Prologue:
- Welcome to The Shadow of His Wings. Warnings: Character death. Rather AU and will probably become more so after HBP comes out. Slash, if that sort of thing bothers you. Some mild het content, if that sort of thing bothers you. If you blow past these warnings and email me to complain that my clearly-labelled slash fic has gay sex in it, or that you didn't think I was serious about the big red character death warning but it turned out I was, I'm really going to think you're an idiot. Just saying.
Also, if you want to read the fic but are worried about the character death warning, you can highlight here for a hint about who it's not: It's not Harry or Draco. I'm not going to go through 20 chapters of getting them together just to kill one of them off, because dude, talk about pointless.
- SoHW is updated roughly once a month, sometimes twice. Sadly, sometimes RL must take precedence over the porn. The index page shows the date the fic was last updated.
- The title is from Titus Andronicus:
-
The eagle suffers little birds to sing,
And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wings
He can at pleasure stint their melody...
- SoHW is updated roughly once a month, sometimes twice. Sadly, sometimes RL must take precedence over the porn. The index page shows the date the fic was last updated.
Chapter 3:
- The password to Snape's office is from Eliot's The Hollow Men. No, I don't know how he would have known the poem. It just seems like the sort of thing he'd like.
Chapter 5:
- Lucius' line about knowing one's enemy and knowing oneself is taken, more or less, from Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
- Remember I said SoHW was AU? In GoF, Ron doesn't know what the Dark Mark is either when it first appears. SoHW!Ron was a bit more well-informed at 14 than GoF!Ron was.
Chapter 6:
- Take what you want and pay for it, says God is a Spanish proverb.
Chapter 8:
- Árnyék Király, I believe, means "Shadow Kings." However, I don't speak Hungarian and got this from an online translator, so it could say something rude about carp for all I know. Just work with me a bit on it.
Chapter 13:
- Y'all remember I told you this was slash, right? And rated R?
- Actually by my standards it's closer to an NC-17. I rated it R because the HP fandom is damn pervy and my sex scenes are not anywhere even remotely near as explicit as half of what's out there.
Chapter 15:
- The Chamber in this scene is sort of an amalgamation of book and movie.
- The names of the curses Bill removes from the door are lifted from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where they are not actually curses but (mostly) doorkeepers.
A note on HBP compatibility:
- This fic was started well before HBP came out and is, as I have said, already AU in the sense that whatever direction Rowling is taking Harry's conflict with Voldemort in, I'm pretty sure it's not this. Because of that AUness, I'm not going to make a huge effort to bring the fic in line with HBP canon, though I may incorporate some details where they don't interfere with the plot.
Also, you will note that Rowling jossed me a bit with the horcruxes and the Inferi. Briefly, the music box Percy stole from the Burrow serves more or less the same purpose as a horcrux but is not a horcrux as they're set out in HBP (which is fairly obvious, as I am not Rowling and chapters 15 and under of SoHW were written pre-HBP). Similarly, what Voldemort's doing is not breeding Inferi, as Inferi did not exist in the Potterverse at the time I wrote those chapters. I'll leave it to you to figure out what he is doing, for now; just don't expect those things to map right onto HBP or you're going to spend a lot of time being annoyed.
Chapter 16:
- Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky - Harry's quoting Charlemagne. Or Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, take your pick.