They did not bind him.
Harry noticed that first, even through the fog of shock and exhaustion. The Na'vi, that word drifted up from somewhere deep and instinctual, though he had no memory of learning it, moved around him with cautious purpose, bows lowered but not loosed, hands never quite leaving their weapons. He was surrounded, but not restrained.
It was a mercy he did not yet have the words to appreciate.
They guided him through the forest as the light shifted from pre-dawn blue to something richer, streaked with violet and gold. Pandora woke around them. Plants unfurled with soft, wet sounds; distant creatures called to one another across the canopy. With every step, Harry's senses sharpened further, as though the world were patiently teaching him how to exist within it.
He stumbled once, distracted by the way the ground seemed to hum faintly beneath his feet.
A hand caught his arm, strong, steady. The woman from before met his gaze. Up close, her eyes were startlingly expressive, flecked with green and gold like sunlight through leaves.
She said something quietly, and though he could not have translated it word for word, the meaning settled into him like warmth.
Slow. Listen. Let the body teach you.
Harry inhaled and obeyed.
Something in him loosened.
The village was woven from the trees themselves.
Harry had grown up in places that felt imposed upon their surroundings, brick houses pressed into suburban uniformity, a castle of stone carved and rebuilt over centuries. This was different. The homes curved with the trunks, platforms grown rather than built, vines and bridges forming natural pathways high above the forest floor.
Children stared openly as he was led through, their eyes bright with curiosity rather than fear. Elders watched more carefully, their expressions unreadable. Harry felt suddenly, painfully aware of himself, too strange, too lost, too young in a way that had nothing to do with age.
He was brought before a larger structure near the heart of the village. Inside, the air was cooler, heavy with the scent of incense and living wood.
She waited there.
Mo'at was smaller than he expected, but there was nothing fragile about her. Her presence filled the space, calm and immovable, like a mountain that had learned patience. Her eyes lingered on Harry longer than was comfortable, seeing far too much.
She reached out, fingers brushing his chest, just above his heart.
Harry flinched and then froze.
There was a pull. Not painful. Not invasive. A gentle pressure, as though something ancient were turning its attention toward him.
Mo'at frowned.
She spoke, and this time the meaning was clearer, sharper, "You are divided".
Harry swallowed. His throat clicked strangely as he tried to answer. "I...I don't know how I got here."
Mo'at's gaze sharpened. "You are not born of this world," she said, slowly, carefully, shaping the words as though for a child. "But you are not a dream either."
Her fingers pressed more firmly against his chest. Harry felt something respond, an echo, deep and resonant, like the thrum of magic just before a spell took hold.
Mo'at's eyes widened. Just a fraction.
"Eywa hears you," she murmured. "And she does not turn away."
They did not decide his fate that day.
Harry learned, over time, that the Omatikaya did very little hastily. He was given a place on the edge of the village, watched but not imprisoned, fed strange fruits that burst with sweetness and sharpness on his tongue. He slept deeply, dreamlessly, his body recovering from an exhaustion he had not known how to name.
Days turned into weeks...language came first.
Harry absorbed it the way he absorbed everything on Pandora: through immersion, through listening more than speaking, through letting instinct bridge the gaps logic could not. Words slid into place alongside concepts, connection, balance, listening. The Na'vi did not speak of ownership the way humans did. The forest was not theirs. They were part of it.
Hunting came next, It was brutal at first.
Harry's first kill left him shaking, heart pounding as the animal stilled beneath his hands. He had killed before, he remembered the basilisk's death in flashes of fang and sword, the way his hands had trembled afterward, but this was different. There was no abstraction here. No enemy. Just a living thing whose life ended so his could continue.
Neytiri, that was the woman's name, knelt beside him as he struggled to breathe.
"You must thank it," she said quietly.
Harry did. The words came haltingly, but the meaning mattered more than the fluency. Something eased after that, the guilt transforming into something heavier but steadier. Responsibility, rather than shame.
He learned to climb, to leap, to run without sound. His body adapted faster than his mind, muscles strengthening, balance refining, movements flowing together with a grace he had never possessed as a human child.
And through it all, there was Eywa.
Not a voice, not a presence that spoke in words.
A current.
Harry felt it in the roots beneath his feet, in the glow of the forest at night, in the way the Na'vi touched the ground before sleep and after waking. It reminded him, oddly, of magic, not the wandwork he had learned at Hogwarts, but the deeper thing beneath it. The sense that the world itself was listening.
Sometimes, when he lay awake beneath alien stars, memories of Hogwarts would surface: Ron's laughter, Hermione's furrowed brow, the echoing corridors of stone. They felt distant. Small.
He wondered, dimly, how long he had been gone.
Years passed.
Harry grew, not just physically, though his Na'vi body matured, muscles hardening, movements gaining effortless power, but inwardly, in ways he had never had the space to before. He learned patience. Learned to sit with grief rather than outrun it. Learned that fear did not always need to be conquered; sometimes it needed to be acknowledged and carried.
He bonded with a direhorse beneath the Tree of Voices, trembling as his queue connected, the rush of shared sensation nearly overwhelming. He wept the first time he flew an ikran, the sky opening beneath him in a way that made broomsticks feel like toys.
He fought.
When the Sky People came, tearing into the forest with metal and fire, something old and cold settled into Harry's bones. He understood, instinctively, what domination looked like. He had grown up beneath it.
War on Pandora was not clean. It was not glorious. It was loss layered upon loss, trees falling like giants, songs silenced mid-breath, the ground itself crying out beneath the weight of machines.
Harry fought beside Jake Sully, their bond forged not just in battle but in shared displacement. Both of them knew what it meant to belong to two worlds and fully to neither.
He lost people.
He loved.
Decades folded into one another, memory smoothing their edges. Harry stopped counting years. The boy who had arrived confused and terrified faded into something older, steadier, scarred in ways that did not show on skin.
And through it all, the pull remained.
A thread, faint but unbreakable, stretching backward into another life.
It snapped taut one night beneath the Tree of Souls.
Harry knelt, queue connected, the world awash in light and memory. Eywa surged through him, stronger than ever and with it came a sudden, sharp wrongness.
Stone, cold, a scar burning like fire.
Harry gasped, clutching at the ground as images slammed into him: a dragon-shaped egg cracking open, blue-white flame, a voice speaking his name.
Harry Potter.
The forest dimmed.
The pull yanked.
And the world, both worlds, tilted violently out of alignment.
Harry woke with a strangled gasp, sitting bolt upright in his four-poster bed.
Darkness. Stone. The familiar creak of Gryffindor Tower settling around him.
His hands, human hands, trembled in his lap.
Only one night had passed.
But Harry Potter did not wake as the boy who had gone to sleep.