Island of Fire
is a Harry Potter and Temeraire crossover series written by esama on Archive of Our Own.
Unfortunately for Hogwarts, the dragon handlers neglected to put their strongest protection spells on the arena for the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament. It resulted in a ravaged castle, several tens of fiery demises, and worst of all, an entire wizarding generation lost...
Because you can't be more lost than when you're stranded on a deserted island right in the middle of the Atlantic sea, in another dimension.
Oh, and there's dragons here, too. And a lot of people much too curious about this brand-new colony.
The series hasn't been graced with a new installment since August 2016, but the author nonetheless expressed a possibility to continue one day.
Do not confuse it with the movie Island of Fire.
Contains the following tropes
- A Child Shall Lead Them: As Harry is the main speaker for the Atlanteans, outsiders quickly come to believe he's in charge and nickname him the Child-King of Atlantis, even if he's fourteen-years-old already. In practice, Harry and the other three Champions are more of 'first among equals' for the population as they were the ones to first take charge of things.
- Atlantis: How the stranded children ultimately name their new home. They first believe it's funny, but it's later hinted that the barren island genuinely is the Temeraire-verse equivalent of Atlantis.
- Blaming the Victim: What the British attempt, stating that the Atlanteans are forcing them to take more aggressive action. The teenagers are having none of it, and make it pointedly clear that whatever happens is of the British's own volition.
- Breath Weapon: Each of the four draconic breeds present on Atlantis is able to breath fire, and the Chinese Fireball one also can spit napalm. In the world of Temeraire, this is an incredibly rare and feared ability, and makes them all the more resistant to a naval invasion.
- Children Are Innocent: Sailors aboard the Goliath feel uneasy about a possible invasion of Atlantis because it would mean hurting kids and decide to play the intimidation card by practising their gun exercises in plain view. The Atleanteans come to see and cheer on the show, which dampens even further the mood.
- Culture Chop Suey: The Atlanteans' housing and clothing have a strong Greco-Roman vibe, but the British naturalist Edward Howe muses that coexistence with dragons as equals is more something you would see in China and Japan. He also notes that the dragon breeds show physical traits from all across East and West. It is also noted how multicultural they are in human ethnicity and languages, with everyone treated equal, which is even more confusing and considered unnatural for the time.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: When the story is unfolding in 1799, it's rather inevitable.
- A lot of the Atlanteans feel nervous about people trying to invade them, as the colonialism is running extremely strong in Europe and America. They also come from an isolationist culture which fears Muggles finding them, and now everybody else in the whole world are Muggles. So they remain strongly isolationist, not letting anyone stay there for long.
- The First Contact with the wider world happens with a whaling ship. The modern, ecologically sensitive Atlanteans are mentioned to not be fully okay with hunting a soon-to-be-endangered species, but everyone acknowledges how many food and resources they got out of it.
- Delightful Dragon: The Atlanteans are very surprised when their egg clutches produce intelligent dragons that can be reasoned and tamed instead of hungry predators burning everything in sight. This is because dragons back home almost always and systematically brain damaged to keep them as nothing more than controllable animals to be harvested for their parts.
- Some dragons do try and leave, only to discover there is nowhere to go in the ocean, and so return.
- The Fair Folk: The Atlanteans certainly give off this feeling — they suddenly appeared from nowhere to make a barren rock fertile, are startingly youthful, always clean, live in temple-like housings, and casually interact with dragons in a way no one in Europe would dare... No wonder that the first sailors to interact with them were spooked.
- First Contact: Atlantis is introduced to the wider world by the whaling ship Mary, originating from North Carolina. In spite of tensions from both sides, it works peacefully as each party has something that can be traded to the other.
- Good Is Not Soft: Atlantis is happy to trade with any ship wishing to do so... but invaders will be welcomed by dragonfire and their vessels inexplicably sinking. When the French and British fleets fail to sail off at first, they get a pointed demonstration of this.
- Hero Antagonist: William Laurence arrived at the islands as a First Lieutenant, and was in the awkward position of trying to help conquer it. He and a team attempted to infiltrate the island and capture Harry to hold him hostage, only to fail and be imprisoned.
- Island of Mystery: Atlantis, rather fittingly so, for the outside world. Especially as they are so decisively isolationist.
- It Can Think: The Atlanteans are utterly floored when the first dragon to hatch shows herself able to talk.
- MacGuffin Location: Atlantis is right in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, allowing a halt between the Americas and Europe when traveling by sea — giving the place the potential to grow into a very wealthy trade port. Britain is so desperate to secure the valuable island they attempted to invade. Even as a free port, it remains priceless, since ships can depend upon buying fresh water and salt from there, meaning they need less aboard when they first sail, and thus more room for cargo.
- Missing Child: Imagine a school event intended to be fun, only for a disaster to happen and cause the loss of several hundreds of kids. Okay, the displaced kids aren't dead, but for all matters and intents they're gone and won't probably never return to their families.
- When people later check their family tapestries, they discover their kids are alive and have been having more children.
- Mugging the Monster: The Goliath military officers decide to invade Atlantis when the locals refuse to surrender themselves to British authority. The plan hit quite a snag when they stumbled upon the dragons.
- Mundane Luxury: Having a house that didn't fall over in the wind, fresh food that doesn't give you scurvy and a bathing house are this for the displaced kids in the first times of their living on Atlantis.
- Mundane Utility: Wizards and witches on Atlantis are so desperate for survival that they use their magic to build housing, grow crops and obtain fresh water.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Brutally enforced by the Wizarding World, since a dragon is worth its weight in gold when chopped in potion ingredients, and it would be so inconvenient to let such a valuable resource be sentient. In their natural states, the Wizarding dragons are just as smart as the Temeraire dragons.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The Sinking of Atlantis, when a ship suddenly starts taking on water and there's no hole, no mistake explaining that... it just sinks.
- Shrouded in Myth: Courtesy of Atlantis being paranoid about revealing magic, and as such refusing to let outsiders visit the island.
- Teen Pregnancy: Cho Chang becomes Atlantis' first mother, when she's around fifteen-sixteen years old. She's rather anxious about it, being stranded far away from civilization, her family, and frankly any proper experts on childbirth.
- Trapped in Another World: It takes a moment for Atlantis to learn this, because their island is so completely isolated from the local civilizations. It takes getting newspapers from American traders for them to put it all together.
- Trapped in the Past: Not only did the children land in another dimension, they landed in 1799, right as Napoleon was a rising military and political star.
- Young Future Famous People: William Laurence appears as the First Lieutenant on the HMS Goliath ship, well before harnessing Temeraire.
