All right- this is my first go at sporking a badfic. It’s a crossover between the Harry Potter series and Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera novels; Butcher is most known for his Dresden Files Urban Fantasy, but the Alera books are High Fantasy. They’re also awesome and I highly recommend them, though the first is easily the weakest.
In any case, the writing on this isn’t terribly bad, but Harry Potter canon is abused to the point of being barely recognizable, and the Alera sections of the story rely on a massively contrived plot point that almost certainly couldn’t happen in canon, and events in later chapters make one wonder why the author bothered making it a Harry Potter crossover at all, rather than just an Alera AU. Basically, like many badfic authors I think this person was just writing what they thought was cool without really thinking it through.
I apologize if I’m too heavy on the canon stuff and light on the snark, but canon defilement simply irks me. In any case, on with the show!
Cursor's Canim
By WizardsGirl
Prologue
"Harry James Potter, you are hereby sentenced to death via the Vale of Death
Vale of Death? Really? It’s veil, author, as in a concealing cloth, not vale as in valley. Though now I’m trying to imagine an entire valley somehow fitting inside the Department of Mysteries…,
for the murders of Hermione Jane Granger, Ronald Bilious Weasley, Ginerva Rose Weasley, Auror Nymphadora Mariah Tonks, Kingsley Michael Shacklebolt, and countless others through negligence and recklessness in the place of command," Cornelius Fudge, once more the Minister thanks to the convenient deaths of all those suitable to command, jeered from his place not thirty feet from me as I stood, silently, in the grips of the two Dementors. I felt myself smile thinly, but didn't make any noise.
Okay, Fudge? He was booted from office between books five and six because of the fiasco that was his reaction (or lack thereof) to Voldemort’s return. Pretty much the entire wizarding world wanted him gone. I think pretty much the entire Ministry would have to be dead before he could possibly get back into power, assuming he even had the guts to try, which I’m skeptical about.
Oh, and you spelled Hermione and Ron’s middle names, as well as Ginny’s first name, wrong.
They had tossed me straight into Azkaban, nearly before Voldemort's ashes had settled into the ground. No "Thank you for saving our sorry arses again, Harry" or even a "Good job, Potter". But what else could I expect from the turncoats and imbecile's that made up what remained of the Wizarding World, which had been fickle and tactless before hundreds had died in the Dark Wizarding War.
Can we please have some context here? Why did Harry get arrested for beating Voldemort, how did his friends die, and in general what on Earth is going on here?
And now, nearly thirty years later, I stood unaged and unburdened for the first time in my life, sentenced to walk into the thing that had killed my Godfather all those years ago. I would forever look seventeen, unless some serious magic was done…
…What. Just what. Is Harry Superboy from Young Justice now? Why isn’t he aging? There’s nothing in canon to support this, and…
Oh, God. This is a SuperPowerful!Harry fic, isn’t it? Help?
Or, at least, that's what the Dementor Queen told me once she had commanded her children to never feed from me.
Demetor… Queen. You know, I was under the impression they didn’t have or need genders, being spirits and all, and they don’t reproduce sexually, just sort of arise from mist, but I’ll let dementors having a leader slide, since we don’t’ see how they interact among themselves in canon.
You see, Dementors themselves are beings of Death, and must bow down to its Master as every other being must, eventually bow down. I really don't like being bowed to, though, and as Master of Death, thanks to the Deathly Hallows, I could keep them from doing it.
This, on the other hand? No, just no. Dementors are personifications of despair, not death- in fact, it’s explicitly stated in the books that they don’t kill, just feed on your emotions and, if they Kiss you, your soul. And being Master of Death just means you accepted your mortality and united the Hallows; there’s nothing there about controlling dementors or not aging (I’m assuming this is where the not aging part is coming from, anyway). And Harry hates and fears dementors more than anything, even Voldemort- he wouldn’t want to command them. And if he did, he wouldn’t sound so smug about it, and… argh!
"You may enter the Vale on your own power, or be forced into it," Fudge called to me, sneering; I cocked my head and watched him with my glowing green eyes. I knew they glowed, because when you spent three decades in a pitch-black cell, you tended to notice the green light coming from your face.
Um, Harry? You might want to get that checked out…
"My own feet, thank you," I said hoarsely, smiling coldly. "You people have helped quite enough." Immediately, without being ordered, the Dementors released me. I murmured a farewell to them in Parsletongue, and I loped slowly up the steps, pausing momentarily to close my eyes and listen to the whispers…
Why do dementors speak snake language? We never hear them talk in the books, but somehow I figured they’d be telepathic, considering what they are.
They sounded so pretty… And they told such fantastical stories as well… Smiling, I turned, waved at a much-aged Luna and Neville, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Harriet, named after me, who was crying. I smiled softly at them, blew them a kiss, turned, and stepped into the Vale, falling forward into darkness…
Yay, it’s over!
Wait, we’re only halfway through the prologue? Why?
(()_(() PAGE BREAK! ())_())
There was warmth, in the beginning, and an embracing darkness that enveloped and held me close. Whispers flew past ears, and Harry Potter ceased to exist for a time. There was only my magic and the Darkness. It was not Death, merely a… pause. A moment when nothing moved, nothing breathed, nothing happened.
No, it’s definitely death, or did you think Sirius just went on holiday or something?
It was a moment that ended too soon for me, but, then, all moments come to an end too soon. All the goods ones, at least…
And here we have a badfic staple- the angst. Mercifully brief, in this case.
I could suddenly feel myself, my seventeen-year-old body. I felt it… Change. It roiled and shifted and shrunk to the will of Magic and Fate, and I shifted with it. My body became younger and younger, until I was once more an infant, though not as I had been all those years ago when Voldemort first came for me in Godric's Hollow. This was different. Better in some ways, as well.
And apparently the Veil is now doing double-duty as 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Star Gate. Where’s HAL when you need him?
And during all this, the Whispers sang to me their stories, and my new destiny was touched upon, briefly. I saw pictures of battle with people controlling elemental creatures called Furies. A battle between people with Furies, and savages with alien eyes and white hair, called the Marat. I saw hulking wolf-men and women, fighting, killing, mating, raising their pups. Canim. They fascinated me more then the others, and I felt a sort of kinship with them. Siri and Remus, they were like these seven-foot-and-bigger beings in a way. Remus, with his wolf, would have understood them better, I suppose, then Sirius and Snuffles could, but the sense of… Understanding, we'll call it, between these wolf-people, and myself, was strong, and growing stronger with my body's constant shifting.
Okay, this is actually a decent enough rundown of the setting of the Alera books. But the Canim? They’re not werewolves or magical shapeshifters of any kind- they’re bipedal wolves all the time, and are totally different from humans both physically and in terms of their mindset. There really isn’t any kinship between them and Sirius or Remus, beyond the fact that those two sometimes turn into creatures that vaguely resemble them. Neither acts particularly Canim-like.
And please, don’t call Sirius “Siri”. I’ve read a book where the main character is named Siri, and she’s a princess in her late teens. Now I’m going to be imagining Sirius Black as her (or her as Sirius). On the other hand, the mental images are pretty amusing…
Suddenly, the time came to leave the Darkness and the Whispers, and my Magic curled inside my new body, waiting patiently, and I reluctantly agreed. I was needed elsewhere now, for my future was carefully entwined with another's of this new world, this new land where I was being sent. This land of Furies and Cursor's and war and intrigue.
Brief Alera infodump- it’s canon that there are passages between Earth and the setting of the Alera series. The Alerans themselves are descendants of a Roman Legion that got sucked into one of them. So in this case, the character from setting X gets bamfed into setting Y is pretty justified.
Why on Earth the Veil is doing this I have absolutely no clue. If you want to get Harry Potter to Alera, there are plenty of ways to manage it that would make a whole lot more sense.
This world of Alera.
No. Bad author. Much as the Alerans would like to think they’re the whole world, Alera is the name of the human nation that the series revolves around. The planet Alera is on is called Carna.
It was waiting for me, and I hoped that it was prepared, because it was going to get one hell of a surprise when I got there.
Yeah- no world is ever really ready for a Gary Stu to come dropping out of the sky onto it…
A/N: So, what's the verdict? I'll have the first chapter up in a bit, but, for now, this is just a teaser. R&R!
Verdict? Your Harry Potter canon has been knocked completely sideways and your premise makes no sense, but I’ve seen much, much worse. Let’s see how you do once you get to Alera, shall we? (I’ve only skimmed the later chapters, so I can’t speak for details, but there’s one thing I just can’t get past- but that’s next time…)
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