Harry stayed home for two quiet, grounding weeks.
He had wanted to spend time with the girls. They had spent the time having fun and relaxing, but Harry would decide to just up and vanish again.
The girls really weren't all that happy that he would still be jumping through worlds, but they all knew that he wouldn't stop, so in the end, they decided to just make the most of their time together before he leaves again.
Though now it seemed the girls seemed to always have an eye on him as if they were afraid he would leave without telling them. That had been something that they made clear to him, if he was going to another world, he must, and they meant it, must tell them at the very least. His heart couldn't help but beat more for these girls of his.
Though that still didn't stop them from worrying and trying to always keep an eye on him.
Daphne pretended like she wasn't part of the whole thing, but from the way she always kept him close to her and the way she acted like she wasn't counting the minutes when they were together was somewhat funny, but also caring, her eyes always lingered on him a second too long every time he stood up.
Tonks pretended she wasn't watching him like a hawk, even as her hair shifted into a protective, anxious shade of indigo whenever he talked about the world jumping. Anya didn't bother to pretend at all, she simply stayed close, and not once since he came back did she go back to work.
Everything seemed a little bit too much but harry didnt really mind, but after a while things got better and after the two weeks that was when he jumped again, and now after everything it was seven months and his girls had somewhat gotten use to it aftre seeing how much harry was doing to always comeback to them on time and how better he had gotten with the whole thing.
In those seven months, Harry had begun to realize that the Void wasn't as chaotic as he had first thought, it had ways everything moved, and Harry had started paying attention to it, started memorizing it despite knowing he could never fully map it all out, still, it was helping just know how the void was.
His second jump had been... unforgettable, in the worst possible way. He had landed in a reality infested with sentient, human-sized roaches that possessed a clicking hive-mind and a taste for mammalian flesh.
The sheer, oily wrongness of the place, the sound of millions of chitinous legs scraping against dead concrete, had triggered a visceral reaction. Harry had left that world the moment his power recharged, but not before two of its continents were erased from existence by a localized storm of divine fire.
He hadn't fought them for justice or shit like that, no, he had wiped them out of pure, unadulterated revulsion. Even now, months later, the memory of that clicking sound made his skin crawl. God, he hated bugs.
Interestingly, that jump had revealed the first true quirk of temporal drift. Anya told him that from her perspective, he had stepped into the rift and then scant seconds later, the rift had belched him back out, smelling of ozone and dead insects.
To him, 32 hours had passed, to her, it was a blink. The third jump, however, had nearly been his last. It was a mistake born of pure, unadulterated curiosity. Harry had wondered if thinking of a "challenging" environment would lead him somewhere productive.
It could.
The problem was that Harry's mind had not really specified where he wanted to go or the little filters like humans and things like that, no, he was just looking to see if he could see what would happen if a destination was not specified.
He had landed in a world comprised entirely of acid. There was no land, no continents, no solid ground to greet his boots. It was an endless, churning ocean of corrosive green liquid that stretched to every horizon, with only a thin, pressurized layer of toxic gas between the sea and a bruised, static-filled sky.
The moment he materialized, he plummeted. The pain was instant and soul-searing, his skin began to peel away in layers, his nerves screamed as the pH level of the world tried to turn his blood into vinegar, and even his Godslayer bones ached under the pain. He had to react or dissolve into a soup.
Harry had hardened reality around himself, creating a protective shell of condensed matter and magic. He created a small space of air and land to help him out, and that was how he had been lucky to survive.
For thirty-nine agonizing hours, he maintained that barrier, suspended in a ball of hardened rock and magic while his regeneration put him back into shape.
He had to stay conscious under the pain and everything, if he had lost consciousness for even a moment, well, he was sure his girls would have found a way to summon his soul back just to kill him again.
Every second had really been a test of his sanity and will, but he had lived, and well he learned.
Lesson learned? Curiosity without caution was a death sentence, even for someone like him, especially for someone like him.
The fourth world, he landed in a city called Silent Hill. It had been a different kind of weird. A city choked in ash and fog, filled with rust and sirens that sounded like the screams of the damned.
It was a horror show of a place, yet Harry found it fascinating. He felt a strange intelligence in that city, something ancient and hungry that recognized him as a "Greater Predator." It felt as though the world itself had sensed his arrival and shoved all its monsters into a hidden closet, refusing to play until the dangerous guest had left. He stayed the required forty-eight hours, peering into the fog with Odin's sight, feeling the city hold its breath in his presence until he left.
By now, the patterns were undeniable. His power always recharged in a span of forty-eight hours, never more, rarely less. This meant every jump was a mandatory two-day commitment to a foreign reality at most. Two days in a place like the Acid World was a lifetime of torture, two days in a city of fog was a boring mystery.
But this understanding allowed him to better understand his "Fishing in the Void," as he had started calling it.
When he opened a rift now, he was casting "strings." Using the wisdom of the All-Father, he began to see the patterns in the void of chaos, and he gave him a better understanding.
The closer a world was to his own, the more their time-streams synchronized. The farther they drifted, or if the world was rotationally misaligned across the rift, the faster the clocks began to spin.
And then came the breakthrough, Anchoring.
By wrapping his strings not just around a single point, but around the collective "world-strings" of a world itself, Harry could tether a world to his own. It was an exhausting, monumental feat, but it was worth it in every way.
It was like tying a balloon to a child so that it always floated by the side of the child and not drift away, so they kept the world from drifting away, and the time between them seemed to sync up, and it won't cost him anything if he ever decided to go back to the worlds he'd gone to.
So far, he had anchored two.
The first was the "Canon" Harry Potter world he had visited. It was the only place he felt safe enough to eventually take his girls for a vacation at the moment, a world where the stakes were low enough for them to relax but still amaze them.
The second choice was the Acid World.
Daphne had been horrified when he told her about that world and what he had gone through there, and couldn't understand why he decided to 'keep' the world, but Harry's logic was sound, well, at least to himself.
He didn't want the roach-infested hellscape anywhere near his home world, and he didn't want the creeping, psychological rot of the fog-city.
But a dead world? A world of pure, cleansing acid with no life to mourn? It was the perfect dumping ground. A prison for enemies that wouldn't die, a testing field for his most destructive authorities, and a private realm that he could eventually reshape into something useful someday.
He was going to experiment with that world till his heart's content.
Which brought him to today. Another jump, another experiment.
He had aimed for a human world this time, but was also hoping to have a world with the divine in it. So far, he had not actively gone to any world that may have gods or any divine beings in it, but now he was looking for one. There were a ton of worlds that had both humans and gods in them, but still, he hadn't expected to land here.
In this particular world.
Harry stood on a grassy hill, the air smelling of strawberries, sea salt, and a faint, electric hum of power in the air.
Nearby, a group of children were cheering, gathered around a young man with a bright, heroic grin. The boy looked like he had just won a great victory, basking in the adoration of his peers while he flexed. Oldmen and women were there too, watching and cheering.
Harry turned his head, his gaze sweeping the crowd until it locked onto a figure standing at the very back, watching the celebration with a quiet, paternal pride. The man was short, slightly round, not wearing a shirt at all, but beneath his waist were the hairy hindquarters of a goat and small horns atop his head.
A satyr.
"Holy shit," Harry whispered, a small, genuine laugh bubbling out of his chest. He couldn't believe he was here. Here, of all places. He burst out laughing, a sound of pure disbelief and mounting delight.
"I never thought I'd end up here," he murmured, shaking his head. "Of all the places in the multiverse, I didn't ever think I would ever...this place hadn't even crossed my mind."
Then his eyes gleamed with a predatory, emerald fire. He could feel the divinity in the air. It was slightly different from the Heretic Gods he was used to, but the "flavor" of their power was unmistakable.
"Well," Harry smiled, his hand resting on the hilt of a sword that wasn't there yet, but soon would be. "It's not a bad place to be. In fact... it has exactly what I was looking for."
This was going to be very, very good.
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