uiio

A baby Harry who was whisked away by magic and sheltered under trees that bent their trunks to him in reverence. Lily’s pact with magic was clear: if he was to lose his mother, nature was to love him as its own.

Harry Potter grew up beneath a sun that smiles for him.

Dumbledore couldn’t find him, and that was by design. Centaurs sheltered him, braiding his hair and teaching how to shoot a bow; how to harvest and smear his face with berries meant for his mouth. Harry always ate like a mess, the Crups were to blame. While the centaurs taught Harry to speak English, the snakes did everything in their power to make him default to parseltongue. They invited him into their cove when the sun beat down too harshly, and Harry grew accustomed to sleeping below winding scales.

Oftentimes, creatures would mistake him for fey.

They looked on in awe as flowers bloomed where his little feet stamped the mud, lilies springing up in his wake. Harry - every the enthusiastic child - never looked back long enough to see them, but they grew and breathed with the wind, lasting long into the winter before reluctantly withering away. Sometimes, when bees were out and pollen spores clogged every nose in the forest, Harry heard a strange humming at night, like a lullaby. He liked to pretend it was just for him.

The land cherished him, but the water was greedy for him as well. He tans his skin under lapping waves, chatting with a jittery mermaid that does her best to distract him from her peers ripping into a human carcass below. Harry learns not to question the skulls on the banks. The river adorns him in pearls and jewels. The land creatures laugh at him when he surfaces, his skin one big wrinkle, but Harry would always smile with dimples on his sunburned cheeks before cheerfully fitting a pearl necklace on the most offended animal.

Harry is loved by every creature he meets. He can travel anywhere he wants - who could deny him? But there is one place he cannot go, and one thing nature knows for certain.

Keep him away from Albania.