Harry Potter and the Rune Stone Path

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Harry Potter and the Rune Stone Path is a Harry Potter Fanfic written in 2016 by "Temporal Knight".

Several months before he receives his Hogwarts letter, Harry discovers a small trunk labeled "Lily's Chest of Awesome" while cleaning the Dursleys' attic. In it he finds a pendant with the initials "LJH" on it, and three notebooks. The notebooks are his mother's advanced notes in three magical fields -- Charms, Potions and Ancient Runes. The Charms and Potions books are incomprehensible to him, but the Runes are easy for him to understand, and he takes to them like a duck to water.

The notebooks also have one other important piece of information in them -- that his parents' wills were to specify that Harry never be placed with the Dursleys if anything happened to Lily and James.

It's a Harry who is more suspicious and mistrustful of adults -- and is already designing complex clusters of runes -- who arrives at Hogwarts for his first year. His passion for runes immediately causes conflict between him and Ron Weasley, who cannot imagine why anyone would do schoolwork voluntarily, but when Ron sends Hermione crying to the girls' bathroom on Halloween, Harry labels him a bully and abandons what little friendship existed between the two; when Neville joins him in rescuing Hermione a different trio forms. And when Harry blows the head off the troll with an incomplete rune cluster intended to create fireworks, he gains the attention of the first teacher he comes to trust -- 19-year-old Professor Bathsheda "Shiva" Babbling, who realizes that he is a Runes savant and offers to guide his studies and keep him from blowing himself up with his experimentation. It's a friendship that will change the course of Harry's life.

A well-written and well thought out Alternate Universe that works its way through all seven years, Harry Potter and the Rune Stone Path rapidly diverges from canon in many ways. Its Harry is uniquely gifted with an unusual ability, but is not the godlike!Harry so often seen in such fics. He also displays more realistic behaviors for a child subject to the almost Dickensian abuse inflicted by the Dursleys, and as such is less social, less trusting, and far more intolerant of bullying behavior in other children. And knowing that his parents did not want him to be with the Dursleys keeps him from falling into uncritical worship of a Dumbledore who doesn't deserve it.

The story is not without its flaws, though. It indulges in fairly standard Weasley-bashing, with Ron and Molly coming in for almost all of it. (Surprisingly, Ginny -- normally part of the triumvirate of Weasley-bashing targets -- is spared here.) Most prominently it features a stock Manipulative!Dumbledore (bordering on actively evil, but for a reason). However its Dumbledore is a deliberate characterization choice made by the author for story reasons, not because it is his preconception of who Dumbledore is. And it has a remarkable character in its interpretation of Bathsheda Babbling, and her approach to dealing with Harry's situation with the Dursleys is possibly unique in the fandom.

It can be read on Fanfiction.net here.

Tropes used in Harry Potter and the Rune Stone Path include:

• Adults Are Useless: Harry starts the story operating under the assumption that this trope is undeniably true -- and only the best case scenario. (Worst case? Adults are actively malevolent.) He only trusts Shiva, initially, because she convinces him that her youth makes her more a kid like him than an adult like the other professors. He similarly comes to trust Tonks because she's Shiva's contemporary and acts younger than him most of the time they're together when they first meet. Amelia Bones also gains his respect and trust, because she treats him with respect, pays attention to what he has to say, and treats his concerns seriously. However, he eventually grows out of his automatic distrust of adults.
• Affectionate Nickname: By herself in private, Bellatrix Lestrange refers to Voldemort as "Voldybear".
• Alpha Bitch: The ultimate example of the trope appears as an Enemy Without generated by a runic device for Fleur Delacour to face during the second task of the Tri-Wizard Tournament. Later called the Queen Bee, she is a version of Fleur who has completely embraced her Veela heritage and a philosophy of "want-take-have", using her Allure to get anything she wants and control anyone she needs to.
  • A more manageable version appears in Daphne Greengrass, who is described several times as "an Alpha" and is arguably not a pleasant person when outside of the core group surrounding Harry -- at least initially.
• Arranged Marriage: Thanks to his Gringotts account manager, Harry discovers an incomplete marriage contract between himself and Ginny Weasley, arranged by Dumbledore and Molly Weasley five days after his parents were killed. Lacking only Dumbledore's signature (as Harry's magical guardian), it can't be completed -- but while it exists it prevents other contracts from being made for him. (Harry has it buried in a vault to which Dumbledore has no access until he is legally an adult and can destroy it himself.)
  • During Harry and Hermione's defense of Fleur at the Quidditch World Cup, they kill a Death Eater in his 50s to whom Millicent Bulstrode's parents were going to affiance her; she's very grateful that they did so (and apparently so are her parents, as they side with Harry on an important Wizengamot vote not long after).
  • In fifth year, Harry and Daphne voluntarily enter into a marriage contract together to prevent her father from marrying her off to Blaise Zabini (who's dating Sally-Ann Perks and isn't terribly happy about the idea, either).
• Asexuality: Charlie Weasley. If he's not exclusively dracophiliac, as speculated by Shiva and other characters.
• Australia: "[W]here even the grass can kill you!" -- when Harry hears that the "equipment" for the second task of the Tri-Wizard Tournament was created in Australia, he's sure it's going to be deadly. He's right.
• Battle Couple: Viktor Krum and Millicent Bulstrode.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Harry's repeated struggles against the horcrux in his mindscape after Lily's protection ends, culminating in the visual of its destruction by the "Soul Cage" rune stone.
• BDSM: Shiva and Lily begin indulging in light bondage play after their relationship starts looking serious and long-term.
• Because Destiny Says So: Essentially Harry's reasoning for not running off to Australia after the Yule Ball in his fourth year -- he senses that something bigger, if unseen, is happening and it won't let him go.
• The Berserker: Neville has distinct berserker tendencies, his friends notice.
• Beware the Nice Ones: When Luna completely drops the "Looney" persona in the last battle, she is a terror.
• Bi the Way: Shiva mentions having both ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends (the latter including Charlie Weasley). Harry explicitly comments on this when discussing sexualities with Daphne in third year, and just how it and they matter to him, when she talks to him about starting a relationship with Tracey.
  • Hermione expresses at least a willingness to try bisexuality as she explicitly includes her own compatibility with them as a factor in choosing a second girlfriend/wife for Harry when it becomes necessary for him to have one. (Later, she turns out to be willing to do more than just try.)
  • Fleur Delacour.
  • Lily Potter had a fling with Marlene McKinnon while in Hogwarts, and gets into a relationship with Shiva after her "resurrection".
• Black and White Morality: Dumbledore subscribes to this philosophy, denying that the neutral families are actually so -- if they aren't "Light" (and he is the sole judge of what is and isn't "Light"), then they of necessity must be "Dark", regardless of what they do or say.
• Brother-Sister Incest: The Carrow siblings have been in a long-standing sexual relationship; Rita Skeeter apparently joined in occasionally.
• Calling the Old Man Out: When Hermione is petrified near the end of second year, and it turns out that the mail-order mandrakes were never sent for, Harry delivers a blistering diatribe to Dumbledore and several other teachers.
• Chekhov's Gun: Quite a few. The author actually mentions in an author's note at the start of one chapter that he's hung several of them in it. That said, a few prominent examples.
  • The pendant -- after Harry puts it on in the first few pages, it is not mentioned again until Harry finally hears his parents' wills, more than a third of the way through the story, at which point it drops off the radar again until it pays off at the two-thirds point.
  • A terribly dangerous ritual to become an animagus almost instantly becomes critical to Harry's survival of the first task of the Tri-Wizard Tournament.
  • The runes possessed by a doppelganger of Harry created as part of the second task of the Tri-Wizard Tournament.
• Conversational Troping: On the part of the narrative voice, which occasionally breaks out trope names direct from this site. And occasionally a trope name pops up in various characters' dialogue.
• Cool Pet: Coco, Luna's crumple-horned snorkack. Snorkacks, it turns out, are a subterranean species known to the goblins, who keep them as pets. They gave one to Harry so he could give it to Luna. Coco is a quadruped about the size of a small dog, is at least as intelligent as a chimp if not near-human, and has a mobile enough face to make recognizable expressions such as smiling.
• Crazy Prepared: Tracy calls Hermione this when Hermione comes up with a prepared marriage contract between Harry and Daphne at exactly the moment it's needed.
  • Voldemort, during the first war, went into magical battle with protections against guns and other conventional weapons on himself.
• Cue the Flying Pigs: In chapter 38, discussing whether or not Snape would change his ways after the criticism levelled at him by the revived Lily Potter, Harry suggests pigs flying was just as likely. To which Luna responds

"Daddy made pigs fly over the summer actually. He thought it might attract a Drifting Kelburg – sadly it didn't work. I don't think those are real myself, but it did seem to be worth attempting at least."

• Determinator: The trope name is alluded to when a doppelganger of Harry is described as advancing on him like "a determined Terminator".
• Dirty Coward: Zacharias Smith, who is one of the only two Hogwarts casualties at the last battle because he turned and ran moments after entering the fight.
• Enemy Without: Facing one created by a rune-covered monolith is the second task of the story's version of the Tri-Wizard Tournament.
• Everyone Is Bi: Well, not literally everyone, but by about three-quarters of the way through the story it appears that most of the female characters and at least a few male characters are bisexual or have experimented with bisexuality.
  • Harry averts this, explicitly declaring that, unlike practically everyone else in his social circle, he is not bi.
• Evil Overlord: Because Harry is too happy and confident, and far too independent and disrespectful, Dumbledore (who is mentally unstable and spiraling into senility) decides early on that he has turned from the Light and is in fact an up-and-coming Dark Lord.
  • An actual Evil Overlord!Harry appears as an opponent for Harry in the second task of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, created by a runic device.
• The Exile:
  • The Flamels bind Dumbledore's magic and put him in a Muggle nursing home when he has a Villainous Breakdown after Voldemort's resurrection and admits to a small crowd to trying to have Harry killed to keep him from growing in power as an incipient Dark Lord.
  • The students involved in an attempted rape of Daphne Greengrass have their wands snapped and their magic bound, and are sent into the Muggle world. (Except for the one who was framed as the "leader". He was sent to Azkaban -- supposedly.)
  • After she seizes control of the Greengrass family, Daphne banishes her father Marcus to one of the family's small houses in the country with a stipend and a requirement to keep away from her and all family business.
• Faking the Dead:
  • The Flamels. Indeed, they weren't originally the Flamels, that was just the most recent identity they had used, and that for an unusually long time. Hermione and Harry both suspected this would be the case, figuring that despite Dumbledore's claims otherwise, after six centuries they were used to people trying to steal the Philosopher's Stone and weren't going to pack it all in just because Voldemort tried to steal it.
  • Lily Potter, though to be fair not intentionally. A side effect of the protection she devised for Harry put her into a death-like state of Suspended Animation, and it was only Dumbledore sealing the Potters' wills that kept her from being immediately revived after Voldemort's defeat.
• Faux Death: Lily Potter. Her body going into a deathlike state of suspended animation was part of the system of protections she designed and implemented for Harry. She was supposed to be revived immediately after Voldemort's defeat but Dumbledore sealed the Potters' wills, where the instructions on how to do so were listed, resulting in her being buried for nearly a decade and a half.
• For Want of a Nail: What if Harry Potter was a prodigy with Ancient Runes? First year still looks like canon, but the divergences grow quickly... And at least one critical divergence took place long before.
• Freudian Excuse: What appears to be a fanfic-standard Manipulative! and/or Evil!Dumbledore is because Dumbledore is senile and growing worse as the story progresses, leading to his conviction that because Harry is not humble and respectful to him and does not obey his perfectly reasonable demands without question, the boy must of course be a future Dark Lord already deeply corrupted by the horcrux in him.
• Genki Girl: Astoria Greengrass.
• Genre Savvy: Daphne Greengrass. At the start of fourth year, she tells Harry that she's expecting him to be selected for the Tri-Wizard Tournament whether he tries to get into it or not, based on the previous three years.
  • Later, most of Harry's girls demonstrate various levels of Genre Savvy, doing their best to avoid Tempting Fate.
• Groin Attack: Shiva knees Gilderoy Lockhart in the balls when he persists in pursuing her even though she's rebuffed him. Later, a chunk of collapsing ceiling in the tunnel to the Chamber of Secrets also gets him in the crotch.
• Happily Adopted: Harry, by Shiva, with everything made official by the summer of his second year.
• Harmless Freezing: Possibly due to the canonical greater durability of wizards, Marcus Flint does not appear to take any serious damage from being encased in ice by Harry when the latter rescues Luna Lovegood from a potential rape at his hands.
  • After Harry freezes Pansy to a wall while rescuing Daphne from a gang rape attempt, he suggests to the professors who show up that she should probably be chipped or melted out quickly, suggesting the freezing may not be as harmless as Flint's case suggested.
• Has Two Mommies: Harry, after reviving Lily about two thirds of the way through the story.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Used word-for-word by Tonks in chapter 40, probably as a direct invocation of the trope.
• Hollywood Exorcism: Harry's "Soul Cage" rune is explicitly compared to an exorcism, and is less complicated than any movie exorcism ever seen. (Thought not less painful.)
• Ice Queen: As is common in Potter fanfic, Daphne Greengrass has this nickname and reputation. Unlike other fanfics, though, she gets it from having a family spell called "The Ice Crusher" which is used to discourage unwelcome male attention by targeting their genitalia with cold, and can be cast at levels ranging from "painful" to "never father children". After he leads the rape attempt on her, Daphne hits Draco Malfoy with the highest level of the spell.
• Insane Troll Logic: Dumbledore's increasingly demented interpretations of everything in Harry's life as evidence of Dark plans and intent, all predicated on the "obvious" fact that Voldemort's accidental horcrux has either corrupted him or taken him over completely. This reaches the point that when Fawkes abandons him because of the things he's done, Dumbledore starts seriously wondering how Harry corrupted an incorruptible creature of pure Light.
• Insistent Terminology: Since he was never supposed to be in Azkaban to begin with, after Sirius is cleared of all charges he maintains that he spent those twelve years in exile on a tropical island instead. He's not delusional, it's just his way of coping combined with a Running Gag.
  • Harry and his girls, regardless of where the latter fit into the complex web of roles and positions dictated by law and custom (wife, consort, concubine...) all call each other "partners", and only that.
• Jerkass: Ron Weasley, almost entirely driven by the combination of laziness and jealousy. Early on he tries to steal Harry's invisibility cloak because he feels he can make better use of it than Harry does. In fourth year, when both Harry and his brother Fred get into the Tri-Wizard Tournament, Ron bellows out a wish that Harry would die and Fred be badly injured in the tournament, because they "cheated" to get in and didn't share the method with him. Because of his behavior he's all but permanently estranged from the Twins and Ginny.
• Killer Rabbit: Coco, Luna's adorable puppy-sized snorkack, rips out Mulciber's throat and continues on to tear her way through Death Eaters and Waffen SS at the last battle.
• Love Chart: In chapter 27, Luna is disappointed that she's missed the chance to make one. She apparently makes one anyway by the end of the chapter, although it's not seen "on-screen".
• Mad Scientist: After exposure to Muggle media, Daphne describes Harry this way.
• Manipulative Bastard: Dumbledore, in spite of (and maybe also because of) being senile and unstable. In addition to placing Harry with the Dursleys to "toughen him up" so that he could resist the horcrux in him, he influenced multiple people to revive the Tri-Wizard Tournament as a way to kill Harry (whom he believed to be irreversibly corrupted by the horcrux after his second year), and specifically manipulated Dolores Umbridge into making the arrangements for specific events.
• Motive Rant: Umbridge delivers one to Shiva while stuck in an acromantula web at the start of the fourth task of the Tri-Wizard Tournament.
  • When Harry survives the Tournament and Voldemort is resurrected, Dumbledore has a Villainous Breakdown and admits not only to manipulating Umbridge to get Harry killed, but declares it's because Harry is obviously a young Dark Lord who's already utterly corrupted by the horcrux within him and is gathering followers for his own version of the Death Eaters.
• Motor Mouth: Colin Creevey. Gabrielle Delacour. Astoria Greengrass.
• Mundane Solution: Something of a theme, at least in the early part of the story. Already by the beginning of his second year, Harry's friends are encouraging him to find simpler answers to some problems than "create a rune cluster". For instance, when Colin Creevey is petrified in second year and it's unclear if his mind is still active or not, Harry's first impulse is to come up with a magical TV using runes to keep him from sensory deprivation; Neville suggests just putting a Wizarding Wireless by his bed.
• No Name Given: The third Ravenclaw involved in bullying Luna never gets named, but is instead referred to exclusively as "her" and "you" depending on the context. This even though she gets dialogue and action in several scenes. It's not until the last moments she appears "on-screen" that Dumbledore addresses her as "Miss Randle". We never do find out her first name.
• Non Sequitur Thud: When he wakes up after fainting from exposure to the dementor on the Hogwarts Express at the start of third year, Harry asks, "Did anyone get the number of that lorry?"
• Obfuscating Insanity: Luna's definitely employing this tactic in this fic. The first time she drops it is quite a surprise to everyone around her.
• OC Stand-In: Bathsheda "Shiva" Babbling is very different from what little is known of the canon Babbling.
• On a Scale From One To Ten: A type B appears in this passage:

"On a scale of one to shadow panther, I think we hit Giant Squid on that one."

• Polyamory: What Harry's group is evolving into by mid-fourth year.
  • Neville, Susan and Hannah appear to have reached this point even earlier.
• Power Tattoo: After the first task of the Tri-Wizard tournament, Harry comes up with the idea of tattooing runes for spells and other effects onto his body, starting with a rune for Accio on his right palm. He's apparently not the first to come up with the idea, but he's more successful and takes it further than anyone else seems to have before.
• Pressure Point: Tonks demonstrates that she knows mundane (not mystic) pressure point techniques while massaging Harry's head to relax him.
• Primal Scene: Harry walks in on Shiva and Lily in the aftermath of sex (quite likely their first time together, too) and immediately walks back out again; however, his subsequent search for a place to hide and clear his mind of the sight keeps leading him to stumble upon other people having sex.
• Puppy Dog Eyes: Younger Harry is quite adept at using these (described using the exact trope name), and oddly, he only uses them on people he trusts. As early as second year, Shiva is already calling him on using them on her.
• Rape as Drama:
  • Marcus Flint almost manages to rape Luna Lovegood when she's forced out of the Ravenclaw dorms in her underwear by bullies. She leads him to the Gryffindor dorms and Harry hits him with a rune that partially encases him in ice.
  • Harry and Hermione meet Fleur Delacour at the Quidditch World Cup when they save her from a gang rape by a band of Death Eaters.
  • In fifth year, Draco Malfoy leads an attempt to gang-rape Daphne Greengrass as a way of indirectly attacking Harry. (She's able to activate her comm stone and give enough info to Harry for him to find her before she's actually raped.) During the planning session for the attack, Malfoy, Nott, Crabbe and Goyle discuss raping various girls and women with chilling casualness.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Bathsheda "Shiva" Babbling.
  • After an apology for the way she dismissed Harry, Hermione and Neville's concerns about the Philosopher's Stone, McGonagall begins to become one, too.
  • Amelia Bones thoroughly impresses Harry when they first meet with her no-nonsense attitude and her immediate acceptance that what he had to say was the truth. She is the first inarguable adult (since Shiva cast herself as closer to a kid than a true adult) that Harry has a positive relationship with from the outset.
  • Eventually Harry overcomes his early automatic distrust of adults, so Reasonable Authority Figures begin being quite common for him.
  • Completely averted with Dumbledore. Harry starts out actively distrusting him; it graduates to dislike when he learns that Dumbledore (along with McGonagall) put him with the Dursleys, and shifts to "hostile" status when he catches Dumbledore in an outright lie at the end of his first year. And by fourth year, when Harry and the girls deduce that Dumbledore is behind the repeated attempts to kill Harry in the Tri-Wizard Tournament, he graduates to full "enemy" in their minds.
• Ron the Death Eater: If you haven't gathered it already from the other trope entries, in this story we have a stock Manipulative!Dumbledore, verging on an actual Evil!Dumbledore, trying to get Harry killed through various catspaws. Unlike most other implementations, though, it's because he's senile and convinced that Harry's been corrupted by the horcrux in him, and is hopelessly on the path to becoming another Dark Lord. It's a mercy killing, of course -- and if done correctly would open up Voldemort to being killed by someone else. Like Dumbledore.
• Schoolgirl Lesbians: Daphne and Tracey (although Daphne is actually bi) after Daphne finds out her best friend is in love with her.
• Squick: Snape's reaction to overhearing Bellatrix Lestrange refer to Voldemort as "Voldybear".
• Stealth Hi Bye: Luna suddenly (and literally) pops up in the middle of a private conversation between Harry and Hermione in chapter 27, startling them.
• Stronger with Age: Averted with Dumbledore, who while magically is still impressive, turns out to be spiraling into senility and instability, badly affecting his effectiveness in the war against Voldemort.
• The Talk: Harry gets it from Shiva at the beginning of his second year, when Hermione and Neville realize he has no idea what it means when someone says that Gilderoy Lockhart might be having affairs with some of the sixth- and seventh-year girls, or that "sex" can mean more than just the structural differences between male and female. Shiva is almost as traumatized as Harry when she's done.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: A sentiment that Lily Potter thoroughly approves of; she's the kind of person who's always sure to bring a gun to a knife fight.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Waffen SS wizards left over from Grindlewald's war/WW2 join Voldemort's forces at the end.
• Tranquil Fury: Tracy Davis at the last battle, cited by name.
• Triang Relations: In third year, Neville/Susan/Hannah, where Neville is A in either a type 7 or type 8 (it's unclear what the relationship between the girls is).
  • And after New Years the same year, Astoria Greengrass tries to get Harry and Hermione to add Daphne to their relationship, for what would definitely be a type 7 with Harry as A. (This while Daphne is dating Tracy; which if it had been accepted might have made for a Quadrang Relation.)
  • When Harry becomes Heir Black, he's required to have a second wife to perpetuate the Black family separately from the Potter family. Hermione immediately begins weighing all the possible candidates in hopes of arranging a Type 8 (or at worst a Type 7 where B and C are friends). Daphne and Tonks are the front-runners.
    • However, things eventually move beyond Triang Relations and into full polyamory by Harry's fourth year, with betrotheds, consorts and general hangers-on.
• Tricked-Out Time: Harry and Hermione use her time turner to escape a dementor attack which seems to have resulted in Tonks' death. As Harry works on a way to beat the dementors, Hermione objects that they can't change what happened. But Harry points out -- indeed, vigorously insists -- that they didn't see Tonks die, they just heard a scream, so they still have the opportunity to save her. Hermione is unsure that the Observer Effect and the rules of time turner use work that way, but helps him with his plan anyway. Harry turns out to be correct.
• Trickster Mentors: Harry's group views the still-living Flamels this way. And when they do things like send videotapes of a magicless Dumbledore in a mental institution ranting about stopping Harry's Army of Darkness from taking over Britain, it's hard to disagree with them.
• The Undead: Both Dumbledore and a couple of aurors who didn't read the reports completely decide that Lily Potter is some manner of necromantic abomination raised from the dead through Dark Magic. Fortunately Amelia Bones disabuses the aurors of that notion, and by that point Dumbledore is stuck in a Muggle nursing home with his magic bound, so he can't do anything.
• Utility Belt: As early as March of his second year, Harry habitually wears a belt loaded with rune stones; by third year he's actually calling it his "utility belt". By fourth year he's wearing a bandoleer-like harness with dozens of stones on it.
• Villainous Breakdown: After the end of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, when Harry has survived all the attempts to kill him and Voldemort has been resurrected, the senile and unstable Dumbledore flips out, tries to convince the dozen or so people in the hospital wing that Harry's an incipient Dark Lord already utterly corrupted by the horcrux in him, and then tries to kill the boy when no one believes him.
• We Can Rule Together: Played for Laughs. Upon learning several months later that Dumbledore had accused Harry of going dark at the end of his third year, Shiva and the girls begin joking about a dark hierarchy with Harry as the Dark Lord at the top and their own positions within, such as Dark Lady, Dark Mistress, and Dark Court Jester.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Hermione suggests this for offing Voldemort if he gets a body back, after finding out that Muggle Studies covers World War 2 with a single sentence, not even acknowledging the existence of guns. Harry tells her that he found out Voldemort had protection against conventional weapons during the last war.