The reason for Ron leaving England the summer after his sixth year: the only school prize he ever wins. A hundred and five galleons for his essay on the language of magical creatures, to be spent on travelling expenses in a field conducive to his seventh year final project. Percy may have been the language prodigy of the family, muttering Spanish in his sleep, but Ron is the one with the sensitive grasp of linguistic complexities. Ron is also seventeen, and as he said to Harry afterwards, when they were sitting on the train together and a copy of Ron's essay was sitting on his knees along with the little golden goblet that goes with the prize, "I don't bloody half-know what I said myself."

Harry's takes the scroll, snaps it open and starts scanning through it. "Where do you think you're going to go with it? Out to Romania to visit Charlie?"

"That would be the smart thing to do. I'd actually like to go to Japan, though, but I don't think a hundred galleons will get me there." Ron pops the leg of the chocolate frog he's been eating into his mouth, but Harry blinks, surprised, like he's the one with the frog foot kicking at the top of his mouth.

Ron thinks about kissing Harry when he gets off the train, but instead, he sticks his hand out. "I'll see you in August, Harry." he says, finally, holding his hand out

"August," Harry says. He shakes Ron's hand, then, but at the last second, the handshake turns into a hug. "Thank you for being my friend."

*

Harry dies before he turns eighteen. In June, while Ron is in Romania, and Ron doesn't go back to Hogwarts that August because there isn't a Hogwarts to go back to.

After a few months, there is again, and Ginny goes back, but Ron decides to stay in Romania for a little while longer. Charlie has funding for another conservation worker through the winter. "It's a good thing," he says, "that we have got most of our funding independent of the Ministry. The way things are going in England, they really don't have time to be caring about things like dragon poaching or lookout stations."

"Should we go back?" asks one of the other English workers at the station. She was in Ravenclaw, but Charlie shrugs.

"What could we do?" Charlie says back. "Tag Death-Eaters? Catch and release Dementors?"

Ron would have been angrier if he hadn't heard Charlie go into the back room the night before and cry over the report of how Oliver Wood died in heroic action against the Dark Lord and how the Ministry executed Aidan, the Head Boy from Charlie's year, for being a Death Eater spy. When it comes turn to man the high-mountain stations, Ron volunteers to go live in the one on the pass in December.

All winter, he watches dragons throw themselves off cliffs in the Carpathian mountains. They're so big that even with all the magic they have, they can just barely glide and need a good updraft to help them take off. It's like a belly-flop two miles up and with jagged rocks on the bottom of the pool, but even so, Ron's never seen one hit the ground.

The pass is good because all the dragons go lumbering up there to take off, so if you sit still and watch, you'll get a pretty decent survey of the population in that part of the mountains. Dragons don't have much of a language, Ron realizes. Charlie likes to talk about how smart they are, and they do look grand, but their language is pretty primitive. Roars. Fire-belches. Birthing-calls in spring that knock down trees and set off mudslides.

Ron figures out Romanian. It's a lot like Latin, which he's picked up from Percy's old schoolbooks, and he pieces together enough of a Russian translation spell to read about trees bursting from the cold in Siberia. All winter long, in the Carpathian mountains, it rains and snows in alternate turns, but nothing ever explodes.

He hears about the twins being tortured to death in January.

*

They get more rain that spring than almost anybody can remember, and the ground is sodden. Charlie tells them they're lucky that they're not in the sub-Carpathians this year or they'd be digging dragons out of mudslides, but Ron swears that even the rocks squish underfoot. March is still dragon egg-whelping season, though. The dames mated in September, war or no war, and Ron is out near Ocolash Mare to look for the mud-volacano and count egg-fragments. Hungry. Tired, and desperately lonely. It's him and a pair of the big half-wolf, half-dog hybrids they bring along as protection against bears and the full wolves, but they're not particularly bred for cuddliness, so Ron ends up curled underneath his coat on the other side of the fireplace.

Around dawn, Ari and Mari stir, and Ron wakes, fuzzy-headed with sleep. He follows their raised hackles and growls to the side of the clearing where they're staying, and with a jolt, Ron realizes that there's a boy, there, with golden skin and golden wings, standing underneath a black poplar. He looks like a giant Snitch, and the leaves are just starting to unfurl all around the boy's face. On either side of the tree, there are a pair of blazing red horses.

They've got wings, too, and around them are the faces of all the people he knows that've died since last June -- Oliver, Aidan, Cho and Parvati, Norwood and Neville. The ranks and rows of shining faces.

Later, Ron realizes that the golden wings were just the sunrise, that the figures were just the pale undersides of the leaves and the two horses were curious deer, but he finishes packing regardless. A week later, he's back in England and back at Hogwarts, though he leaves early to take Auror training. In his dreams, though, Ron still sees that boy with the golden skin and golden wings and eyes like a poplar tree unfurling.

Ron suspects he'll always see him.

*

Black poplar is the slowest burning of all woods. The best matches are made out of it; they're the most expensive kind. In August, though, the Romanian countryside is so dry that you could set it all ablaze with a single spark.

*

end

*

The boy in the story is actually based off of an old Slavic legend about Jablan. . .

Jablan occurs in the South-Slavic folklore as the proper name of a male mythological figure. [He] is a winged man with long golden hair, riding on a flying horse; his song or music makes the sun shine; trees and stones, and even mountains grow; with his fairy sisters (nine or twelve in number) he has the capacity of healing any wound and even raising the dead back to life.

http://www.rastko.org.yu/projekti/kodovi/kodovi_eng.html#AleksandarLoma1