixed on the figure slumped on her knees in front of the towering pyre at the center of the hall.

Harry stepped forward, a ripple of coolness washing through him from the cloak. The fiery magicks and heat that emanated from the hearth met the ancient enchantments and the touch of Death that formed the mantle of his forefathers.

The pyre was not simply flame. No simple fire could somehow be capable of forcibly transporting him to… wherever this was. The reaction of the Peverell cloak was a strong indicator that there was something intensely magical, even divine, about it.

He could tell the moment that the kneeling priestess felt his presence. Her prayers—the lilting song of these people hitching— drew silent as she looked up, her eyes a curious crimson but equally red-rimmed and her face drawn.

Then, as quickly as she looked up, her head was once again bent, her lips moving in feverish prayers. A few steps behind him, Kinvara speaking in that same language, not prayers, and her voice bearing a tone of... reassurance?

Harry sighed and held out his hands to the kneeling priestess.

“Melisandre,” Kinvara murmured, her sister-priestess looked up, uncomprehending.

Seemingly, more by reflex than anything else, she accepted his offered hands, her skin warm against his as he all but bodily lifted her to her feet. She nearly collapsed the moment that he let go but was saved by him wrapping an arm around her waist.

He half-carried her from the Great Flame and set her down on the steps beyond it. As Harry sank onto the polished red granite, he felt an odd sensation that he traced to… the crimson-clad and crimson-haired priestess.

Her magic had latched onto his presence, not a bond of minds, but it did him no harm to offer her a trickle of his magic to give her back some strength. She felt it, too, looking up, wide-eyed as she drew her vitality from him.

“Water!” Harry looked up, his voice commanding as he conveyed to Kinvara a sensation of sating thirst and the image of a free-flowing river.

“Dōna iēdar!” Kinvara looked about, snapping the order.

The call echoed until a red-robed acolyte appeared, coming forward from one of the doorways, bearing cups and a pitcher of water awash with flower petals and a sweet scent rising from it.

A brush with his magic and nothing rang out as being wrong with it, no potions or poisons, so Harry nodded to the acolyte, who filled a cup and handed it to him.

“Drink,” he ordered softly, lifting the cup to the priestess’s lips.

Even if she didn’t understand the word, its meaning was clear. She took a few sips, accepted the cup from him, and gulped it down until not even dregs swilled around the bottom. He felt the moment the priestess froze.

She tried to pull herself away, her head bowed.

“Shijetra nyke, Ñuha Dārilaros,” she muttered frantically, repeating it twice more as Harry first glared around the chamber.

The various lingering priests and acolytes made themselves scarce. He glanced over Melisandre’s bowed head to Kinvara, who stood at the foot of the steps, her hands clasped before her.

He reached out, the mental connection he’d established with her, curious that it was still strong, not lingering but pulsing with life, even when he’d stopped consciously feeding it.

Harry was unused to how the mental bond felt and how it worked, especially with someone who spoke a different language, even with their conscious thoughts in a different language.

The Mind Arts had never been his forte. He had shied away from them thanks to Snape and the two bastards he’d served. Yet, after some experimentation with sharing images, flashes of memories, and sensations, this woman was able to convey a combination of those things, eventually resolving their meanings.

Melisandre was… begging for forgiveness. From him? Her prince?

“There is no need for forgiveness,” he murmured. Kinvara soon picked up the meaning of his words.

Melisandre visibly relaxed at her whispers, looking at him again with wide eyes. Harry met her red-eyed stare unflinchingly and offered her a reassuring dip of his head.

He then looked back to Kinvara, raising an eyebrow as he tapped a hand against his stomach. They’d got somewhat waylaid, after all.

***

Kinvara saw her champion to the table in the temple's finest guest hall. A dozen acolytes came forth with golden platters of meat still steaming, bread hot from the ovens, and displays of fruit, fresh and preserved, the finest from across Essos.

Her judgment of his character grew more certain when he cleared half of a platter onto a plate, the make of distant Yi-Ti, and placed it in front of her sister-priestess.

A single stern command followed. Eat. It needed no translation.

One of the acolytes serving the table made eye contact with her, a small gesture indicating that she should follow him. Though she was reluctant to part with Azor Ahai, few acolytes would dare command a fully-fledged priestess.

With the reassurance of her champion echoing in her mind, Kinvara dipped her head to him for a long moment before retreating. She was escorted out of the hall and up an adjoining spiral staircase that led to a concealed gallery behind a fine grating, screened by silk, overlooking the hall.

There, she found the High Priest himself, a pale and heavily tattooed man with a half-starved look about him, his crimson tattoos, hairless head, and enveloping robes contrasting with the man next to him.

His right hand, the fearsome Moqorro. A man who appeared to be a lion-turned-man with skin as black as the very night itself. A handful of fiery tattoos adorned his face, his hair a wild mane of white and silver, bearing a staff of iron wrought in the form of a snarling dragon’s head.

“So, this is him? The flame arisen? The sword in the darkness?” Moqorro asked, not even shifting to face Kinvara. “He does not strike me as the scourge to put to the backs of the Triarchs.”

“We have questioned the Lord of Light oft of late,” Kinvara mused. “Have you not reached out and felt him?”

It was clear from the set of Moqorro’s jaw as he turned, affixing her with a narrow-eyed stare, that he had not.

Perhaps a sensible precaution. There were practitioners of the arcane arts for whom nothing more and even sometimes less was plenty enough to puppet a man’s flesh.

“And it was not you who brought him forth… but the one sent to the Sunset Lands and returned with empty hands? A quest failed, and the man she had claimed to be Azor Ahai reborn discovered, slain,” Moqorro rumbled.

“For three nights, for the spark that lights, for the flame that burns, and for the ashes that remain, our sister Melisandre has prayed before the Great Flame. In flagellation of the soul, for failings real and perceived,” Kinvara snapped, her temper drawn.

“For three days, a Dragon’s Breath Comet burns in the High Heavens. A light that not even the scholars in matters of stars and stone, of beasts and of beings can explain,” the curiously high voice of Benerro whispered. “No such light has shone upon our world in near a hundred and fifty years. And my sisters, you bring me this man, who rode through our lord’s divine fire on his beast of iron. We have searched for answers. For the face of our champion. We have gazed into the flame for lifetimes of men.”

“Perhaps we have spent too much time searching for answers when instead the Lord of Light would have looked with favor on us had we simply asked. Or perhaps it was simply a time chosen in eons past by our lord to send forth his champion,” Kinvara replied, gazing through the thin gauze of silk that concealed the gallery from the chamber below.

A thin protection when your quarry could simply reach out and touch your presence.

“The question is, what path will Azor Ahai choose?” The high priest asked, looking into the flickering light of a single oil lamp no bigger than a large scallop shell. “Whatever path, we are duty bound to offer counsel where it is sought, and to follow and aid in it.”

“For all that I have come to know of him, that shall be no burden on our souls. Upon seeing our sister, the first thing he did was lift her up with his bare hands and command water be brought. Water which he brought to her lips, again, with his own hands.” Kinvara noted, not turning aside her vigil, watching through the gauze. “Even now, he gave her the first portion of his meal on the plate offered to him. I do not think that the mark of a man who we would suffer following.”

“Yet… the flames do not reveal his path,” Benerro mused.

“I suspect that the flames are not necessary at this moment. First, he will sate his hunger. Then, perhaps, a bath?” Kinvara offered a small, mysterious smile. “He has our lord’s blessing to choose his own path. And, as a first matter, he seems… unfamiliar with us and the Temple. He speaks not our language nor any other language that Melisandre or I have heard.”

“Then… how?” Moqorro demanded.

“As a faithful servant of the Lord of Light, we may gain insight from the flames. As Azor Ahai, fire made in human form, may offer insight into the workings of his mind to a faithful servant.” She turned the same mysterious smile on the fearsome figure of Moqorro. “I am a faithful servant, and he has seen fit to allow me that boon. You know he’s told me his chosen name, alone of all others? Thus, it shall remain until he commands otherwise.”

***

Kinvara was quite right, as it turned out.

When she managed to convey the offer of the use of the private bathhouse attached to the temple’s high-status guest quarters, Harry gladly accepted after he’d seen that her fellow priestess was conveyed to her bedchamber.

The opportunity to take a good long soak in a steaming-hot bath wasn’t to be sniffed at. Merlin alone knows he’d had to go long enough without during various missions and hunts. Above all else, it allowed him to continue quietly interrogating the priestess.

He’d realized quickly that he had come to be in some sort of religious establishment, surrounded by a cult with a fondness for the color red.

That didn’t explain how he’d been snatched from a burning manor house in England and transported to… wherever this was. Or why.

Unfortunately, his efforts to extract more information from Kinvara weren’t entirely fruitful. Not because she was unwilling to share it—she treated him with an almost unsettling degree of reverence, giving him flashbacks to being the ‘Chosen One’ in his sixth year.

No, it was a lack of understanding on both their parts.

It took quite a while to work out that Kinvara referred to herself as a servant to some sort of fire deity, which matched up with the odd presence in the enormous hearth he’d arrived through.

It also matched up somewhat with the circumstances. He’d been quite free with using conjured fire in the fight with Dolohov’s mob, and there were no lack of fire gods that had been worshipped on Earth.

Worshipped enough that they might have some lingering power that could be harnessed by the aspect of fire that Kinvara served. Belief gave power, and it was clear that her fire god was worshipped by a good many people.

That was the how, if not answered, then at least with a theory in place. The next question was, why was Harry here?

Kinvara was a little less clear on this, as her sister-priestess, Melisandre, seemed to have started the chain reaction that led to his arrival. Her prayers to this fire god were joined by the voices of the many priests and acolytes who’d witnessed his arrival.

However, there was one thing that she was clear on.

An image of a figure reaching into the heart of a flaming pyre, drawing from it a sword, the blade ablaze, and brandishing it against an encroaching darkness of cold and death. The figure, lit by the burning sword, had his face.

“Azor Ahai,” Kinvara repeated the words as she brought him a fine cotton cloth with which to towel himself off. She had a little smile on her lips as her eyes ventured down his body, the slightest tinge of pink about her cheeks.

Harry spared her a half-smirk, a faintly roguish look, as he ran a hand through the mop of hair, temporarily made manageable by thoroughly soaking it. He allowed his priestess to wash it with scented soaps.

His priestess?

A small voice of sanity spoke up, and with long practice from dealing with matters of his own heart and potentially homicidal or pyromaniac redheads, he swiftly crushed said voice of sanity.

It was just a pity Ginny had decided that murdering Death Eaters for sport wasn’t quite as fulfilling as an offer to play for the Holyhead Harpies, and that Susie Bones had already been rostered for a different mission when he decided to go and off Dolohov.

They’d have fitted in with the red theme, and he was quickly finding himself imagining them sharing Kinvara and Melisandre’s alluring dress sense.

Harry gave himself a mental smack over the back of the head, refocusing, even as his priestess gave him a little smirk. Evidently, something of what he was thinking had leaked out through their connection.

Azor Ahai, she’d called him.

He’d heard those two words over and again. They seemed to have a great meaning to the people who served this fire god. Still, every time he tried to get a meaning out of Kinvara, she simply pushed that vision across the connection, of a figure drawing a blazing sword from a pyre.

Clearly, it was a question of some importance but one not really worth pursuing until he could get a handle on their language. The deeper meaning was one that their connection wasn’t quite managing to convey.

When he explored his chambers a little more, Harry discovered that aside from his own garments, his hosts had provided ones of their own, which he welcomed as he realized just how hot the air had grown as the day passed.

He wasn’t discarding his dragonskin coat and boots, nor the mantle of the Peverells, but he did pick up a pair of fine black-dyed cotton breeches which were just long enough to tuck into the top of his boots.

A loose, silk shirt—crimson, picked through with gold thread, because wasn’t that a theme—worn with overlapping collars in a style he’d have pinned as Japanese or Chinese were he still on Earth. Complete with dragons dancing amidst flames as a pattern.

Appropriately dressed, Harry allowed Kinvara to guide him beyond a set of fine curtains and the shutters—both crimson, of course—to a balcony, looking out onto what lay beyond.

The Red Temple complex was an enormous one. Cloisters, domes, and towers spread across acres, his balcony on a corner of the colossal central block. A castle keep in all but name, but for the enormous dome that surmounted it.

Beyond the precincts of the temple lay a city, enclosed by extensive walls and split in two by a great river estuary, spanned by a covered bridge with so many arches that he could not even begin to count them. Sharing the same side of the river as the temple was an enormous black-walled citadel, a small city in its own right from all Harry could see.

In the streets below, red-clad acolytes and guards mixed with tiger-cloaked soldiers, elephants drew carts up to the gates of the temple precinct. Even from the very heart of the temple, they could hear the babble of voices.

“Volantis,” Kinvara announced, spreading her arms wide in a gesture to the city.

“Volantis,” Harry repeated, a flush of excitement going through him.

He’d explored the remains of Tenochtitlan, delved into the tombs of the sorcerers who served the Pharaohs and ventured into the land of Ur, but this was something wholly different.

A living city that no son or daughter of Earth had laid eyes on. The ghost of the child who’d spent night after night exploring the halls of Hogwarts under his father’s cloak reared its head.

“Come!” Harry ordered, wheeling around. “Volantis!”

Kinvara’s serene mask slipped for a moment as she followed Azor Ahai.

She saw him shrug his dragonskin coat about his shoulders, worn loose with his arms free, and the cloth-of-silver-and-death cloak clasped at his throat. She dove for the door to the chambers, snapping orders to the acolyte guarding the hall beyond to summon a guard from the Fiery Hand.

Their champion intended to explore the city.