Chapter 160 - Limb Regeneration Potion

That time, Sirius Black had brought up James again.

Winnie was coming down the stairs and happened to hear every word.

She said, in that particular tone of hers, "Harry looks for his father in you, and you look for Harry's father in Harry. A child starved of love — fine, understandable. But you're starved of... love too? Oh, I'm so sorry, did I offend your orientation? Does Lily know about this?"

Harry forgot to be angry. He just felt that the Third Wizarding War — the first two being the war Grindelwald started, and the wizarding war Voldemort started ten years ago — was about to break out right here in this room.

Nobody thought Winnie had genuinely misunderstood Sirius Black's orientation. She was purely mocking him for seeking his dead brother's shadow in Harry.

Molly had scolded Sirius Black for the same thing, but honestly, nowhere near as viciously.

The scene that day was a powder keg meeting a lit match. To this day, not one person in the Order of the Phoenix dares bring it up — Harry included.

But to Harry's surprise, Sirius Black knocked on his door that very night and said he wanted to talk privately.

Harry clutched his pillow and followed closely behind Sirius Black, step for step, all the way to his bedroom.

Then Sirius Black pushed open the door, took one look inside, and smacked himself on the head. "Harry, let's go to your room instead."

Sirius Black's relationship with Kreacher had been utterly abysmal before, and that was one of the triggers for the whole Department of Mysteries disaster.

After the lesson was learned, Dumbledore had a long talk with Sirius Black about it.

Sirius Black genuinely loathed Kreacher, but for the greater good, he agreed to move his mother's portrait back into the entrance hall as a concession, a peace offering of sorts.

Even so, all they'd managed was a cold truce. Neither side crossed the other's line.

Kreacher would sooner die than set foot in Sirius Black's room. And Sirius Black had never cared much about tidiness. The result was a bedroom that looked like a small disaster.

"No." Harry quietly grabbed the bedpost with one hand. "I think it's perfectly fine."

If he got to be with Sirius Black, Harry would sleep in a rubbish heap without complaint.

In the end, Harry lay down on Sirius Black's bed.

Sirius Black said he wanted to hear what had been happening at school.

So Harry talked. He talked about Ron and Hermione, about his other classmates, about Quidditch, talked and talked until his throat went dry.

Bedtime conversations have a way of building momentum, and Harry felt more awake now than when he'd started.

"Harry." Sirius Black folded his hands behind his head and said, out of nowhere, "I owe you an apology."

"For what?" Harry stared at him. "Sirius, I think you're wonderful. All of it — everything about you."

Sirius Black turned onto his side and studied Harry's face for a long moment, then looked him in the eyes. "Harry, when I was little, my mother desperately wanted me to be like my idiot brother Regulus."

The more Walburga pushed, the more Sirius Black hated her and Regulus both. Regulus was a mama's boy. A weakling. A puppet of the Black family.

He, Sirius Black, would never be Regulus. Would never be anyone else. He lived by his own will and no one else's. He was himself, full stop.

"Harry, I owe you an apology." Sirius Black said. "I... you are you, Harry."

"Winnie was right. If I truly treat James as my brother and you as my godson, then James will only ever be James, and you will only ever be you. Just like no matter how far gone my mother got, I never became a second Regulus."

Winnie had far too little patience for this sick dog.

And of everyone in that room, she was the only one who had the right to say it. She too had the daughter of an old friend. She too could never see Silvia again. But Praeris would only ever be Praeris, and Silvia would only ever be Silvia.

Searching for Silvia in Praeris was an insult to both of them.

Harry blinked, a little unsteady. He had sought fatherly love in Sirius Black too.

The good news was that he'd never forgotten Sirius Black was his godfather. He just craved hearing more about James, that was all.

Sirius Black's guilt rang a bell he couldn't un-ring: a godfather is a godfather. A father is a father.

"What's there to apologize for, Sirius." Harry said, and he meant it. "Having you — that's already the best gift."

Back at his aunt's house, Harry had ached to be a child with parents. Ached to be protected.

He had Sirius Black now. How could he ask for the gift to be any more perfect than this?

Whether Harry's gift was perfect or not was another matter. Praeris, before she even touched her Christmas presents, had to figure out how to explain herself to Professor Snape.

According to Muggle-family survival guides, when a child has done something they feel guilty about, the smart move is to do some housework and earn a bit of goodwill before the reckoning arrives.

On Christmas morning, the moment Praeris confirmed that there was nothing from the Half-Blood Prince among her gifts, she knew she was in trouble.

She went straight back down to the underground classroom and prayed that today's experiments would produce some kind of dramatic breakthrough, something that might earn her a lenient sentence, ideally walking away completely free.

Before this, Praeris had already tested a wide range of common ingredients.

Factoring in each ingredient's properties and effects, the current formula stood at: salamander blastema, hyacinth bulb, holly leaf juice, and honeysuckle powder, among others.

This was already a tamed, iterated version. The early drafts hadn't looked like anything a living creature could consume.

The hyacinth bulb served primarily as an analgesic and anti-inflammatory in potions, to spare the patient the worst of the pain.

Holly represented life. In potions, holly leaf and honeysuckle powder carried the final step: accelerating wound closure and full healing.

Hyacinth bulb, salamander blastema, holly leaf juice, and honeysuckle powder, a chain. Pain relief, then regeneration, then complete recovery.

Before she'd built that chain, the horned toads had been dying in an impressive variety of ways. The 2 most common: poisoned by the potion, or killed by the pain of amputation.

That was what pushed Praeris to find the right ingredient to anchor the pain-relief function.

Now, the surviving toads could grow back a leg, a leg roughly a quarter of the original's length, scrawny and pitiful, but there.

The urgent problem was that the salamander blastema wasn't potent enough for full limb regeneration.

Praeris could not begin to picture Dumbledore dueling Voldemort with an arm a quarter its original length. The image was genuinely horrifying.

To solve the potency gap, she needed something that could amplify the blastema's effect.

Spread across the table in front of her was a collection of materials: dragon's blood, phoenix ash from sublimation, Basilisk venom, powdered Graphorn horn, Lobalug venom sac, Re'em blood, and more.

An impressive gathering, every item on that table. Each one either rare, expensive, or outright illegal.

Dragon blood, Re'em blood, powdered Graphorn horn, hard to source, sold at prices that made you wince, sometimes not available at any price. The Lobalug venom sac fell firmly into the illegal column.

The Basilisk venom had come from Harry, during last year's Occlumency lessons. When the memory surfaced, Harry had made Praeris swear she'd never pass it to Draco Malfoy, in case he used it to poison someone.

The phoenix ash from sublimation came from the headmaster's office. An obscure ancient potions text had mentioned it in passing.

Praeris started with the dragon's blood.

That small vial had been coaxed out of Professor Snape by Praeris, the self-proclaimed Supreme Leech Warrior, and once it was gone, it was gone.

She held her breath as she tipped it, terrified of using too much, equally terrified of splashing potion back into the vial and contaminating what remained.

BLOP!

One drop of dragon's blood fell into the cauldron. Praeris stirred clockwise immediately, working the blood and the salamander blastema into full contact.

Under her stirring, the potion shifted to a deep golden-red, and each breaking bubble sent up a small bright arc, leaping golden carp, if you squinted.

The second cauldron held phoenix ash. The potion turned a reddish-brown, the color of dried blood.

The third held Basilisk venom. The potion was contaminated almost instantly, the red liquid went black shot through with green in a matter of seconds.

The others followed the same pattern, each a slightly different shade.

Praeris ran back and forth between the cauldrons, wishing she'd been born with compound eyes.

She hadn't been. She was just a young witch with one pair of eyes and a brain she was running at full speed, sweeping glances replacing careful observation, head turning so fast it looked like she was shaking it no at everything.

Her hands were everywhere at once, reaching for dragon's blood, phoenix ash, snake venom, Re'em blood in turn.

She was spinning herself like a top, round and round through the cauldrons.

Half an hour later, all of them had been stopped.

Praeris sat at the experiment table with zero dignity remaining, looking exactly like a young witch who had saved up weeks of pocket money for Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans and pulled out the bogey-flavored one, completely and utterly done with life.

Right.

Praeris stood up sharply and clenched her fists.

Your friend Toad Slaughterer is online.

8 vials, 8 different colors, lined up in a row. Each held a small sample of one potion, labeled with the ingredient that had gone into it.

Praeris looked like someone who had been gutting fish in Southend-on-Sea for a decade straight. Toad in one hand, knife in the other. Blade up, blade down. Not so much as a blink.

The dragon's blood version: new leg, strong but too short. The phoenix ash version: new leg, right length, but weak. The Graphorn version: new leg, strong, long enough, but deformed and twisted. The Lobalug version: toad stopped breathing. The Re'em version: no new leg, but the toad's body was somehow healthier than before the amputation.

The only toad with a healthy new leg, correct length, no deformity, was the one that had drunk the Basilisk venom version.

Her experiment had... succeeded?

Praeris sat there in a daze, and then slowly melted into her chair.

3 months. This had taken 3 full months. Classes, sleep, experiments, that was it, that was her life. Every meal a hasty afterthought. She'd grown up on black bread; she wasn't going to starve now.

She'd started by borrowing a dozen or so horned toads from Slughorn. Nowhere near enough. Some of those toads had been put through amputation more than once. At one point she'd considered their forelimbs.

When she reported her progress, Professor Snape's temple vein had made its opinion known. He agreed to provide more horned toads.

52 horned toads had died in the course of this experiment. Roughly 4 times the projected number.

The rare herbs and animal-derived materials were beyond counting. Professor Snape's Galleons and hers had flowed out like water.

And then there was time, the cruelest constraint of all. The longer Praeris's experiment ran, the greater the pressure on Professor Snape to hold the curse back.

She squeezed time out of her schedule like wringing water from a stone. The gaps between coursework and the social engagements she couldn't avoid. That was where experiments happened.

Eating, sitting in class, lying in bed, always, some corner of her mind was turning the problem over, looking for the flaw she'd missed.

She looked like she was paying attention. She wasn't, not entirely.

Praeris had never been a note-taker. Her brain was her notebook.

But this experiment had broken her again and again. Too many failures. Too many reversals. Too much second-guessing her own decisions, crossing out, starting over.

Goal-oriented research was different from open development. When she brewed for herself, for her own curiosity, stumbling onto an unexpected result still counted as a win.

The regeneration potion had one goal. And it could not fail.

That was what finally drove her to pick up an actual notebook and fill it with experiment records, half-formed ideas, tangents she couldn't afford to forget.

Every page looked like Goyle's comic books. Flowing cursive looping over itself in every direction.

Nobody else could read it.

Like a witch in the Muggle sense of the word, the old fairy-tale kind, she had spent months hidden underground, surrounded by bubbling cauldrons, sleeping when she could, and somewhere in there said goodbye to someone she loved.

Now, it was mostly done. A few adjustments remained before any of this could be used on a real person.

And the feelings she'd been pressing down under the weight of the work began pushing back. Quiet at first, then all at once, like weeds breaking through cracked concrete.

Oh. She and Draco Malfoy had broken up, hadn't they.

Last night, she'd watched proud, proud Draco Malfoy standing there in that humiliating situation, and without a second's hesitation she'd opened her mouth and said she was the one who'd invited him.

Not long before that, she had told Professor Snape that she and Draco Malfoy had nothing to do with each other.

And she knew exactly what Draco Malfoy had been up to.

FUCK!

Damn it all. Why did her heart always outrun her head.

Praeris hadn't pinned up her hair in weeks. She let it hang down, black and loose. Her mood was foul, so she shoved her hands into it and dragged them through without any particular care, rougher than petting a dog.

Right. What did Professor Snape's book say?

"There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now."*

The day Professor Snape had predestined for dealing with his student was just as fixed. If not tomorrow, then today.

Praeris stood up, washed and dried the potion vials, and whistled to herself as she divided the cauldron's contents into 3 equal portions.

Fate, oh fate.

Fortune plays its tricks.

Voldemort had kept a Basilisk in the school, intending it to kill. And the Basilisk's venom had become the very ingredient that gave Dumbledore a way out from under his curse.

Even a sparrow gets its chance to live.

Doesn't it?

➤ Next: Christmas Gift — Face to Face