Year of the Snake 🐍
Nagini
Year of the Snake 🐍
Nagini
SO UH I love Harry Potter, but hate PottAH. I was bored one day and came up with a lil "headcanon" that Harry over here was a little cAnNiBaLisTiC..
SOON, like VERY VERY SOON, I actually researched ACTUAL EVIDENCE that this might be a theory instead of a headcanon that is so obviously unaccurate to everything relevant to the plotline and story. Now you guys get to hear me out!! :D
Point 1: Harry's animagus
We all know his animagus is a stag, correct? A stag is basically a deer, a male one. What are Wendigos? Wendigos are cannibalistic entities that, in one story of actual folktale from North Amerca, are "entities that may possess a man for his greedy and selfish desires, driving him to cannibalistic measures and insanity". The Wendigo NOWADAYS is a DEER looking creature that is a cannibal. Wendigo=Deer and Stag=deer. the connection is possibly clear :3
Point 2: PUTHEFRIESINTHEBAGBRO-
Ik, ik.. what I'm implying is stupid, but PLEASE i was bored and needed drama and TEA for some roleplay. also I just kinda don't like Harry IMO (In My Opinion)<3
Point 3: Behaviors
Harry acts rather odd throughout the series. He also likes food- Ron wouldn't be cannibalistic. That isn't him. He'd never harm someone, EVEN GINNY- HIS OWN SISTER-
Potter also lies, and gets away with it quite well. He may be capable of lying and deceiving the viewers!!
Point 4: Horcrux connection
So, Harry is a parseltongue, and that's because he's a horcrux and is mentally connected with Tom Riddle's soul, as shown in the 7th book (part 2 of deathly hallows for you movie-dwellers). Also in the nightmares, he can see visions Voldemort implanted in his mind, and can feel the snake attacks from the 5th book/movie in the dream that impacts and contains Arthur Weasley. Snakes are carnivores, infact all snakes are. No reason Harry wouldn't literally be connected with nagini too, right? If snakes are carnivores and Harry might be connected with Nagini and not just Voldemort, Harry would feel those mental cravings of meat, something carnivores would crave and eat.
YOU ACTUALLY READ MY DUM THEORY? (thought?)
58 Votes in Poll
{MINOR SPOLIER WARNING}
And when that scene when Nagini ate Professor Burbage's body my little sister was like 'Yay snake!'. She also said that she wished Voldemort won...I think my sister's a death eater guys...that or she just really likes snakes lol.
(also idk what category to put this.)
(Like canon there will be an epilogue chapter after this, and I will post it later today...so close to the end!!!😄)
First half of book:
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003829962
Previous Chapters:
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003833123
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003838588
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003840013
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003841380
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003842029
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003842653
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003843726
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844089
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844089/r/4400000000017564493
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844352
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844924
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003845391
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003845905
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003846382
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003846656
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003846902
Tags:
@SaphireStark @Missy Clara Oswald @CatsAndRoblox @Pervaza972 @Mega.mind.harry.potter
Chapter Thirty-Five: An Ending is Just a New Beginning
He was lying facedown on the ground again. The smell of the forest filled his nostrils. He could feel the cold hard ground beneath his cheek, and the hinge of his glasses, which had been knocked sideways by the fall, cutting into his temple. Every inch of him ached, and the place where the Killing Curse had hit him felt like the bruise of an iron-clad punch. He did not stir but remained exactly where he had fallen, with his left arm bent out at an awkward angle and his mouth gaping.
He had expected to hear cheers of triumph and jubilation at his death, but instead hurried footsteps, whispers, and solicitous murmurs filled the air.
‘My Lord...my Lord...’
It was Bellatrix’s voice, and she spoke as if to a lover. Harry did not dare open his eyes, but allowed his other senses to explore his predicament. He knew that his wand was still stowed beneath his robes because he could feel it pressed between his chest and the ground. A slight cushioning effect in the area of his stomach told him that the Invisibility Cloak was also there, stuffed out of sight. ‘My Lord...’
‘That will do,’ said Voldemort’s voice.
More footsteps. Several people were backing away from the same spot. Desperate to see what was happening and why, Harry opened his eyes by a millimeter.
Voldemort seemed to be getting to his feet. Various Death Eaters were hurrying away from him, returning to the crowd lining the clearing. Bellatrix alone remained behind, kneeling beside Voldemort.
Harry closed his eyes again and considered what he had seen. The Death Eaters had been huddled around Voldemort, who seemed to have fallen to the ground.
Something had happened when he had hit Harry with the Killing Curse. Had Voldemort too collapsed? It seemed like it. And both of them had fallen briefly unconscious and both of them had now returned…
‘My Lord, let me—‘
‘I do not require assistance,’ said Voldemort coldly, and though he could not see it, Harry pictured Bellatrix withdrawing a helpful hand. ‘The boy…Is he dead?’
There was complete silence in the clearing. Nobody approached Harry, but he felt their concentrated gaze; it seemed to press him harder into the ground, and he was terrified a finger or an eyelid might twitch.
‘You,’ said Voldemort, and there was a bang and a small shriek of pain. ‘Examine him. Tell me whether he is dead.’
Harry did not know who had been sent to verify. He could only lie there, with his heart thumping traitorously, and wait to be examined, but at the same time noting, small comfort though it was, that Voldemort was wary of approaching him, that Voldemort suspected that all had not gone to plan…
Hands, softer than he had been expecting, touched Harry’s face, pulled back an eyelid, crept beneath his shirt, down to his chest, and felt his heart. He could hear the woman’s fast breathing, her long hair tickled his face. He knew that she could feel the steady pounding of life against his ribs.
‘Is Draco alive? Is he in the castle?’
The whisper was barely audible; her lips were an inch from his ear, her head bent so low that her long hair shielded his face from the onlookers.
‘Yes,’ he breathed back.
He felt the hand on his chest contract; her nails pierced him. Then it was withdrawn. She had sat up.
‘He is dead!’ Narcissa Malfoy called to the watchers.
And now they shouted, now they yelled in triumph and stamped their feet, and through his eyelids, Harry saw bursts of red and silver light shoot into the air in celebration.
Still feigning death on the ground, he understood. Narcissa knew that the only way she would be permitted to enter Hogwarts, and find her son, was as part of the conquering army. She no longer cared whether Voldemort won.
‘You see?’ screeched Voldemort over the tumult. ‘Harry Potter is dead by my hand, and no man alive can threaten me now! Watch! Crucio!’
Harry had been expecting it, knew his body would not be allowed to remain unsullied upon the forest floor; it must be subjected to humiliation to prove Voldemort’s victory. He was lifted into the air, and it took all his determination to remain limp, yet the pain he expected did not come. He was thrown once, twice, three times into the air: His glasses flew off and he felt his wand slide a little beneath his robes, but he kept himself floppy and lifeless, and when he fell to the ground for the last time, the clearing echoed with jeers and shrieks of laughter.
‘Now,’ said Voldemort, ‘we go to the castle, and show them what has become of their hero. Who shall drag the body? No—Wait—‘
There was a fresh outbreak of laughter, and after a few moment Harry felt the ground trembling beneath him.
‘You carry him,’ Voldemort said. ‘He will be nice and visible in your arms, will he not? Pick up your little friend, Hagrid. And the glasses—put on the glasses—he must be recognizable—‘
Someone slammed Harry’s glasses onto his face with deliberate force, but the enormous hands that lifted him into the air were exceedingly gentle. Harry could feel Hagrid’s arms trembling with the force of his heaving sobs; great tears splashed down upon him as Hagrid cradled Harry in his arms, and Harry did not dare, by movement or word, to intimate to Hagrid that all was not, yet, lost.
‘Move,’ said Voldemort, and Hagrid stumbled forward, forcing his way through the close-growing trees, back through the forest. Branches caught at Harry’s hair and robes, but he lay quiescent, his mouth lolling open, his eyes shut, and in the darkness, while the Death Eaters crowed all around them, and while Hagrid sobbed blindly, nobody looked to see whether a pulse beat in the exposed neck of Harry Potter…
The two giants crashed along behind the Death Eaters; Harry could hear trees creaking and falling as they passed; they made so much noise that birds rose shrieking into the sky, and even the jeers of the Death Eaters were drowned. The victorious procession marched on toward the open ground, and after a while Harry could tell, by the lightening of the darkness through his closed eyelids, that the trees were beginning to thin.
‘BANE!’
Hagrid’s unexpected bellow nearly forced Harry’s eyes open. ‘Happy now, are yeh, that yeh didn’ fight, yeh cowardly bunch o’ nags? Are yeh happy Harry Potter’s—d–dead..?’
Hagrid could not continue, but broke down in fresh tears. Harry wondered how many centaurs were watching their procession pass; he dared not open his eyes to look. Some of the Death Eaters called insults at the centaurs as they left them behind. A little later, Harry sensed, by the freshening of the air, that they had reached the edge of the forest.
‘Stop.’
Harry thought that Hagrid must have been forced to obey Voldemort’s command, because he lurched a little. And now a chill settled over them where they stood, and Harry heard the rasping breath of the dementors that patrolled the outer trees. They would not affect him now. The fact of his own survival burned inside him, a talisman against them, as though his father’s stag kept guardian in his heart.
Someone passed close by Harry, and he knew that it was Voldemort himself because he spoke a moment later, his voice magically magnified so that it swelled through the grounds, crashing upon Harry’s eardrums.
‘Harry Potter is dead. He was killed as he ran away, trying to save himself while you lay down your lives for him. We bring you his body as proof that your hero is gone. The battle is won. You have lost half of your fighters. My Death Eaters outnumber you, and the Boy Who Lived is finished. There must be no more war. Anybody who continues to resist, man, woman, or child, will be slaughtered, as will every member of their family. Come out of the castle now, kneel before me, and you shall be spared. Your parents and children, your brothers and sisters will live and be forgiven, and you will join me in the new world we shall build together.’
There was silence in the grounds and from the castle. Voldemort was so close to him that Harry did not dare open his eyes yet.
‘Come,’ said Voldemort, and Harry heard him move ahead, and Hagrid was forced to follow. Now Harry opened his eyes a fraction, and saw Voldemort striding in front of them, wearing the great snake Nagini around his shoulders, now free of her enchanted cage. But Harry had no possibility of extracting the wand concealed under his robes without being noticed by the Death Eaters, who marched on either side of them through the slowly lightening darkness…
‘Harry,’ sobbed Hagrid. ‘Oh, Harry…Harry…’
Harry shut his eyes tight again. He knew that they were approaching the castle and strained his ears to distinguish, above the gleeful voices of the Death Eaters and their tramping footsteps, signs of life from those within.
‘Stop.’
The Death Eaters came to a halt; Harry heard them spreading out in a line facing the open front doors of the school. He could see, even through his closed lids, the reddish glow that meant light streamed upon him from the entrance hall. He waited. Any moment, the people for whom he had tried to die for would see him, lying apparently dead, in Hagrid’s arms.
‘NO!’
The scream was more terrible because he had never expected or dreamed that Professor McGonagall could make such a sound. He heard another woman laughing nearby, and knew that Bellatrix gloried in McGonagall’s despair. He squinted again for a single second and saw the open doorway filling with people, as the survivors of the battle came out onto the front steps to face their vanquishers and see the truth of Harry’s death for themselves. He saw Voldemort standing a little in front of him, stroking Nagini’s head with a single white finger. He closed his eyes again.
‘No!’
‘No!’
‘NO! HARRY! NO!’
Canini’s, Theodore’s, Tracey’s, and Allison’s voices were worse than McGonagall’s; Harry wanted nothing more than to call back, yet he made himself lie silent, and their cries acted like a trigger; the crowd of survivors took up the cause, screaming and yelling abuse at the Death Eaters, until—
‘SILENCE!’ cried Voldemort, and there was a bang and a flash of bright light, and silence was forced upon them all. ‘It’s over! Set him down, Hagrid, at my feet, where he belongs!’
Harry felt himself lowered onto the grass.
‘You see?’ said Voldemort, and Harry felt him striding backward and forward right beside the place where he lay. ‘Harry Potter is dead! Do you understand now, deluded ones? He was nothing, ever, but a boy who relied on others to sacrifice themselves for him!’
‘He won, not you!’ yelled Theodore, and the charm broke, and the defenders of Hogwarts were shouting and screaming again until a second, more powerful bang extinguished their voices once more.
‘Silence you treacherous boy!’ said the ice cold voice of Morgan Nott. ‘You will get what’s coming to you in due time.’
‘Harry Potter was killed while trying to sneak out of the castle grounds,’ said Voldemort, and there was relish in his voice for the lie, ‘killed while trying to save himself—‘
But Voldemort broke off: Harry heard a scuffle and a shout, then another bang, a flash of light, and a grunt of pain; he opened his eyes an infinitesimal amount. Someone had broken free of the crowd and charged at Voldemort: Harry saw the figure hit the ground, Disarmed, Voldemort throwing the challenger’s wand aside and laughing.
‘And who is this?’ he said in his soft snake’s hiss. ‘Who has volunteered to demonstrate what happens to those who continue to fight when the battle is lost?’
Bellatrix gave a delighted laugh.
‘It is Neville Longbottom, my Lord! The boy who has been giving the Carrows so much trouble! The son of the Aurors, remember?’
‘Ah, yes, I remember,’ said Voldemort, looking down at Neville, who was struggling back to his feet, unarmed and unprotected, standing in the no-man’s-land between the survivors and the Death Eaters. ‘But you are a Pure-blood, aren’t you, my brave boy?’ Voldemort asked Neville, who stood facing him, his empty hands curled into fists.
‘So what if I am?’ said Neville loudly.
‘You show spirit and bravery, and you come of noble stock. You will make a very valuable Death Eater. We need your kind, Neville Longbottom.’
‘I’ll join you when hell freezes over,’ said Neville. ‘Dumbledore’s Army!’ he shouted, and there was an answering cheer from the crowd, whom Voldemort’s Silencing Charms seemed unable to hold.
‘Very well,’ said Voldemort, and Harry heard more danger in the silkiness of his voice than in the most powerful curse. ‘If that is your choice, Longbottom, we revert to the original plan. On your head,’ he said quietly, ‘be it.’
Still watching through his lashes, Harry saw Voldemort wave his wand. Seconds later, out of one of the castle’s shattered windows, something that looked like a misshapen bird flew through the half light and landed in Voldemort’s hand. He shook the mildewed object by its pointed end and it dangled, empty and ragged: the Sorting Hat.
‘There will be no more Sorting at Hogwarts School,’ said Voldemort. ‘There will be no more Houses. The emblem, shield, and colours of my noble ancestor, Salazar Slytherin, will suffice for everyone. Won’t they, Neville Longbottom?’
He pointed his wand at Neville, who grew rigid and still, then forced the hat onto Neville’s head, so that it slipped down below his eyes. There were movements from the watching crowd in front of the castle, and as one, the Death Eaters raised their wands, holding the fighters of Hogwarts at bay.
‘Neville here is now going to demonstrate what happens to anyone foolish enough to continue to oppose me,’ said Voldemort, and with a flick of his wand, he caused the Sorting Hat to burst into flames.
Screams split the dawn, and Neville was aflame, rooted to the spot, unable to move, and Harry could not bear it: He must act—
And then many things happened at the same moment.
They heard uproar from the distant boundary of the school as what sounded like hundreds of people came swarming over the out-of-sight walls and pelted toward the castle, uttering loud war cries. At the same time, Grawp came lumbering around the side of the castle and yelled, ‘HAGGER!’
His cry was answered by roars from Voldemort’s giants: They ran at Grawp like bull elephants, making the earth quake. Then came hooves and the twangs of bows, and arrows were suddenly falling amongst the Death Eaters, who broke ranks, shouting their surprise. Harry pulled the Invisibility Cloak from inside his robes, swung it over himself, and sprang to his feet, as Neville moved too.
In one swift, fluid motion, Neville broke free of the Body-Bind Curse upon him; the flaming hat fell off him and he drew from its depths something silver, with a glittering, rubied handle—
The slash of the silver blade could not be heard over the roar of the oncoming crowd or the sounds of the clashing giants or of the stampeding centaurs, and yet it seemed to draw every eye. With a single stroke Neville sliced off the great snake’s head, which spun high into the air, gleaming in the light flooding from the entrance hall, and Voldemort’s mouth was open in a scream of fury that nobody could hear, and the snake’s body thudded to the ground at his feet—
Hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak, Harry cast a Shield Charm between Neville and Voldemort before the latter could raise his wand. Then, over the screams and the roars and the thunderous stamps of the battling giants, Hagrid’s yell came loudest of all, ‘HARRY!’ Hagrid shouted. ‘HARRY—WHERE’S HARRY?’
Chaos reigned. The charging centaurs were scattering the Death Eaters, everyone was fleeing the giants’ stamping feet, and nearer and nearer thundered the reinforcements that had come from who knew where; Harry saw great winged creatures soaring around the heads of Voldemort’s giants, thestrals and Buckbeak the hippogriff scratching at their eyes while Grawp punched and pummeled them, and now the wizards, defenders of Hogwarts and Death Eaters alike, were being forced back into the castle. Harry was shouting jinxes and curses at any Death Eater he could see, and they crumpled, not knowing what or who had hit them, and their bodies were trampled by the retreating crowd.
Still hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak, Harry was buffeted into the entrance hall: He was searching for Voldemort and saw him across the room, firing spells from his wand as he backed into the Great hall, still screaming instructions to his followers as he sent curses flying left and right; Harry cast more Shield Charms, and Voldemort’s would-be victims, Seamus Finnigan and Hannah Abbott, darted past him into the Great Hall, where they joined the fight already flourishing inside it.
And now there were more, even more people storming up the front steps, and Harry saw Charlie Weasley overtaking Horace Slughorn, who was still wearing his emerald pajamas. They seemed to have returned at the head of what looked like the families and friends of every Hogwarts student who had remained to fight, along with the shopkeepers and homeowners of Hogsmeade. The centaurs Bane, Ronan, and Magorian burst into the hall with a great clatter of hooves, as behind Harry the door that led to the kitchens was blasted off its hinges.
The house-elves of Hogwarts swarmed into the entrance hall, screaming and waving carving knives and cleavers, and at their head, the locket of Regulus Black bouncing on his chest, was Kreacher, his bullfrog’s voice audible even above this din: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight for my Master, defender of the house-elves! Fight the Dark Lord, in the name of brave Regulus! Fight!’
They were hacking and stabbing at the ankles and shins of Death Eaters, their tiny faces alive with malice, and everywhere Harry looked Death Eaters were folding under sheer weight of numbers, overcome by spells, dragging arrows from wounds, stabbed in the leg by elves, or else simply attempting to escape, but swallowed by the oncoming horde.
But it was not over yet: Harry sped between duelers, past struggling prisoners, and into the Great Hall.
Voldemort was in the center of the battle, and he was striking and smiting all within reach. Harry could not get a clear shot, but fought his way nearer, still invisible, and the Great Hall became more and more crowded as everyone who could walk forced their way inside.
Harry saw Yaxley slammed to the floor by George and Lee Jordan, saw Dolohov fall with a scream at Tracey’s hands, saw Walden Macnair thrown across the room by Hagrid, hit the stone wall opposite, and slide unconscious to the ground. He saw Canini, Theodore, and Neville bringing down Morgan Nott, Aberforth Stunning Rookwood, Arthur and Percy flooring Thicknesse, and Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy running through the crowd, not even attempting to fight, screaming for their son.
Voldemort was now dueling McGonagall, Slughorn, and Kingsley all at once, and there was cold hatred in his face as they wove and ducked around him, unable to finish him—
Bellatrix was still fighting too, fifty yards away from Voldemort, and like her master she dueled three at once: Allison, Ginny, and Luna, all battling their hardest, but Bellatrix was equal to them, and Harry’s attention was diverted as a Killing Curse shot past the heads of both Allison and Ginny that missed both by an inch—
He changed course, running at Bellatrix rather than Voldemort, but before he had gone a few steps he was knocked sideways.
‘NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!’
Mrs Weasley threw off her cloak as she ran, freeing her arms. Bellatrix spun on the spot, roaring with laughter at the sight of her new challenger.
‘OUT OF MY WAY!’ shouted Mrs Weasley to the three girls, and with a swipe of her wand she began to duel. Harry watched with terror and elation as Molly Weasley’s wand slashed and twisted, and Bellatrix Lestrange’s smile faltered and became a snarl. Jets of light flew from both wands, the floor around the witches’ feet became hot and cracked; both women were fighting to kill.
‘No!’ Mrs Weasley cried to Allison as she ran forward, trying to come to her aid. ‘Get back! Get back! She is mine!’
Hundreds of people now lined the walls, watching the two fights, Voldemort and his three opponents, Bellatrix and Molly, and Harry stood, invisible, torn between both, wanting to attack and yet to protect, unable to be sure that he would not hit the innocent.
‘What will happen to your children when I’ve killed you?’ taunted Bellatrix, as mad as her master, capering as Molly’s curses danced around her. ‘When Mummy’s gone the same way as Freddie?’
‘You—will—never—touch—our—children—again!’ screamed Mrs Weasley.
Bellatrix laughed, the same exhilarated laugh her cousin Sirius had given as he toppled backward through the veil, and suddenly Harry knew what was going to happen before it did.
Molly’s curse soared beneath Bellatrix’s outstretched arm and hit her squarely in the chest, directly over her heart.
Bellatrix’s gloating smile froze, her eyes began to bulge: For the tiniest space of time she knew what had happened, and then she toppled, and the watching crowd roared, and Voldemort screamed.
Harry felt as though he turned in slow motion; he saw McGonagall, Kingsley, and Slughorn blasted backward, flailing and writhing through the air, as Voldemort’s fury at the fall of his last, best lieutenant exploded with the force of a bomb. Voldemort raised his wand and directed it at Molly Weasley.
‘Protego!’ roared Harry, and the Shield Charm expanded in the middle of the Hall, and Voldemort stared around for the source as Harry pulled off the Invisibility Cloak at last.
The yell of shock, the cheers, the screams on every side of ‘Harry!’ ‘HE’S ALIVE!’ were stifled at once. The crowd was afraid, and silence fell abruptly and completely as Voldemort and Harry looked at each other, and began, at the same moment, to circle each other.
‘I don’t want anyone else to try to help!’ Harry said loudly, and in the total silence his voice carried like a trumpet call. ‘It’s got to be like this. It’s got to be me.’
Voldemort hissed.
‘Potter doesn’t mean that,’ he said, his red eyes wide. ‘That isn’t how he works, is it? Who are you going to use as a shield today, Potter?’
‘Nobody,’ said Harry simply. ‘There are no more Horcruxes. It’s just you and me. Neither can live while the other survives, and one of us is about to leave for good...’
‘One of us?’ jeered Voldemort, and his whole body was taunt and his red eyes stared, a snake that was about to strike. ‘You think it will be you, do you, the boy who has survived by accident, and because Dumbledore was pulling the strings?’
‘Accident, was it, when my mother died to save me?’ asked Harry. They were still moving sideways, both of them, in that perfect circle, maintaining the same distance from each other, and for Harry no face existed but Voldemort’s. ‘Accident, when I decided to fight in that graveyard? Accident, that I didn’t defend myself tonight, and still survived, and returned to fight again?’
‘Accidents!’ screamed Voldemort, but still he did not strike, and the watching crowd was frozen as if petrified, and of the hundreds in the Hall, nobody seemed to breathe but they two. ‘Accident and chance and the fact that you crouched and sniveled behind the skirts of greater men and women, and permitted me to kill them for you!’
‘You won’t be killing anyone else tonight,’ said Harry as they circled, and stared into each other’s eyes, green into red. ‘You won’t be able to kill any of them ever again. Don’t you get it? I was ready to die to stop you from hurting these people—‘
‘But you did not!’
‘—I meant to, and that’s what it did. I’ve done what my mother did. They’re protected from you. Haven’t you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can’t torture them. You can’t touch them. You don’t learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?’
‘You dare—‘
‘Yes, I dare,’ said Harry. ‘I know things you don’t know, Tom Riddle. I know lots of important things that you don’t. Want to hear some, before you make another big mistake?’
Voldemort did not speak, but prowled in a circle, and Harry knew that he kept him temporarily mesmerized and at bay, held back by the faintest possibility that Harry might indeed know a final secret…
‘Is it love again?’ said Voldemort, his snake’s face jeering. ‘Dumbledore’s favorite solution, love, which he claimed conquered death, though love did not stop him falling from the tower and breaking like an old waxwork? Love, which did not prevent me stamping out your Mudblood mother like a cockroach, Potter—and nobody seems to love you enough to run forward this time and take my curse. So what will stop you from dying now when I strike?’
‘Just one thing,’ said Harry, and still they circled each other, wrapped in each other, held apart by nothing but the last secret.
‘If it is not love that will save you this time,’ said Voldemort, ‘you must believe that you have magic that I do not, or else a weapon more powerful than mine?’
‘I believe both,’ said Harry, and he saw shock flit across the snakelike face, though it was instantly dispelled; Voldemort began to laugh, and the sound was more frightening than his screams; humorless and insane, it echoed around the silent Hall.
‘You think you know more magic than I do?’ he said. ‘Than I, than Lord Voldemort, who has performed magic that Dumbledore himself never dreamed of?’
‘Oh, he dreamed of it,’ said Harry, ‘but he knew more than you, knew enough not to do what you’ve done.’
‘You mean he was weak!’ screamed Voldemort. ‘Too weak to dare, too weak to take what might have been his, what will be mine!’
‘No, he was cleverer than you,’ said Harry, ‘a better wizard, a better man.’
‘I brought about the death of Albus Dumbledore!’
‘You thought you did,’ said Harry, ‘but you were wrong.’
For the first time, the watching crowd stirred as the hundreds of people around the walls drew breath as one.
‘Dumbledore is dead!’ Voldemort hurled the words at Harry as though they would cause him unendurable pain. ‘His body decays in the marble tomb in the grounds of this castle. I have seen it, Potter, and he will not return!’
‘Yes, Dumbledore’s dead,’ said Harry calmly, ‘but you didn’t have him killed. He chose his own manner of dying, chose it months before he died, arranged the whole thing with the man you thought was your servant.’
‘What childish dream is this?’ said Voldemort, but still he did not strike, and his red eyes did not waver from Harry’s.
‘Severus Snape wasn’t yours,’ said Harry. ‘Snape was Dumbledore’s. Dumbledore’s from the moment you started hunting down my mother. And you never realized it, because of the thing you can’t understand. You never saw Snape cast a Patronus, did you, Riddle?’
Voldemort did not answer. They continued to circle each other, like wolves about to tear each other apart.
‘Snape’s Patronus was a doe,’ said Harry, ‘the same as my mother’s, because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from the time when they were children. You should have realized,’ he said as he saw Voldemort’s nostrils flare, ‘he asked you to spare her life, didn’t he?’
‘He desired her, that was all,’ sneered Voldemort, ‘but when she had gone, he agreed that there were other women, and of purer blood, worthier of him—‘
‘Of course he told you that,’ said Harry, ‘but he was Dumbledore’s spy from the moment you threatened her, and he’s been working against you ever since! Dumbledore was already dying when Snape finished him!’
‘It matters not!’ shrieked Voldemort, who had followed every word with rapt attention, but now let out a cackle of mad laughter. ‘It matters not whether Snape was mine or Dumbledore’s, or what petty obstacles they tried to put in my path! I crushed them as I crushed your mother, Snape’s supposed great love! Oh, but it all makes sense, Potter, and in ways that you do not understand! Dumbledore was trying to keep the Elder Wand from me! He intended that Snape should be the true master of the wand! But I got there ahead of you, little boy—I reached the wand before you could get your hands on it, I understood the truth before you caught up, I killed Severus Snape three hours ago, and the Elder Wand, the Deathstick, the Wand of Destiny is truly mine! Dumbledore’s last plan went wrong, Harry Potter!’
‘Yeah, it did,’ said Harry. ‘You’re right. But before you try to kill me, I’d advise you to think about what you’ve done…Think, and try for some remorse, Riddle…’
‘What is this?’
Of all the things that Harry had said to him, beyond any revelation or taunt, nothing had shocked Voldemort like this. Harry saw his pupils contact to thin slits, saw the skin around his eyes whiten.
‘It’s your one last chance,’ said Harry, ‘it’s all you’ve got left…I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise...Be a man...try...Try for some remorse…’
‘You dare—?’ said Voldemort again.
‘Yes, I dare,’ said Harry, ‘because Dumbledore’s last plan hasn’t backfired on me at all. It’s backfired on you, Riddle.’
Voldemort’s hand was trembling on the Elder Wand, and Harry gripped Draco’s very tightly. The moment, he knew, was seconds away.
‘That wand still isn’t working properly for you because you murdered the wrong person. Severus Snape was never the true master of the Elder Wand. He never defeated Dumbledore.’
‘He killed—‘
‘Aren’t you listening? Snape never beat Dumbledore! Dumbledore’s death was planned between them! Dumbledore intended to die undefeated, the wand’s last true master! If all had gone as planned, the wand’s power would have died with him, because it had never been won from him!’
‘But then, Potter, Dumbledore as good as gave me the wand!’ Voldemort’s voice shook with malicious pleasure. ‘I stole the wand from its last master’s tomb! I removed it against its last master’s wishes! Its power is mine!’
‘You still don’t get it, Riddle, do you? Possessing the wand isn’t enough! Holding it, using it, doesn’t make it really yours. Didn’t you listen to Ollivander? The wand chooses the wizard…The Elder Wand recognized a new master before Dumbledore died, someone who never even laid a hand on it. The new master removed the wand from Dumbledore against his will, never realizing exactly what he had done, or that the world’s most dangerous wand had given him its allegiance…
Voldemort’s chest rose and fell rapidly, and Harry could feel the curse coming, feel it building inside the wand pointed at his face.
‘The true master of the Elder Wand was Draco Malfoy.’
Blank shock showed in Voldemort’s face for a moment, but then it was gone.
‘But what does it matter?’ he said softly. ‘Even if you are right, Potter, it makes no difference to you and me. You no longer have the phoenix wand: We duel on skill alone…and after I have killed you, I can attend to Draco Malfoy…’
‘But you’re too late,’ said Harry. ‘You’ve missed your chance. I got there first. I overpowered Draco weeks ago. I took this wand from him.’
Harry twitched the hawthorn wand, and he felt the eyes of everyone in the Hall upon it.
‘So it all comes down to this, doesn’t it?’ whispered Harry. ‘Does the wand in your hand know its last master was Disarmed? Because if it does…I am the true master of the Elder Wand.’
A red-gold glow burst suddenly across the enchanted sky above them as an edge of dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window. The light hit both of their faces at the same time, so that Voldemort’s was suddenly a flaming blur. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he too yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Draco’s wand:
‘Avada Kedavra!’
‘Expelliarmus!’
The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort’s green jet meet his own spell, saw the Elder Wand fly high, dark against the sunrise, spinning across the enchanted ceiling like the head of Nagini, spinning through the air toward the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last. And Harry, with the unerring skill of a Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hands, staring down at his enemy’s shell.
One shivering second of silence, the shock of the moment suspend: and then the tumult broke around Harry as the screams and the cheers and the roars of the watchers rent the air. The fierce new sun dazzled the windows as they thundered toward him, and the first to reach him were Allison, Canini, Theodore, and Tracey, and it was their arms that were wrapped around him, their incomprehensible shouts that deafened him. Then Terence, Neville, Luna, and Susan were there, and then all the Weasleys and Hagrid, and Kingsley and McGonagall and Flitwick and Spout, and Harry could not hear a word that anyone was shouting, nor tell whose hands were seizing him, pulling him, trying to hug some part of him, hundreds of them pressing in, all of them determined to touch the Boy Who Lived, the reason it was over at last—
The sun rose steadily over Hogwarts, and the Great Hall blazed with life and light. Harry was an indispensable part of the mingled outpourings of jubilation and mourning, of grief and celebration. They wanted him there with them, their leader and symbol, their savior and their guide, and that he had not slept, that he craved the company of only a few of them, seemed to occur to no one.
He must speak to the bereaved, clap their hands, witness their tears, receive their thanks, hear the news now creeping in from every quarter as the morning drew on; that the Imperiused up and down the country had come back to themselves, that Death Eaters were fleeing or else being captured, that the innocent of Azkaban were being released at that very moment, and that Kingsley Shacklebolt had been named temporary Minister of Magic…
They moved Voldemort’s body and laid it in a chamber off the Hall, away from the bodies of Remus, Tonks, Fred, Colin Creevey, and fifty others who had died fighting him. McGonagall had replaced the House tables, but nobody was sitting according to House anymore: All were jumbled together, teachers and pupils, ghosts and parents, centaurs and house-elves, and Firenze lay recovering in a corner, and Grawp peered in through a smashed window, and people were through food into his laughing mouth. After a while, exhausted and drained, Harry found himself sitting on a bench beside Luna.
‘I’d want some peace and quiet, if it were me,’ she said.
‘I’d love some,’ he replied.
‘I’ll distract them all,’ she said. ‘Use your Cloak.’
And before he could say a word she cried, ‘Oooh, look, a Blibbering Humdinger!’ and pointed out of the window. Everyone who heard looked around, and Harry slid the Cloak up over himself, and got to his feet.
Now he could move through the Hall without interference. He spotted the Weasley’s two tables away; they were huddled together, crying and laughing, there would be time to talk to them later. He saw Neville, the sword of Gryffindor lying beside his plate as he ate, surrounded by a knot of fervent admirers. Along the aisle between the tables he walked, and he spotted the three Malfoys, huddled together as though unsure whether or not they were supposed to be there, but nobody was paying them any attention. Everywhere he looked he saw families reunited, and finally, he saw the four whose company he craved most.
‘It’s me,’ he muttered, crouching down beside them. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘I’ll be back soon, love,’ said Tracey to Terence while giving him a kiss on the cheek.
They stood up at once, and together he, Tracey, Allison, Theodore, and Canini left the Great Hall. Great chunks were missing from the marble staircase, part of the balustrade was gone, and rubble and bloodstains occurred every few steps as they climbed.
Somewhere in the distance they could hear Peeves zooming through the corridors singing a victory song of his own composition:
‘We did it, we bashed them,
wee Potter’s the one,
And Voldy’s gone moldy,
so now let’s have fun!’
‘Really takes the edge off the trauma, doesn’t it,’ said Theodore sarcastically, opening the door for the others.
Happiness would come, Harry thought, but at the moment it was muffled by exhaustion, and the pain of losing Remus, Tonks, Fred, and Colin pierced him like a physical wound every few steps. Most of all he felt the most stupendous relief, and a longing to sleep. But first he owed an explanation to those closest in his life, who had fought by his side for years while sharing his suffering, and who deserved the truth. When he was absolutely sure they were alone he turned to Canini first.
‘Remus was so proud of you, he always knew how much strength you had, and Tonks knew you were loyal and kind—‘
‘Harry—?‘ she began, but tears were welling in her eyes.
‘But most of all I want you to hear from my own lips how proud I, myself, am of you,’ said Harry to his sister before turning to Theodore. ‘Colin never left your side. He loved you dearly and knew how much you needed him.’
Theodore looked frozen like a statue, eventually he gave a little nod, but Harry could tell this death in particular was going to be with his brother for a long time.
‘But how do you know all this, Harry?’ asked Allison in deep curiosity.
Painstakingly he recounted what he had seen in the Pensieve and what had happened in the forest, and they had not even begun to express all their shock and amazement when at last they arrived at the place to which they had been walking, though none of them had mentioned their destination.
Since he had last seen it, the gargoyle guarding the entrance to the headmaster’s study had been knocked aside; it stood lopsided, looking a little punch-drunk, and Harry wondered whether it would be able to distinguish passwords anymore.
‘Can we go up?’ he asked the gargoyle.
‘Feel free,’ groaned the statue.
They clambered over him and onto the spiral stone staircase that moved slowly upward like an escalator. Harry pushed open the door at the top.
He had one, brief glimpse of the stone Pensieve on the desk where he had left it, and then an earsplitting noise made him cry out, thinking of curses and returning Death Eaters and the rebirth of Voldemort—
But it was applause. All around the walls, the headmasters and headmistresses of Hogwarts were giving him a standing ovation; they waved their hats and in some cases their wigs, they reached through their frames to grip each other’s hands; they danced up and down on the chairs in which they had been painted; Dilys Derwent sobbed unashamedly will sharing a portrait with Antonia Creaseworthy; Dexter Fortescue was waving his ear-trumpet; and Phineas Nigellus Black called, in his high, reedy voice, ‘And let it be noted that Slytherin House played its part! Spread the word that it was a Slytherin who defeated him!’
But Harry had eyes only for the man who stood in the largest portrait directly behind the headmaster’s chair. Tears were sliding down from behind the half-moon spectacles into the long silver beard, and the pride and the gratitude emanating from him filled Harry with the same balm as phoenix song.
At last, Harry held up his hands, and the portraits fell respectfully silent, beaming and mopping their eyes and waiting eagerly for him to speak. He directed his words at Dumbledore, however, and chose them with enormous care. Exhausted and bleary-eyed though he was, he must make one last effort, seeking one last piece of advice.
‘The thing that was hidden in the Snitch,’ he began, ‘I dropped it in the forest. I don’t know exactly where, but I’m not going to go looking for it again. Do you agree?’
‘My dear boy, I do,’ said Dumbledore, while his fellow pictures looked confused and curious. ‘A wise and courageous decision, but no less than I would have expected of you. Does anyone else know where it fell?’
‘No one,’ said Harry, and Dumbledore nodded his satisfaction.
‘I’m going to keep Ignotus’ present, though,’ said Harry, and Dumbledore beamed.
‘But of course, Harry, it is yours forever, until you pass it on! That is if you and Miss Runcorn here plan on having kids of your own.’
‘One day,’ said Allison confidently, ‘but I’m going to be a star Quidditch player for a while first!’
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ said Harry beaming before turning back to the portrait of Dumbledore. ‘And then there’s this.’
Harry held up the Elder Wand, and the other four looked at it with a reverence that, even in his befuddled and sleep-deprived state, Harry did not like to see.
‘I don’t want it,’ said Harry.
‘What?’ said Tracey loudly. ‘Did dying make you crazy? Think of the magic you could do!’
‘I know it’s powerful,’ said Harry wearily, ‘but I was happier with mine. So...’
He rummaged in the pouch hung around his neck, and pulled out the two halves of holly still just connected by the finest thread of phoenix feather. Tracey and Mr Ollivander had said that they could not be repaired, that the damage was too severe. All he knew was that if this did not work, nothing would.
He laid the broken wand upon the headmaster’s desk, touch it with the very tip of the Elder Wand, and said ‘Reparo.’
As his wand resealed, red sparks flew out of its end. Harry knew that he had succeeded. He picked up the holly and phoenix wand and felt a sudden warmth in his fingers, as though wand and hand were rejoicing at their reunion. Before doing anything else, or before anyone could talk him out of it, Harry proceeded to snap the Elder Wand completely in half, it broke just like an ordinary dry twig.
‘Woah!’ spewed Canini, who had not expected that.
‘It would seem only the Elder Wand can repair broken wands, so with it destroyed beyond repair no one should be able to use it anymore,’ he told the group. Harry then once more faced the portrait of Dumbledore who was watching him with deep affection. ‘I’m putting the Elder Wand back where it came from. It will rest eternally with you.’
Dumbledore nodded. They smiled at each other.
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Tracey, who looked a little nervous.
‘I believe Harry’s making the right decision,’ said Theodore quietly.
‘That wand’s more trouble than it’s worth,’ said Harry. ‘And quite honestly,’ he turned away from the painted portraits, thinking now only of making himself a sandwich in whatever remained of the kitchen and heading to the the four-poster bead lying waiting for him in Slytherin Dungeon, ‘I’ve had enough trouble for a lifetime.’
(And technically that is the last chapter, I can't wait for you all to see the epilogue.)
First half of book:
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003829962
Previous Chapters:
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003833123
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003838588
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003840013
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003841380
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003842029
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003842653
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003843726
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844089
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844089/r/4400000000017564493
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844352
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003844924
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003845391
Tags:
@SaphireStark @Missy Clara Oswald @CatsAndRoblox @Pervaza972 @Mega.mind.harry.potter
(I think the last chapter didn't publish quite correct, so if you haven't read the chapter about Harry finding Theodore and the gang finding Ravenclaw's diadem please read that chapter first, a lot happens in it.)
Chapter Thirty-One: The Elder Wand
The world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased, the castle fallen silent in horror, and every combatant laid down their arms? Harry’s mind was in free fall, spinning out of control, unable to grasp the impossibility, because Nymphadora Tonks could not be dead, the evidence of all his senses must be lying—
And then there was an explosion and the exterior wall collapsed on top of them, and curses flew in at them from the darkness, hitting the wall behind their heads.
‘Get down!’ Harry shouted, as more curses flew through the night: He and Allison had grabbed Theodore and Tracey and pulled them to the floor. Allison then tried to go to Tonks, so move her body away from any further harm, but Harry had to shout at her to stop.
‘Allison, come on, we’ve got to move!’ Harry said while grabbing her arm, holding her back.
She shook her head, she tried to twist herself free.
‘Allison!’ Harry saw tears running down her spot covered face, as well as Theodore and Tracey’s, and Harry knew he was probably crying to, but he knew they couldn’t stay there. He tried to pull Allison again but she would not budge. ‘There is nothing we can do for her now, Allison! We’re going to—‘
Tracey screamed, and Harry, turning, did not need to ask why. A monstrous spider the size of a small car was trying to climb through the huge hole in the wall. One of Aragog’s descendants had joined the fight.
Tracey and Harry shouted together; their spells collided and the monster was blown backward, its legs jerking horribly, and vanished into the darkness.
‘The whole family is here!’ Theodore called to the others, and glancing through the hole in the wall Harry could see it was true. More giant spiders were climbing the side of the building, liberated from the Forbidden Forest, into which the Death Eaters must have penetrated. Harry fired Stunning Spells down upon them, knocking the lead monster into its fellows, so that they rolled back down the building and out of sight. Then more curses came soaring over Harry’s head, so close he felt the force of them blow his hair.
‘Let’s move, NOW!’
Pushing Tracey ahead of him with Theodore, Harry stooped to seize Tonks’ body under the armpit. Allison, realizing what Harry was trying to do and helped: together, crouching low to avoid the curses flying at them from the grounds, they hauled Tonks out of the way.
‘Here,’ said Harry, and they placed her in a niche where a suit of armor had stood earlier. He could not bear to look at his cousin a second longer than he had to, and after making sure that the body was well-hidden, he took off after Tracey and Theodore. The corridor was now full of dust and falling masonry, glass long gone from windows, he saw many people running backward and forward, whether friends or foes he could not tell. Rounding the corner, Allison let out a bull-like roar warning:
‘DOLOHOV!’ and sprinted towards Harry.
‘Alli, Harry, over here!’ Theodore screamed.
She and Theodore were behind the tapestry, and a second later Harry and Allison’s joined them. Allison was practically fuming and she looked as though she was about to explode.
‘It was Bellatrix! I’m going to make her pay for all the pain and death she’s caused! I’ll going to kill all of the Death Eaters!’
‘Alli-‘ Tracey tried, but she choked on her words.
‘Allison! You listen to me right now!’ shouted Harry.
Her face was contorted, smeared with dust, smoke, and tears, and she was shaking with rage and grief.
He knew how she felt, they all just lost a caring and loyal family member who was always there for them, Harry wanted revenge as well, but they couldn’t do so yet. They had to finish the mission so that no one else would get hurt.
‘Allison, Jaanu, only the four of us can end this fighting! Only the four of us can kill the snake! Allison—Please!’ Harry begged.
Her breathing steadied slightly, but she still seemed engulfed in rage.
‘To get to the snake we’ll have to go through waves of Death Eaters, vile monsters you can take out, but you can only do so if you come with us,’ said Theodore, his voice raspy.
This seemed to bring Allison back, and her rage settled beneath the surface but did not cease. She turned to Harry.
‘You have to find out where Voldemort is now, as the snake will be with him. Open your mind to his, look inside of him Harry!’
Why was it so easy? Because his scar had been burning for hours, yearning to show him Voldemort’s thoughts? He closed his eyes on her command, and at once, the screams and bangs and all the discordant sounds of the battle were drowned until they became distant, as though he stood far, far away from them…
He was standing in the middle of a desolate but strangely familiar room, with peeling paper on the walls and all the windows boarded up except for one. The sounds of the assault on the castle were muffled and distant. The single unblocked window revealed distant bursts of light where the castle stood, but inside the room was dark except for a solitary oil lamp.
He was rolling his wand between his fingers, watching it, his thoughts on the room in the castle, the secret room only he had ever found, the room, like the chamber, that you had to be clever and cunning and inquisitive to discover…He was confident that the boy would not find the diadem…although Dumbledore’s puppet had come much farther than he ever expected…too far…
‘My Lord,’ said a voice, desperate and cracked. He turned: there was Lucius Malfoy sitting in the darkest corner, ragged and still bearing the marks of the punishment he had received after the boy’s last escape. One of his eyes remained closed and puffy. ‘My Lord...please...my son...’
‘If your son is dead, Lucius, he did so trying to fulfill my commands, you should be honoured. That of course is if he is loyal and did not decided to befriend Harry Potter?’
‘No—never,’ whispered Malfoy.
‘You must hope not.’
‘Aren’t—aren’t you afraid, my Lord that Potter might die at another hand but yours?’ asked Malfoy, his voice shaking.
‘Wouldn’t it be…forgive me…more prudent to call off this battle, enter the castle, and seek him y–yourself?’
‘Do not pretend Lucius. You wish the battle to cease so that you can discover what has happened to your son. And I do not need to seek Potter. Before the night is out, Potter will have come to find me.’
Voldemort dropped his gaze once more to the wand in his fingers. It troubled him…and those things that troubled Lord Voldemort needed to be rearranged…
‘Go and fetch Snape.’
‘Snape, m–my Lord?’
‘Snape. Now. I need him. There is a—service—I require from him. Go.’
Frightened, stumbling a little through the gloom, Lucius left the room. Voldemort continued to stand there, twirling the wand between his fingers, staring at it.
‘It is the only way, Nagini,’ he whispered, and he looked around, and there was the great thick snake, now suspended in midair, twisting gracefully within the enchanted, protected space he had made for her, a starry, transparent sphere somewhere between a glittering cage and a tank.
With a gasp, Harry pulled back and opened his eyes at the same moment his ears were assaulted with the screeches and cries, the smashes and bangs of battle.
‘He’s in the Shrieking Shack. The snake’s with him, it’s got some sort of magical protection around it. He’s just sent Lucius Malfoy to find Snape.’
‘Voldemort is hiding in the Shrieking Shack?’ said Theodore, outraged. ‘He isn’t even fighting with his dying army?’
‘He doesn’t think he needs to fight,’ said Harry. ‘He thinks I’m going to go to him.’
‘Why would he—‘ began Tracey.
‘He knows I’m after Horcruxes—he’s keeping Nagini close beside him—obviously I’m going to have to go to him to get near the thing—‘
‘Correct,’ said Theodore, ‘so that is why you shouldn’t go, he’s expecting you, it’s a trap. You should stay here and maybe one of two of us go under your Cloak—‘
Harry cut Theodore off.
‘No, you three stay here, I’ll go under the Cloak and I’ll be back as soon as I—‘
‘I’ll go, I need to fight something!’ said Allison.
‘No one should go by themselves,’ said Tracey.
Before Harry or anyone else could argue any further, the tapestry at the top of the staircase on which they stood was ripped open.
‘POTTER!’
Dolohov and another masked Death Eaters stood there, but even before their wands were fully raised, Tracey shouted ‘Everte Statum!’
And the Death Eaters were flung backwards several feet and then fell down the rest of the stair.
‘We have to run!’ she cried, and without arguing the began sprinting down a different corridor away from the first two Death Eaters.
A moment later the four of them ran into another set, and curse started flying over their heads.
‘Ebubio!’ shouted Allison and one of the Death Eaters became trapped in a large bubble. Theodore used the Full Body-Bind curse on another, and Harry cast the Incarcerous Spell on the final Death Eater in the way.
They could hear something coming, and so Allison shouted, ‘Get back!’ before she, Harry, Tracey, and Theodore hurled themselves against a door as a herd of galloping desks thundered past, shepherded by a sprinting Professor McGonagall. She appeared not to notice them. Her hair had come down and there was a gash on her cheek. As she turned the corner, they heard her scream, ‘CHARGE!’
‘Harry, it should be you who uses the Cloak,’ said Tracey. ‘The rest of us will—‘
‘But he threw it over all four of them; large though they were he doubted anyone would see their disembodied lower legs through the dust that clogged the air, the falling stone, the shimmer of spells.
They ran down the next staircase and found themselves in a corridor full of duelers. The portraits on either side of the fighters were crammed with figures screaming advice and encouragement, while Death Eaters, both masked and unmasked, dueled students and teachers. Dean had won himself a wand, for he was now the one face-to-face with Dolohov, Terence with Travers. All four friends raised their wands at once, ready to strike, but the duelers were weaving and darting so much that there was a strong likelihood of hurting on of their own side if they cast curses.
Even as they stood braced, looking for the opportunity to act, there came a great ‘Wheeeeeeeeeeee!’ and looking up, Harry saw Peeves zooming over them, dropping Snargaluff pods down onto the Death Eaters, whose heads were suddenly engulfed in wriggling green tubers like fat worms.
‘Argh!’
A fistful of tubers had hit the Cloak over Theodore’s head; the damp green roots were suspended improbably in midair as Theodore tried to shake them loose.
‘Someone’s invisible there!’ shouted a masked Death Eater, pointing.
Terence made the most of the Death Eater’s momentary distraction, knocking him out with a stunning Spell; Dolohov attempted to retaliate, and Dean shot a Confundus Charm then Stun Spell at him.
‘LET’S GO!’ Harry yelled, and he, and the other three gathered the Cloak tightly around themselves and pelted, heads down, through the midst of the fighters, slipping a little in pools of Snargaluff juice, toward the top of the marble staircase into the entrance hall.
There were more duelers all over the stairs and in the hall. Death Eaters everywhere Harry looked: Yaxley, close to the front doors, in combat with Flitwick, a masked Death Eater dueling Kingsley right beside them. Students ran in every direction; some carrying or dragging injured or dead friends. Harry directed a Stunning Spell toward the masked Death Eater; it missed but nearly hit Neville, who had emerged from nowhere brandishing armfuls of Venomous Tentacula, which looped itself happily around the nearest Death Eater and began reeling him in.
Harry, Theodore, Allison, and Tracey sped down the marble staircase: glass shattered on the left, and the Slytherin hourglass that had recorded House points spilled its emeralds everywhere, so that people slipped and staggered as they ran.
A body fell from the balcony overhead as they reached the ground. Looking up Harry could see the quick blur of the animalistic Fenrir Greyback.
‘No!’ Harry heard Canini howl in emotional turmoil and then she yelled 'Duro'.
And within seconds the body of Greyback had turned to solid stone. Harry thought Canini's attack would end with Greyback's petrification, but then he watched in shock as she shoved Greyback's stone form off the balcony, sending it to the ground below where it shattered. He couldn’t understand this action until he saw that the body below her next to the rubble that used to be Greyback was that of Remus Lupin.
‘Remus…’ Harry heard Theodore whisper.
‘Harry!’ yelled Allison in warning before she forcibly shoved his head down. A bright white crystal ball flew over where his face had been a second before and hit a Death Eater right on the top of his head, and he crumpled to the ground and did not move.
‘I have more!’ shrieked Professor Trelawney from over the banisters. ‘More for any who want them! Here—‘
And with a move like a tennis serve, she heaved another enormous crystal sphere from her bag, waved her wand through the air, and caused the ball to speed across the hall and smash through a window. At the same moment, the heavy wooden front doors burst open, and more of the gigantic spiders forced their way into the front hall.
Screams of terror rent the air: the fighters scattered, Death Eaters and Hogwartians alike, and red and green jets of light flew into the midst of the oncoming monsters, which shuddered and reared, more terrifying than ever.
‘W-we have to get out of here,’ Harry mumbled, but in reality he wanted to go to his sister who was currently suffering alone.
‘But how?’ yelled Tracey over all the screaming, but before either Harry, Allison, or Theodore could answer they were bowled aside; Hagrid had come thundering down the stairs, brandishing his flowery pink umbrella.
‘Don’t hurt ’em, don’t hurt ’em!’ he yelled.
‘HAGRID, NO!’
Harry forgot everything else: he sprinted out from under the cloak, running bent double to avoid the curses illuminating the whole hall.
‘HAGRID, COME BACK!’ But he was not even halfway to Hagrid when he saw it happen: Hagrid vanished amongst the spiders, and with a great scurrying, a foul swarming movement, they retreated under the onslaught of spells, Hagrid buried in their midst.
‘HAGRID!’
Harry heard someone calling his own name, whether friend or foe he did not care: He was sprinting down the front steps into the dark grounds, and the spiders were swarming away with their prey, and he could see nothing of Hagrid at all.
‘HAGRID!’
He thought he could make out an enormous arm waving from the midst of the spider swarm, but as he made to chase after them, his way was impeded by a monumental foot, which swung down out of the darkness and made the ground on which he stood shudder. He looked up: A giant stood before him, twenty feet high, its head hidden in shadow, nothing but its treelike, hairy shins illuminated by light from the castle doors. With one brutal, fluid movement, it smashed a massive fist through an upper window, and glass rained down upon Harry, forcing him back under the shelter of the doorway.
‘What the H—!’ shrieked Allison, as she, Tracey, and Theodore caught up with Harry and gazed upward at the giant now trying to seize people through the window above.
‘Stop!’ Tracey yelled, grabbing Allison’s hand as she raised her wand. ‘If you make him fall he could fall on the castle and—‘
‘HAGGER?’
Grawp came lurching around the corner of the castle; only now did Harry realize that Grawp was, indeed, an undersized giant. The gargantuan monster trying to crush people on the upper floors turned around and let out a roar. The stone steps trembled as he stomped toward his smaller kin, and Grawp’s lopsided mouth fell open, showing yellow, half brick-sized teeth; and then they launched themselves at each other with the savagery of lions.
‘RUN!’ Harry roared; the night was full of hideous yells and blows as the giants wrestled, and he seized Allison’s hand and tore down the steps into the grounds, Theodore and Tracey bringing up the rear. Harry had not lost hope of finding and saving Hagrid; he ran so fast that they were halfway toward the forest before they were brought up short again.
The air around them had frozen: Harry’s breath caught and solidified in his chest. Shapes moved out in the darkness, swirling figures of concentrated blackness, moving in a great wave towards the castles, their faces hooded and their breath rattling…
Allison stood by his side and Theodore and Tracey closed in beside them as the sounds of fighting behind them grew suddenly muted, deadened, because a silence only dementors could bring was falling thickly through the night, and Tonks was gone, as was his last remaining parent, and Hagrid was surely dying or already dead...
‘Come on, Harry!’ said Allison’s voice even though it sounded very far away. ‘Cast your Patronus, we need you!’
He raised his wand, but a dull hopelessness was spreading throughout him: How many more lay dead that he did not yet know about? He felt as though his soul had already half left his body…
‘HARRY!’ screamed Tracey.
A hundred dementors were advancing, gliding toward them, sucking their way closer to Harry’s despair, which was like a promise of a feast…
He saw Tracey and Theodore’s silver monarch butterfly and grass snake burst into the air, flicker feebly, and then both expired; he saw Allison’s doe leap in midair and fade, and his own wand trembled in his hand, and he almost welcomed the oncoming oblivion, the promise of nothing, of no feeling…
And then a silver hare, a boar, and sparrowhawk soared past Harry, Tracey, Allison, and Theodore’s heads: the dementors fell back before the creatures’ approach. For a moment Harry mistook the hare for a jack rabbit and thought Tonks had saved him, but deep down he knew that wasn’t the case.
Three more people had arrived out of the darkness to stand beside them, their wands outstretched, continuing to cast Patronuses: Luna, Ernie, and Terence.
‘That’s right,’ said Luna encouragingly, as if they were back in the Room of Requirement and this was simply spell practice for the D.A., ‘That’s right, Harry…come on think of something happy…’
‘Something happy?’ he said, his voice cracked.
‘We’re with you all the way, Harry,’ said Terence. ‘We’ll fight by your side to the very end.’
‘Harry, I love you,’ whispered Allison.
There was a silver spark, then a wavering light, and then, with the greatest effort it had ever cost him the stag burst from the end of Harry’s wand. It cantered forward, and now the dementors scattered in earnest, and immediately the night was mild again, but the sounds of the surrounding battle were loud in his ears.
‘I am so grateful you all showed up,’ said Tracey shakily, looking at Terence in particular.
‘Yes, you all just saved our lives,’ said Theodore to Luna, Ernie, and Terence.
With a roar and an earth-quaking tremor, another giant came lurching out of the darkness from the direction of the forest, brandishing a club taller than any of them.
‘RUN!’ Harry shouted again, but the others needed no telling; They all scattered, and not a second too soon, for the next moment the creature’s vast foot had fallen exactly where they had been standing. Harry looked around: Tracey, Allison, and Theodore were following him, but the other three had vanished back into the battle.
‘We should get out of everyone’s range!’ yelled Theodore as the giant swung its club again and its bellows echoed through the night, across the grounds where bursts of red and green light continued to illuminate the darkness.
‘The Whomping willow,’ said Harry, ‘go!’
Somehow he walled it all up in his mind, crammed it into a small space into which he could not look now: thoughts of Remus, Tonks, and Hagrid, and his terror for all the people he loved, scattered in and outside the castle, must all wait, because they had to run, had to reach the snake and Voldemort, because that was the only way to end it—
He sprinted, half—believing he could outdistance death itself, ignoring the jets of light flying in the darkness all around him, and the sound of the lake crashing like the sea, and the creaking of the Forbidden Forest though the night was windless; through grounds that seemed themselves to have risen in rebellion, he ran faster than he had ever moved in his life, and it was he who saw the great tree first, the Willow that protected the secret at its roots with whiplike, slashing branches.
Panting and gasping, Harry slowed down, skirting the willow’s swiping branches, peering through the darkness toward its tick trunk, trying to see the single knot in the bark of the old tree that would paralyze it. The other three caught up, Tracey so out of breath that she could not speak.
‘S—so, how do we stop it from murdering us?’ gasped Allison, catching her breath. ‘My cat is still with Tulip—‘
‘We don’t need Shabaz,’ wheezed Theodore, bent double, clutching his chest. ‘We know way more spells now than we did then.’
‘Right—sorry—‘
Allison looked around, then directed her wand at a small rock on the ground and said ‘Wingardium Leviosa!’
The rock flew up from the ground, spun through the air as if caught by a gust of wind, then zoomed directly at the trunk through the Willow’s ominously swaying branches. It hit exactly at its target of a place near the roots, and at once, the writhing tree became still.
‘Great job,’ panted Tracey.
‘Wait.’
For one teetering second, while the crashes and booms of the battle filled the air, Harry hesitated. Voldemort wanted him to do this, wanted him to come...Was he leading his three closest friends into a trap?
But the reality seemed to close upon him, cruel and plain: the only way forward was to kill the snake, and the snake was where Voldemort was, and Voldemort was at the end of this tunnel…
‘Harry, I know how much you have lost, and how desperately afraid you are of losing anyone else, but we are with you for all of this,’ said Allison in a soothing tone. Her face then let loose some of her pent up rage. ‘Now let’s go bash in that snake’s skull!’
Harry wriggled into the earthy passage hidden in the tree’s roots. It was a much tighter squeeze than it had been the last time they had entered it. The tunnel was low—ceilinged: they had had to double up to move through it nearly four years previously; now there was nothing for it but to crawl. Harry went first, his wand illuminated, expecting at any moment to meet barriers, but none came. They moved in silence, Harry’s gaze fixed upon the swinging beam of the wand held in his fist.
At last, the tunnel began to slope upward and Harry saw a sliver of light ahead. Theodore tugged at his ankle.
‘The Cloak!’ he whispered. ‘You should put the Cloak on!’
He groped behind him and he forced the bundle of slippery cloth into his free hand. With difficulty he dragged it over himself, murmured, ‘Nox,’ extinguishing his wandlight, and continued on his hands and knees, as silently as possible, all his senses straining, expecting every second to be discovered, to hear a cold clear voice, see a flash of green light.
And then he heard voices coming from the room directly ahead of them, only slightly muffled by the fact that the opening at the end of the tunnel had been blocked up by what looked like an old crate. Hardly daring to breathe, Harry edged right up to the opening and peered through a tiny gap left between crate and wall.
The room beyond was dimly lit, but he could see Nagini, swirling and coiling like a serpent underwater, safe in her enchanted, starry sphere, which floated unsupported in midair. He could see the edge of a table, and a long-fingered white hand toying with a wand. Then Snape spoke, and Harry’s heart lurched: Snape was inches away from where he crouched, hidden.
‘...my Lord, their resistance is crumbling—‘
‘—and it is doing so without your help,’ said Voldemort in his high, clear voice. ‘Skilled wizard though you are, Severus, I do not think you will make much difference now. We are almost there…almost.’
‘Let me find the boy. Let me bring you Potter. I know I can find him, my Lord. Please.’
Snape strode past the gap, and Harry drew back a little, keeping his eyes fixed upon Nagini, wondering whether there was any spell that might penetrate the protection surrounding her, but he could not think of anything. One failed attempt, and he would give away his position…
Voldemort stood up. Harry could see him now, see the red eyes, the flattened, serpentine face, the pallor of him gleaming slightly in the semidarkness.
‘I have a problem, Severus,’ said Voldemort softly.
‘My Lord?’ said Snape.
Voldemort raised the Elder Wand, holding it as delicately and precisely as a conductor’s baton.
‘Why doesn’t it work for me, Severus?’
In the silence Harry imagined he could hear the snake hissing slightly as it coiled and uncoiled—or was it Voldemort’s sibilant sigh lingering on the air?
‘My—my lord?’ said Snape blankly. ‘I do not understand. You—you have performed extraordinary magic with that wand.’
‘No,’ said Voldemort. ‘I have performed my usual magic. I am extraordinary, but this wand…no. It has not revealed the wonders it has promised. I feel no difference between this wand and the one I procured from Ollivander all those years ago.’
Voldemort’s tone was musing, calm, but Harry’s scar had begun to throb and pulse: Pain was building in his forehead, and he could feel that controlled sense of fury building inside Voldemort.
‘No difference,’ said Voldemort again.
Snape did not speak. Harry could not see his face. He wondered whether Snape sensed danger, was trying to find the right words to reassure his master.
Voldemort started to move around the room: Harry lost sight of him for seconds as he prowled, speaking in that same measured voice, while the pain and fury mounted in Harry.
‘I have thought long and hard, Severus…do you know why I have called you back from battle?’
And for a moment Harry saw Snape’s profile. His eyes were fixed upon the coiling snake in its enchanted cage.
‘No, my Lord, but I beg you will let me return. Let me find Potter.’
‘You sound like Lucius. Neither of you understands Potter as I do. He does not need finding. Potter will come to me. I knew his weakness you see, his one great flaw. He will hate watching the others struck down around him, knowing that it is for him that it happens. He will want to stop it at any cost. He will come.’
‘But my Lord, he might be killed accidentally by someone other than yourself—‘
‘My instructions to the Death Eaters have been perfectly clear. Capture Potter. Kill his friends—the more, the better—but do not kill him. But it is of you that I wished to speak, Severus, not Harry Potter. You have been very valuable to me. Very valuable.’
‘My Lord knows I seek only to serve him. But—let me go and find the boy, my Lord. Let me bring him to you. I know I can—‘
‘I have told you, no!’ said Voldemort, and Harry caught the glint of red in his eyes as he turned again, and the swishing of his cloak was like the slithering of a snake, and he felt Voldemort’s impatience in his burning scar. ‘My concern at the moment, Severus, is what will happen when I finally meet the boy!’
‘My Lord, there can be no question, surely—?’
‘—but there is a question, Severus. There is.’
Voldemort halted, and Harry could see him plainly again as he slid the Elder Wand through his white fingers, staring at Snape.
‘Why did both the wands I have used fail when directed at Harry Potter?’
‘I—I cannot answer that, my Lord.’
‘Can’t you?’
The stab of rage felt like a spike driven through Harry’s head: he forced his own fist into his mouth to stop himself from crying out in pain. He closed his eyes, and suddenly he was Voldemort, looking into Snape’s pale face.
‘My wand of yew did everything of which I asked it, Severus, except to kill Harry Potter. Twice it failed. Ollivander told me under torture of the twin cores, told me to take another’s wand. I did so, but Lucius’ wand shattered upon meeting Potter’s.’
‘I—I have no explanation, my Lord.’
Snape was not looking at Voldemort now. His dark eyes were still fixed upon the coiling serpent in its protective sphere.
'I sought a third wand, Severus. The Elder Wand, the Wand of Destiny, the Deathstick. I took it from its previous master. I took it from the grave of Albus Dumbledore.’
And now Snape looked at Voldemort, and Snape’s face was like a death mask. It was marble white and so still that when he spoke, it was a shock to see that anyone lived behind the blank eyes.
‘My Lord—let me go to the boy—‘
‘All this long night when I am on the brink of victory, I have sat here,’ said Voldemort, his voice barely louder than a whisper, ‘wondering, wondering, why the Elder Wand refuses to be what it ought to be, refuses to perform as legend says it must perform for its rightful owner…and I think I have the answer.’
Snape did not speak.
‘Perhaps you already know it? You are a clever man, after all, Severus. You have been a good and faithful servant, and I regret what must happen.’
‘My Lord—‘
‘The Elder Wand cannot serve me properly, Severus, because I am not its true master. The Elder Wand belongs to the wizard who killed its last owner. You killed Albus Dumbledore. While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot truly be mine.’
‘My Lord!’ Snape protested, raising his wand.
‘It cannot be any other way,’ said Voldemort. ‘I must master the wand, Severus. Master the wand, and I master Potter at last.’
And Voldemort swiped the air with the Elder Wand. It did nothing to Snape, who for a split second seemed to think he had been reprieved: but then Voldemort’s intention became clear. The snake’s cage was rolling through the air, and before Snape could do anything more than yell, it had encased him, head and shoulders, and Voldemort spoke in Parseltongue.
‘Kill.’
There was a terrible scream. Harry saw Snape’s face losing the little colour it had left; it whitened as his black eyes widened, as the snake’s fangs pierced his neck, as he failed to push the enchanted cage off himself, as his knees gave way and he fell to the floor.
‘I regret it,’ said Voldemort coldly.
He turned away; there was no sadness in him, no remorse. It was time to leave this shack and take charge, with a wand that would now do his full bidding. He pointed it at the starry cage holding the snake, which drifted upward, off Snape, who fell sideways onto the floor, blood gushing from the wounds in his neck. Voldemort swept from the room without a backward glance, and the great serpent floated after him in its huge protective sphere.
Back in the tunnel and his own mind, Harry opened his eyes; He had drawn blood biting down on his knuckles in an effort not to shout out. Now he was looking through the tiny crack between crate and wall, watching a foot in a black boot trembling on the floor.
‘Harry!’ breathed Allison behind him, but he had already pointed his wand at the crate blocking his view. It lifted an inch into the air and drifted sideways silently. As quietly as he could, he pulled himself up into the room.
He did not know why he was doing it, why he was approaching the dying man: he did not know what he felt as he saw Snape’s white face, and the fingers trying to staunch the bloody wound at his neck. Harry took off the invisibility cloak and looked down upon the man he hated, whose widening black eyes found Harry as he tried to speak.
Harry bent over him, and Snape seized the front of his robes and pulled him close.
A terrible rasping, gurgling noise issued from Snape’s throat. ‘Take...it...Take...it...’
Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed form his mouth and his ears and his eyes, and Harry knew what it was, but did not know what to do—
A flask, conjured from thin air, was thrust into his shaking hand by Tracey. Harry lifted the silvery substance into it with his wand. When the flask was full to the brim, and Snape looked as though there was no blood left in him, his grip on Harry’s robes slackened.
‘Look...at...me...’ he whispered.
The green eyes found the black, but after a second, something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank, and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more.
Narcissa: "He's dead!"
Voldemort: "Nagini, dinner."
Harry: *Dies*
Previous Chapters:
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003804769
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003805533
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003806102
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003806803
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003808304
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003810956
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003811902
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003814653
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003816806
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003819557
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003821422
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003822967
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003823601
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003825124
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003826708
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@SaphireStark @Missy Clara Oswald @CatsAndRoblox @Pervaza972
Chapter Sixteen: Bathilda’s Secret
‘Stop, someone is watching us,’ said Tracey very suddenly.
‘There is?’ responded Theodore.
They had only just reached the grave of the unknown Abbott.
‘Yes, they’re over by the bushes.’
All three of them stood quite still, holding on to each other, gazing at the dense black boundary of the graveyard. Harry could not see anything.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘I think so, I saw the bushes move and I swore it looked like a person…’
She broke from him to free her wand arm.
‘We look like Muggles,’ Harry pointed out.
‘But we also just laid flowers in front of a grave that only you or someone with close to connections to you would lay them,’ said Theodore, now starting to become nervous to. ‘Maybe we should Apparate out of here.’
Harry thought of A History of Magic, the graveyard was supposed to be haunted, what if—? But then he heard a rustle and saw a little eddy of dislodged snow in the bush to which Tracey had pointed. Ghosts could not move snow.
‘It’s a cat,’ said Harry, after a second or two, ‘or a bird. If it was a Death Eater we’d be dead by now. But let’s get out of here, and we can put the Cloak back on.’
They glanced back repeatedly as they made their way out of the graveyard. Harry, who did not feel as sanguine as he had pretended when reassuring the other two, was glad to reach the gate and the slippery pavement. They pulled the Invisibility Cloak back over themselves. The pub was fuller than before: Many voices inside it were now singing the carol that they had heard as they approached the church. For a moment Harry considered suggesting they take refuge inside it, but before he could say anything Theodore murmured, ‘No, let’s go the other way,’ and pulled him and Tracey down the dark street leading out of the village in the opposite direction from which they had entered. Harry could make out the point where the cottages ended and the lane turned into open country again. They walked as quickly as they dared, past more windows sparkling with multicolored light, the outlines of Christmas trees dark through the curtains.
‘Do we still want to find Bathilda Bagshot? How are we even supposed to know which house is hers?’ asked Tracey, who was shivering a little and kept glancing back over her shoulder. ‘I’m starting to agree with Theodore, we should maybe go and come back another day. What do you think Harry?’
She tugged at his arm, but Harry was not paying attention. He was looking toward the dark mass that stood at the very end of this row of houses. Next moment he had sped up, dragging Tracey along with him, Theodore close behind him.
‘Harry, where are you g—‘ Theodore half-shouted.
‘Look...Look at it guys...’
‘Sorry I don’t understand…oh!’ said Tracey, her eyes widening.
They could all see it; the Fidelius Charm must have died with James and Lily. The hedge had grown wild in the sixteen years since Remus and Hagrid had taken Harry from the rubble that lay scattered amongst the waist-high grass. Most of the cottage was still standing, though entirely covered in dark ivy and snow, but the right side of the top floor had been blown apart; that, Harry was sure, was where the curse had backfired. The three of them stood at the gate, gazing at the wreck of what must once have been a cottage just like those that flanked it.
‘How come it hasn’t been bought and rebuilt?’ thought Tracey out loud.
‘Maybe you can’t rebuild it?’ Harry replied. ‘Maybe it’s like the injuries from Dark Magic and you can’t repair the damage?’
He slipped a hand from beneath the Cloak and grasped the snowy and thickly rusted gate, not wishing to open it, but simply to hold some part of the house.
‘Harry,’ said Theodore in a warning tone, ‘I know you want to go inside, but doing so combined with what we did in the graveyard our cover would be—oh look!’
His touch on the gate seemed to have done it. A sign had risen out of the ground in front of them, up through the tangles of nettles and weeds, like some bizarre, fast-growing flower, and in golden letters upon the wood it said:
“On this spot, on the night of 31 October 1981, Lily and James Potter lost their lives. Their son, Harry, remains the only wizard ever to have survived the Killing Curse. This house, invisible to Muggles, has been left in its ruined state as a monument to the Potters and as a reminder of the violence that tore apart their family.”
And all around these neatly lettered words, scribbles had been added by other witches and wizards who had come to see the place where the Boy Who Lived had escaped. Some had merely signed their names in Everlasting Ink; others had carved their initials into the wood, still others had left messages. The most recent of these, shining brightly over sixteen years’ worth of magical graffiti, all said similar things.
“Good luck, Harry wherever you are.”
“If you read this, Harry, we’re all behind you! Long live Harry Potter.”
‘That’s really risky but brave of all of them,’ said Tracey, it almost sounded like hope was in her voice.
‘It’s good to know more than just Potterwatch is on our side,’ said Theodore confidently.
But Harry beamed at both of them.
‘It’s brilliant. I’m glad they did it. I…’
He broke off. A heavily muffled figure was hobbling up the lane toward them, silhouetted by the bright lights in the distant square. Harry thought, though it was hard to judge, that the figure was a woman. She was moving slowly, possibly frightened of slipping on the snowy ground. Her stoop, her stoutness, her shuffling gait all gave an impression of extreme age. They watched in silence as she drew nearer. Harry was waiting to see whether she would turn into any of the cottages she was passing, but he knew instinctively that she would not. At last she came to a half a few yards from them and simply stood there in the middle of the frozen road, facing them.
He did not need Theodore’s warning of stepping on his foot. There was next to no chance this woman was a Muggle: She was standing there gazing at a house that ought to have been completely invisible to her, if she was not a witch. Even assuming that she was a witch, however, it was odd behaviour to come out on a night this cold, simply to look at an old ruin. By all the rules of normal magic, meanwhile, she ought not to be able to see the three of them at all. Nevertheless, Harry had the strangest feeling that she knew that they were there, and also who they were. Just as he had reached this uneasy conclusion, she raised a gloved hand and beckoned.
Theodore moved closer to him under the Cloak, Harry could hear both his and Tracey’s uneasy breathing.
‘How could she know we’re here?’
Harry shook his head. The woman beckoned again, more vigorously. Harry could think of many reasons not to obey the summons, and yet his suspicions about her identity were growing stronger every moment that they stood facing each other in the deserted street.
Was it possible that she had been waiting for them all these long months? That Dumbledore had told her to wait, and that Harry would come in the end? Was it not likely that it was she who had moved in the shadows in the graveyard and had followed them to this spot? Even her ability to sense them suggested some Dumbledore-ish power that he had never encountered before.
Finally Harry spoke, causing Tracey to gasp and jump, ‘Are you Bathilda?’
The muffled figure nodded and beckoned again.
Beneath the Cloak, all three friends looked at each other. Harry raised his eyebrows; the other two gave a tiny, nervous nod. They stepped toward the woman and, at once, she turned and hobbled off back the way they had come. Leading them past several houses, she turned in at a gate. They followed her up the front path through a garden nearly as overgrown as the one they had just left. She fumbled for a moment with a key at the front door, then opened it and stepped back to let them pass.
She smelled bad, or perhaps it was her house. Harry wrinkled his nose as they sidled past her and pulled off the Cloak. Now that he was beside her, he realized how tiny she was; bowed down with age she came barely level with his chest. She closed the door behind them, her knuckles blue and mottled against the peeling paint, then turned and peered into Harry’s face.
Her eyes were thick with cataracts and sunken in folds of transparent skin, and her whole face was dotted with broken veins and liver spots. He wondered whether she could make him out at all; even if she could, it was the balding Muggle whose identity he had stolen that she would see.
The odor of old age, of dust, of unwashed clothes and stale food intensified as she unwound a moth-eaten black shawl, revealing a head of scant white hair through which the scalp showed clearly.
‘Bathilda?’ Harry repeated.
She nodded again. Harry became aware of the locket against his skin; the thing inside it that sometimes ticked or beat had woken; he could feel it pulsing through the cold gold. Did Dumbledore leave her the sword or a basilisk fang, did the Horcrux know, could it sense, that the thing that would destroy it was near?
Bathilda shuffled past them, pushing Tracey and Theodore aside as though she had not seen them, and vanished into what seemed to be a sitting room.
‘Harry, I don’t think this is safe,’ breathed Theodore.
‘Yes, what if Bathilda isn’t as trustworthy as we thought?’ whispered Tracey.
‘Look at the size of her, I think we could overpower her if we had to,’ said Harry, ‘Listen, I should have told you two, I knew she wasn’t all there. Muriel called her “gaga”.’
‘Come!’ called Bathilda from the next room.
Tracey jumped and clutched Harry’s arm.
‘Um, Harry…’ said Theodore, sounding quite unnerved.
‘It’s okay,’ said Harry reassuringly, and he led the way into the sitting room.
Bathilda was tottering around the place lighting candle, but it was still very dark, not to mention extremely dirty. Thick dust crunched beneath their feet, and Harry’s nose detected, underneath the dank and mildewed smell, something worse, like meat gone bad. He wondered when was the last time anyone had been inside Bathilda’s house to check whether she was coping. She seemed to have forgotten that she could do magic too, for she lit the candles clumsily by hand, her trailing lace cuff in constant danger of catching fire.
‘Let me do that,’ offered Harry and he took the matches from her. She stood watching him as he finished lighting the candle stubs that stood on saucers around the room, perched precariously on stack of book and on side tables crammed with cracked and moldy cups.
The last surface on which Harry spotted a candle was a bow-fronted chest of drawers on which there stood a large number of photographs. When the flame danced into life, its reflection wavered on their dusty glass and silver. He saw a few tiny movements from the pictures. As Bathilda fumbled with logs for the fire, he muttered ‘Tergeo’; the dust vanished from the photographs, and he was at once that half a down were missing from the largest and most ornate frames.
He wondered whether Bathilda or somebody else had removed them. Then the sight of a photograph near the back of the collection caught his eye, and he snatched it up.
It was the golden-haired, merry-faced thief, the young man who had perched on Gregorovitch’s windowsill, smiling lazily up at Harry out of the silver frame. And it came to Harry instantly where he had seen the boy before: in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, arm in arm with teenage Dumbledore, and that must be where all the missing photographs were in Rita’s book.
‘Ms—er—Madam Bagshot?’ he said, and his voice shook slightly. ‘Who is this?’
Bathilda was standing in the middle of the room watching Tracey light the fire for her.
‘Madam Bagshot?’ Harry repeated, and he advanced with the picture in his hands as the flames burst into life in the fireplace. Bathilda looked up at his voice, and the Horcrux heat faster upon his chest.
‘Who is this person?’ Harry asked her, pushing the picture forward.
She peered at it solemnly, then up at Harry.
‘Do you know who this is?’ he repeated in a much slower and louder voice than usual. ‘This man? Do you know him? What’s he called?’
Bathilda merely looked vague. Harry felt an awful frustration. With how much force had Rita Skeeter unlocked Bathilda’s memories?
‘Who is this man?’ he repeated loudly.
‘Shouting at her isn’t going to help, what’s so important about the bloke in the photo?’ asked Theodore.
‘This picture, it’s the thief, the thief who stole from Gregorovitch! Please!’ he said to Bathilda. ‘Who is this?’
But she only stared at him.
‘Why did you ask us to come here, Madam Bagshot?’ asked Tracey, raising her own voice. ‘Was there a message you wanted to give us, or an item from Dumbledore?’
Giving no sign that she had heard Tracey, Bathilda now shuffled a few steps closer to Harry. With a little jerk of her head she looked back into the hall.
‘You want us to leave?’ he asked.
She repeated the gesture, this time pointing firstly at him, then at herself, then at the ceiling.
‘Oh, right…guys, I think she wants me to go upstairs with her.’
‘Ok then,’ said Tracey. ‘Let’s she what she wants to show us.’
But when Tracey and Theodore moved, Bathilda shook her head with surprising vigour, once more pointing first at Harry, then to herself.
‘She wants me to go with her, alone.’
‘What?’ asked Theodore, and his voice rang out sharp and clear in the candlelit room; the old lady shook her head a little at the loud noise.
‘Maybe Dumbledore told her to give the sword to me, and only me?’
‘Harry, do you seriously think this ancient blind old lady knows who you are?’ whispered Tracey, her eyes screaming with apprehension.
‘Yes,’ said Harry, looking down into the milky eyes fixed upon his own, ‘I think she does.’
‘Harry,’ Theodore hissed, ‘I don’t trust this, something isn’t right…’
‘Theo, I’ll be fine…but if something goes wrong I’ll let you two know,’ said Harry, he then turned to Bathilda. ‘Lead the way.’
She seemed to understand, because she shuffled around him toward the door. Harry glanced back at his friends with a reassuring smile, but he was not sure they had seen it; both were looking at the different books and pictures in the room. As Harry walked out of the room, unseen by both Theodore, Tracey, and Bathilda, he slipped the silver-framed photograph of the unknown thief inside his jacket.
The stairs were steep and narrow; Harry was half tempted to place his hands on stout Bathilda’s backside to ensure that she did not topple over backward on top of him, which seemed only too likely. Slowly, wheezing a little, she climbed to the upper landing, turned immediately right, and led him into a low-ceilinged bedroom.
It was pitch-black and smelled horrible. Harry had just made out a chamber pot protruding from under the bed before Bathilda closed the door and even that was swallowed by the darkness.
‘Lumos,’ said Harry, and his wand ignited. He gave a start; Bathilda had moved close to him in those few seconds of darkness, and he had not heard her approach.
‘You are Potter?’ she whispered.
‘Yes, I am.’
She nodded slowly, solemnly. Harry felt the Horcrux beating fast, faster than his own heart. It was an unpleasant, agitating sensation.
‘Have you got anything for me?’ Harry asked, but she seemed distracted by his lit wand-tip. ‘Have you got anything for me?’ he repeated.
Then she closed her eyes and several things happened at once: Harry’s scar prickled painfully; the Horcrux twitched so that the front of his sweater actually moved; the dark, fetid room dissolved momentarily. He felt a leap of joy and spoke in a high, cold voice:
‘Hold him!’
Harry swayed where he stood: The dark, foul-smelling room seemed to close around him again; he did not know what had just happened.
‘Have you got anything for me?’ he asked for a third time, much louder.
‘Over here,’ she whispered, pointing to the corner. Harry raised his wand and saw the outline of a cluttered dressing table beneath the curtained window.
This time she did not lead him. Harry edged between her and the unmade bed, his wand raised. He did not want to look away from her.
‘What is it?’ he asked as he reached the dressing table, which was heaped high with what looked and smelled like dirty laundry.
‘There,’ she said, pointing at the shapeless mass.
And in the instant that he looked away, his eyes raking the tangled mess for a sword hilt, or a fang, she moved weirdly: He saw it out of the corner of his eye; panic made him turn and horror paralyzed him and he saw the old body collapsing and the great snake pouring from the place where her neck had been.
The snake struck as he raised his wand. The force of the bite to his forearm sent the wand spinning up toward the ceiling; its light swung dizzyingly around the room and was extinguished. Then a powerful blow from the tail to his midriff knocked the breath out of him. He fell backward onto the dressing table, into the mound of filthy clothing—He rolled sideways, narrowly avoiding the snake’s tail, which thrashed down upon the table where he had been a second earlier. Fragments of the glass surface rained upon him as he hit the floor. From below he heard Theodore and Tracey call, ‘Harry?!’
He could not get enough breath into his lungs to call back. Then a heavy smooth mass smashed him into the floor and he felt it slide over him, powerful, muscular.
‘No!’ he gasped, pinned to the floor.
‘Yes,’ whispered the voice. ‘Yesss…hold you….hold you…’
‘Accio...Accio Wand...’
But nothing happened and he needed his hands to try to force the snake from him as it coiled itself around his torso, squeezing the air from him, pressing the Horcrux hard into his chest, a circle of ice that throbbed with life, inches from his own frantic heart, and his brain was flooding with cold, white light, all thought obliterated, his own breath drowned, distant footsteps, everything going…
A metal heart was banging outside his chest, and now he was flying, flying with triumph in his heart, without need of broomstick or thestral…
He was abruptly awake in the sour-smelling darkness; Nagini had released him. He scrambled up and saw the snake outlined against the landing light. It struck, and Theodore dived aside with a yelp; his deflected attack hit the curtained window, which shattered. Frozen air filled the room as Harry ducked to avoid another shower of broken glass and his foot slipped on a pencil-like something—his wand—
He bent and snatched it up, but now the room was full of the snake, its tail thrashing; Harry heard Tracey scream ‘Vipera Evanesca,’ but nothing happened to Nagini. Theodore was nowhere to be seen and for a moment Harry thought the worst, but then there was a loud bang and a flash of red light, and the snake flew into the air, smacking Harry hard in the face as it went, coil after heavy coil rising up to the ceiling. Harry raised his wand, but as he did so his scar seared more painfully, more powerfully than it had done in years.
‘He’s coming! He’s almost here!’
As he yelled the snake fell, hissing wildly. Everything was chaos; It smashed shelves from the wall, and splintered china flew everywhere as Tracey jumped over the bed and Harry followed her as they both seized the dark shape they knew to be Theodore.
Theodore cried out with pain as the two friends pulled him back across the bed. The snake reared again, but Harry knew that worse than the snake was coming, was perhaps already at the gate, his head was going to split open with pain from his scar.
The snake lunged as he took a running leap, dragging the other two with him; as it struck, Tracey scream, ‘Bombarda Maxima!’ and her spell flew around the room, exploding the wardrobe mirror and ricocheting back at them, bouncing from floor to ceiling; Harry felt the heat of it sear the back of his hand. Glass cut his cheek as, pulling the others on with him, he leapt from bed to broken dressing table and then straight out of the smashed window into nothingness, their screams reverberating through the night as they twisted in midair.
And then his scar burst open and he was Voldemort and he was running across the fetid bedroom, his long white hands clutching at the windowsill as he glimpsed the bald man, the little woman, and the young teenager twist and vanish, and he screamed with rage, a scream that mingled with his vanishing targets, that echoed across the dark gardens over the church bells ringing in Christmas Day.
And his scream was Harry’s scream, his pain was Harry pain…that it could happen here, where it had happened before…here, within sight of that house where he had come so close to knowing what it was to die...to die...The pain was so terrible…ripped from his body…But if he had no body, why did his head hurt so badly; if he was dead, how could he feel so unbearably, didn’t pain cease with death, didn’t it go—
The night wet and windy, two children dressed as pumpkins waddling across the square, and the shop window covered in paper spiders, all the tawdry Muggle trapping of a world in which they did not believe…And he was gliding along, that sense of purpose and power and rightness in him that he always knew on these occasions...Not anger...that was for weaker souls than he...but triumph, yes...He had waited for this, he had hoped for it...
‘Nice costume, mister!’
He saw the small boy’s smile falter as he ran near enough to see beneath the hood of the cloak, saw the fear cloud his painted face.
Then the child turned and ran away…Beneath the robe be fingered the hand of his wand…One simple movement and the child would never reach his mother…but unnecessary, quite unnecessary…
And along a new and darker street he moved, and now his destination was in sight at last, the Fidelius Charm broken, though they did not know it yet…And he made less noise than the dead leaves slithering along the pavement as he drew level with the dark hedge, and peered over it...
They had not drawn the curtains; he saw them quite clearly in their little sitting room, the tall black-haired man in his glasses, making puffs of coloured smoke erupt from his wand for the amusement of the small black-haired boy in his blue pajamas. The child was laughing and trying to catch the smoke, to grab it in his small fist…
A door opened and the mother entered, saying words he could not hear, her long dark-red hair falling over her face. Now the father scooped up the son and handed him to the mother. He threw his wand down upon the sofa and stretched, yawning…
The gate creaked a little as he pushed it open, but James Potter did no hear. His white hand pulled out the wand beneath his cloak and pointed it at the door, which burst open.
He was over the threshold as James came sprinting into the hall. It was easy, too easy, he had not even picked up his wand…
‘Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run! I’ll hold him off!’
Hold him off, without a wand in his hand..?He laughed before casting the curse...
‘Avada Kedavra!’
The green light filled the cramped hallway, it lit the pram pushed against the wall, it made the banisters glare like lightning rods, and James Potter fell like a marionette whose strings were cut...
He could hear her screaming from the upper floor, trapped, but as long as she was sensible, she, at least, had nothing to fear…He climbed the steps, listening with faint amusement to her attempts to barricade herself in…She had no wand either…How stupid they were, and how trusting, thinking that their safety lay in friends, that weapons could be discarded even for moments...
He forced the door open, cast aside the chair and boxes hastily piled against it with one lazy wave of his wand…and there she stood, the child in her arms. At the last sight of him, she dropped her son into the crib behind her and threw her arms wide, as if this would help, as if in shielding him from sight she hoped to be chosen instead…
‘Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry!’
‘Stand aside, you silly girl…stand aside now.’
‘Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead—‘
‘This is my last warning—‘
‘Not Harry! Please...have mercy...have mercy...Not
Harry! Not Harry! Please—I’ll do anything—‘
‘Stand aside. Stand aside, girl!’
He could have forced her away from the crib, but it seemed more
prudent to finish them all...
The green light flashed around the room and she dropped like her husband. The child had not cried all this time. He could stand, clutching the bars of his crib and he looked up into the intruder’s face with a kind of bright interest, perhaps thinking that it was his father who hid beneath the cloak, making more pretty light, and his mother would pop up any moment, laughing—
He pointed the wand very carefully into the boy’s face. He wanted to see it happen, the destruction of this one, inexplicable danger. The child began to cry. It had seen that he was not James. He did not like it crying, he had never been able to stomach the small ones whining in the orphanage—
‘Avada Kedavra!’
And then he broke; He was nothing, nothing but pain and terror, and he must hide himself, not here in the rubble of the ruined house, where the child was trapped and screaming, but far away…far away...
‘No,’ he moaned.
The snake rustled on the filthy, cluttered floor, and he had killed the boy, and yet he was the boy...
‘No...’
And now he stood at the broken window of Bathilda’s house, immersed in memories of his greatest loss, and at his feet the great snake slithered over broken china and glass…He looked down and saw something…something incredible…
‘No...’
‘Harry, you’re ok, you’re going to be ok.’
He stooped down and picked up the smashed photograph. There he was, the unknown thief he was seeking...
‘No...I dropped it...I dropped it...’
‘Harry stop, it’s ok, you are safe, wake up!’
He was Harry…Harry, not Voldemort…and the thing that was rustling was not a snake…He opened his eyes.
‘Harry,’ Tracey whispered. ‘How do you feel, are you alright?’
‘Yes,’ he lied.
He was in the tent, lying on one of the lower bunks beneath a heap of blankets, looking to his side he could see Theodore unconscious in what was normally Tracey’s bunk. Harry could tell that it was almost dawn by the stillness and the quality of the cold, flat light beyond the canvas ceiling. He was drenched in sweat; he could feel it on the sheets and blankets.
‘We got away.’
‘We did,’ said Tracey, ‘but Theodore’s leg was broken and he fell unconscious from shock almost the second we arrived. I had to set up the tent and use Mobilicorpus to get you both onto bunks. Harry…you were…um…’
There were purple shadows under her dark hazel eyes and he noticed a small sponge in her hand. She had been wiping his face.
‘You were seriously ill,’ she finished. ‘Scarily ill.’
‘How’s Theodore?’ asked Harry, as he felt his own well being didn’t matter until he knew his brother was ok.
‘Theo is fine, I cast Brackium Emendo on him and gave him some Sleeping Draught, he’ll probably sleep until noon but he’ll be fine,’ she said, but her eyes never stopped focusing on Harry. ‘It’s you I was very worried about. I think, among other things, you were suffering from the snake’s venom, although thankfully it was no where near as bad as poor Mr Weasley…’
‘How long ago did we leave?’
‘About eight hours ago. The sun is nearly up.’
‘And I’ve been…what, unconscious?’
‘Er, not exactly,” said Tracey uncomfortable, ‘you were screaming, and shouting, and writhing violently…’ she added in a tone that made Harry feel uneasy. What had he done? Screamed curses like Voldemort, cried like the baby in the crib?
‘With how violently you were shaking I couldn’t administer any of my bottle of Antidote to Common Poisons, so the best I could do was cast Reparifor to try and mitigate any internal damage from the venom. I cleaned the bite, and because it was shallow I tried to use Murtlap Essence, but there must be some really dark magic in that snake’s venom because in the end I had to use the rest of my dittany to close the wound.’
‘Well thank you Tracey, I’m glad you were the one left conscious, I doubt Theo or I would have been able to-what’s wrong,’ as Tracey’s remorseful expression told Harry her story was not complete.
‘Th-the Horcrux, I couldn’t get it off, it welded itself onto your chest,’ she said, and Harry now knew she had seen something horrible while trying to heal him and she had to deal with it all alone. ‘I-I was only able to get it off using the Severing Charm, I used more Murtlap Essence and Burn-Healing Paste to heal and close the wound where the Horcrux had been, but I’m sorry Harry without anymore dittany it left quite a scar.’
He pulled the sweaty T-shirt he was wearing away from himself and looked down. There was a scarlet oval over his heart where the locket had burned him. He could also see the half-healed puncture marks to his forearm.
‘It’s ok Tracey, you did what you had to do. Where’ve you put the Horcrux?’
‘In my purse. I didn’t want to wear it while being the only conscious person here, and I think you should take a decent break from wearing it at all.’
He lay back on his pillow and looked into her pinched gray face. ‘We shouldn’t have gone to Godric’s Hollow. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault, Tracey, I’m sorry.’
‘Harry it is not your fault, I advocated for us to go too. I thought it was important for you to visit your parents grave and that we might find something important there.‘
‘Yeah, well…we got that wrong, didn’t we?’
‘I know you’re tired Harry, but I need to know. What happened? What happened when Bathilda took you upstairs? Was the snake hiding and waiting for you and kill her before attacking you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘She was the snake…or the snake was her…all along.’
‘W—what?’
He closed his eyes. He could still smell Bathilda’s house on him. It made the whole thing horribly vivid.
‘Bathilda must’ve been dead a while. The snake was…was inside her. You-Know-Who put it there in Godric’s Hollow, to wait. You and Theodore were right. He knew I’d go back.’
‘Go back, the snake was inside her?’
He opened his eyes again. Tracey looked revolted, nauseated. ‘Remus said there would be magic we’d never imagined,’ Harry said. ‘She didn’t want to talk in front of you two, because it was Parseltongue, all Parseltongue, and I didn’t realize, but of course I could understand her. Once we were up in the room, the snake sent a message to You-Know-Who. I heard it happen inside my head, I felt him get excited, he said to keep me there...and then...’
He remembered the snake coming out of Bathilda’s neck; after all the body horror Tracey had already seen tonight, Harry decided she did not need to know the details.
‘…she changed, changed into the snake, and attacked.’
He looked down at the puncture marks.
‘It wasn’t supposed to kill me, just keep me there till You-Know-Who came.’
If he had only managed to kill the snake, it would have been worth it, all of it…Sick at heart, he sat up threw back the covers.
‘Harry, no, you should rest. I was about to give you some of the Sleeping Draught.’
‘You’re the one who needs sleep. No offense, but you look terrible. I’m fine. I’ll keep watch for a while. Where’s my wand?’
She did not answer, she merely looked at him.
‘Where’s my wand, Tracey?’
She was biting her lip, and tears continued to spawn in her eyes.
‘Harry...’
‘Where’s my wand?’
She reached down beside the bed and held it out to him.
The holly and phoenix wand was nearly severed in two. One fragile strand of phoenix feather kept both pieces hanging together. The wood had splintered apart completely. Harry took it into his hands as though it was a living thing that had suffered a terrible injury. He could not think properly. Everything was a blur of panic and fear. He held out the wand to Tracey.
‘Mend it. Please.’
‘Harry, I’m really sorry, but I don’t think that’s pos—‘
‘Please, Tracey, try!’
‘R-Reparo.’
The handling half of the wand resealed itself. Harry held it up.
‘Lumos!’
The wand sparked feebly, then went out. Harry pointed it at Tracey.
‘Expelliarmus!’
Hermione’s wand gave a little jerk, but did not leave her hand. The feeble attempt at magic was too much for Harry’s wand, which split into two again. He stared at it, aghast, unable to take in what he was seeing...the wand that had survived so much... The wand he had bought with Sirius by his side…
‘Harry,’ Tracey whispered so quietly he could hardly hear her. ‘It’s all my fault. When we were trying to keep the Snake away before we Apparated, the first charm that came to mind was the Bombardment Spell, but the snake is a Horcrux so it rebounded everywhere. My spell, it must have—must have hit—‘
‘It was an accident,’ said Harry mechanically. He felt empty, stunned. ‘We’ll—we’ll find a way to repair it.’
‘Harry, I don’t believe that we can,’ said Tracey, the tears trickling down her face. ‘When I took Ancient Studies we covered wand origins, wands are extremely complex and once they’re damaged it can’t be reversed. You’ll have to get a new one.’
Harry thought of Ollivander, kidnapped and held hostage by Voldemort; of Gregorovitch, who was dead. How was he supposed to find himself a new wand?
‘Well,’ he said, in a falsely matter-of-fact voice, ‘well, I’ll just borrow yours for now, then. While I keep watch.’
Her face glazed with tears, Tracey handed over her wand, and he left her sitting beside his bed, desiring nothing more than to get away from her.
What is Snape's Patronus?
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Chapter Twenty-Four: Horcruxes
(As always with memory chapters there isn't to much I can change, however I did try to add as many as I could throughout, and near the end when Dumbledore is explaining the memories meaning to Harry I did add somethings that hint to a reveal coming at the end of the book. I will also say I am so glad this is the final memory chapter of this book.)
Harry could feel the Felix Felicis wearing off as he crept back into the castle. The front door had remained unlocked for him, but on one of the corridors leading down to the dungeon he ran into Mrs Norris, meaning Filch couldn't be far behind, and just barely managed to hide in a hidden passageway Harry was fairly certain Filch didn't know about before hearing Filch walk past him. After a deep breath and not hearing anymore footsteps he emerged from the passageway and continued down to Slytherin's Dungeon and walked up towards the enchanted wall.
'Kneazle,' said Harry confidently, then proceeded to smash his nose on the still very solid wall.
'Ow!' he said, while rubbing his now tender nose with one hand and checking his watch with the other. It was past midnight, so the password might have already been changed. He'd have to wait for a Prefect on patrol to come by and if it was someone like Pansy or Draco he could still get in a lot of trouble.
'Bloody hell, what do I do now?' Harry asked himself allowed, he did not feel like sleeping on the cold solid stone floor. 'I don't want to go up to Dumbledore's office and risk getting caught if Dumbledore is on one of his trips.'
'He is here,' said a low chilly voice. Harry yelped as the scariest ghost in the castle, The Bloody Baron, had just appeared beside him.
'Er, good evening, Dumbledore is in the castle? Is he in his office?' asked Harry nervously. He had only ever been haunted by the Baron, in his six years at Hogwarts this was the first time they had actually spoken. The Bloody Baron nodded and then floated away. It was only after he left that Harry realized he had never taken his Invisibility Cloak off and maybe the Baron thought Harry was another spirit.
Harry hurtled back along the corridor, up several flights of stairs and within minutes, he was saying 'toffee éclairs' to Dumbledore’s gargoyle, which leapt aside, permitting Harry entrance onto the spiral staircase.
'Enter,' said Dumbledore when Harry knocked. He sounded exhausted.
Harry pushed open the door. There was Dumbledore’s office, looking the same as ever, but with black, star-strewn skies beyond the windows, he had just finished putting something inside his midnight-blue handbag.
'Good gracious, Harry,' said Dumbledore in surprise. 'To what do I owe this very late pleasure?'
'Sir—I’ve got it. I’ve got the memory from Slughorn.'
Harry pulled out the tiny glass bottle and showed it to Dumbledore. For a moment or two, the headmaster looked stunned. Then his face split in a wide smile.
'Harry, this is spectacular news! Very well done indeed! I knew you could do it!'
All thought of the lateness of the hour apparently forgotten, he hurried around his desk, took the bottle with Slughorn’s memory in his uninjured hand, and strode over to the cabinet where he kept the Pensieve.
'And now,' said Dumbledore, placing the stone basin upon his desk and emptying the contents of the bottle into it. 'Now, at last, we shall see. Harry, quickly...'
Harry bowed obediently over the Pensieve and felt his feet leave the office floor...Once again he fell through darkness and landed in Horace Slughorn’s office many years before.
There was the much younger Slughorn, with his thick, shiny, straw-colored hair and his gingery-blond mustache, sitting again in the comfortable winged armchair in his office, his feet resting upon a velvet pouffe, a small glass of wine in one hand, the other rummaging in a box of crystalized pineapple. And there were the half-dozen teenage boys, including Morgan Nott and Christopher Avery, sitting around Slughorn with Tom Riddle in the midst of them, Marvolo’s gold-and-black ring gleaming on his finger.
Dumbledore landed beside Harry just as Riddle asked, 'Sir, is it true that Professor Merrythought is retiring?'
'Tom, Tom, if I knew I couldn’t tell you,' said Slughorn, wagging his finger reprovingly at Riddle, though winking at the same time. 'I must say, I’d like to know where you get your information, boy, more knowledgeable than half the staff, you are.'
Riddle smiled; the other boys laughed and cast him admiring looks.
'What with your uncanny ability to know things you shouldn’t, and your careful flattery of the people who matter—thank you for the pineapple, by the way, you’re quite right, it is my favorite—'
Several of the boys tittered again.
'—I confidently expect you to rise to Minister of Magic within twenty years. Fifteen, if you keep sending me pineapple, I have excellent contacts at the Ministry.'
Tom Riddle merely smiled as the others laughed again. Harry noticed that he was by no means the eldest of the group of boys, but that they all seemed to look to him as their leader.
'I don’t know that politics would suit me, sir,' he said when the laughter had died away. 'I don’t have the right kind of background, for one thing.'
A couple of the boys around him smirked at each other. Harry was sure they were enjoying a private joke, undoubtedly about what they knew, or suspected, regarding their gang leader’s famous ancestor.
'Nonsense,' said Slughorn briskly, 'couldn’t be plainer you come from decent Wizarding stock, abilities like yours. No, you’ll go far, Tom, I’ve never been wrong about a student yet.'
The small golden clock standing upon Slughorn’s desk chimed eleven o’clock behind him and he looked around.
'Good gracious, is it that time already? You’d better get going, boys, or we’ll all be in trouble. Lestrange, I want your essay by tomorrow or it’s detention. Same goes for you, Avery.'
One by one, the boys filed out of the room. Slughorn heaved himself out of his armchair and carried his empty glass over to his desk. A movement behind him made him look around; Riddle was still standing there.
'Look sharp, Tom, you don’t want to be caught out of bed out of hours, and you a prefect...'
'Sir, I wanted to ask you something.'
'Ask away, then, m’boy, ask away...'
'Sir, I wondered what you know about...about Horcruxes?' Slughorn stared at him, his thick fingers absentmindedly caressing the stem of his wine glass.
'Project for Defense Against the Dark Arts, is it?'
But Harry could tell that Slughorn knew perfectly well that this was not schoolwork.
'Not exactly, sir,' said Riddle. 'I came across the term while reading and I didn’t fully understand it.'
'No...well...you’d be hard-pushed to find a book at Hogwarts that’ll give you details on Horcruxes, Tom, that’s very Dark stuff, very Dark indeed,' said Slughorn.
'But you obviously know all about them, sir? I mean, a wizard like you—sorry, I mean, if you can’t tell me, obviously—I just knew if anyone could tell me, you could—so I just thought I’d ask—'
It was very well done, thought Harry, the hesitancy, the casual tone, the careful flattery, none of it overdone. He, Harry, had had too much experience of trying to wheedle information out of reluctant people not to recognize a master at work. He could tell that Riddle wanted the information very, very much; perhaps had been working toward this moment for weeks.
'Well,' said Slughorn, not looking at Riddle, but fiddling with the ribbon on top of his box of crystalized pineapple, 'well, it can’t hurt to give you an overview, of course. Just so that you understand the term. A Horcrux is the word used for an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul.'
'I don’t quite understand how that works, though, sir,' said Riddle.
His voice was carefully controlled, but Harry could sense his excitement.
'Well, you split your soul, you see,' said Slughorn, 'and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one’s body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged. But of course, existence in such a form...'
Slughorn’s face crumpled and Harry found himself remembering words he had heard nearly two years before: “I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost...but still, I was alive.'
'...few would want it, Tom, very few. Death would be preferable.'
But Riddle’s hunger was now apparent; his expression was greedy, he could no longer hide his longing.
'How do you split your soul?'
'Well,' said Slughorn uncomfortably, 'you must understand that the soul is supposed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation, it is against nature.'
'But how do you do it?'
'By an act of evil—the supreme act of evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: He would encase the torn portion—'
'Encase? But how—?'
'There is a spell, do not ask me, I don’t know!' said Slughorn, shaking his head like an old elephant bothered by mosquitoes. 'Do I look as though I have tried it—do I look like a killer?'
'No, sir, of course not,' said Riddle quickly. 'I’m sorry...I didn’t mean to offend...'
'Not at all, not at all, not offended,' said Slughorn gruffly. 'It’s natural to feel some curiosity about these things...Wizards of a certain caliber have always been drawn to that aspect of magic...'
'Yes, sir,' said Riddle. 'What I don’t understand, though—just out of curiosity—I mean, would one Horcrux be much use? Can you only split your soul once? Wouldn’t it be better, make you stronger, to have your soul in more pieces, I mean, for instance, isn’t seven the most powerfully magical number, wouldn’t seven—?'
'Merlin’s beard, Tom!' yelped Slughorn. 'Seven! Isn’t it bad enough to think of killing one person? And in any case...bad enough to divide the soul...but to rip it into seven pieces...'
Slughorn looked deeply troubled now: He was gazing at Riddle as though he had never seen him plainly before, and Harry could tell that he was regretting entering into the conversation at all.
'Of course,' he muttered, 'this is all hypothetical, what we’re discussing, isn’t it? All academic...'
'Yes, sir, of course,' said Riddle quickly.
'But all the same, Tom...keep it quiet, what I’ve told—that’s to say, what we’ve discussed. People wouldn’t like to think we’ve been chatting about Horcruxes. It’s a banned subject at Hogwarts, you know...Dumbledore’s particularly fierce about it...'
'I won’t say a word, sir,' said Riddle, and he left, but not before Harry had glimpsed his face, which was full of that same wild happiness it had worn when he had first found out that he was a wizard, the sort of happiness that did not enhance his handsome features, but made them, somehow, less human...
'Thank you, Harry,' said Dumbledore quietly. 'Let us go...'
When Harry landed back on the office floor Dumbledore was already sitting down behind his desk. Harry sat too and waited for Dumbledore to speak.
'I have been hoping for this piece of evidence for a very long time,' said Dumbledore at last. 'It confirms the theory on which I have been working, it tells me that I am right, and also how very far there is still to go...'
Harry suddenly noticed that every single one of the old headmasters and headmistresses in the portraits around the walls was awake and listening in on their conversation. A corpulent, red-nosed wizard had actually taken out an ear trumpet.
'Well, Harry,' said Dumbledore, 'I am sure you understood the significance of what we just heard. At the same age as you are now, give or take a few months, Tom Riddle was doing all he could to find out how to make himself immortal.'
'You think he succeeded then, sir?' asked Harry. 'He made a Horcrux? And that’s why he didn’t die when he attacked me? He had a Horcrux hidden somewhere? A bit of his soul was safe?'
'A bit...or more,' said Dumbledore. 'You heard Voldemort: What he particularly wanted from Horace was an opinion on what would happen to the wizard who created more than one Horcrux, what would happen to the wizard so determined to evade death that he would be prepared to murder many times, rip his soul repeatedly, so as to store it in many, separately concealed Horcruxes. No book would have given him that information. As far as I know—as far, I am sure, as Voldemort knew—no wizard had ever done more than tear his soul in two.'
Dumbledore paused for a moment, marshaling his thoughts, and then said, 'Four years ago, I received what I considered certain proof that Voldemort had split his soul.'
'Where?' asked Harry 'How?'
'You handed it to me, Harry,' said Dumbledore. 'The diary, Riddle’s diary, the one giving instructions on how to reopen the Chamber of Secrets.'
'I don’t understand, sir,' said Harry.
'Well, although I did not see the Riddle who came out of the diary, what you described to me was a phenomenon I had never witnessed. A mere memory starting to act and think for itself? A mere memory, sapping the life out of the girl into whose hands it had fallen? No, something much more sinister had lived inside that book...a fragment of soul, I was almost sure of it. The diary had been a Horcrux. But this raised as many questions as it answered. What intrigued and alarmed me most was that that diary had been intended as a weapon as much as a safeguard.'
'I still don’t understand,' said Harry.
'Well, it worked as a Horcrux is supposed to work—in other words, the fragment of soul concealed inside it was kept safe and had undoubtedly played its part in preventing the death of its owner. But there could be no doubt that Riddle really wanted that diary read, wanted the piece of his soul to inhabit or possess somebody else, so that Slytherin’s monster would be unleashed again.'
'Well, he didn’t want his hard work to be wasted,' said Harry. 'He wanted people to know he was Slytherin’s heir, because he couldn’t take credit at the time.'
'Quite correct,' said Dumbledore, nodding. 'But don’t you see, Harry, that if he intended the diary to be passed to, or planted on, some future Hogwarts student, he was being remarkably blasé about that precious fragment of his soul concealed within it. The point of a Horcrux is, as Professor Slughorn explained, to keep part of the self hidden and safe, not to fling it into somebody else’s path and run the risk that they might destroy it—as indeed happened: That particular fragment of soul is no more; you saw to that. The careless way in which Voldemort regarded this Horcrux seemed most ominous to me. It suggested that he must have made—or been planning to make—more Horcruxes, so that the loss of his first would not be so detrimental. I did not wish to believe it, but nothing else seemed to make sense.'
Harry now felt a little stupid that he had never questioned how a Diary could be so powerful, even if the diary belonged to Voldemort.
'Then you told me, two years later, that on the night that Voldemort returned to his body, he made a most illuminating and alarming statement to his Death Eaters. "I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality." That was what you told me he said. "Further than anybody," And I thought I knew what that meant, though the Death Eaters did not. He was referring to his Horcruxes, Horcruxes in the plural, Harry, which I do not believe any other wizard has ever had. Yet it fitted: Lord Voldemort has seemed to grow less human with the passing years, and the transformation he has undergone seemed to me to be only explicable if his soul was mutilated beyond the realms of what we might call "usual evil"...'
'So he’s made himself impossible to kill by murdering other people?' said Harry. 'Why couldn’t he make a Philosopher’s Stone, or steal one, if he was so interested in immortality?'
'Well, we know that he tried to do just that, five years ago,' said Dumbledore. 'But there are several reasons why, I think, a Philosopher’s Stone would appeal less than Horcruxes to Lord Voldemort. While the Elixir of Life does indeed extend life, it must be drunk regularly, for all eternity, if the drinker is to maintain their immortality. Therefore, Voldemort would be entirely dependent on the Elixir, and if it ran out, or was contaminated, or if the Stone was stolen, he would die just like any other man. Voldemort likes to operate alone, remember. I believe that he would have found the thought of being dependent, even on the Elixir, intolerable. Of course he was prepared to drink it if it would take him out of the horrible part-life to which he was condemned after attacking you, but only to regain a body. Thereafter, I am convinced, he intended to continue to rely on his Horcruxes: He would need nothing more, if only he could regain a human form. He was already immortal, you see...or as close to immortal as any man can be.'
This was very dark information Harry was taking in.
'But now, Harry, armed with this information, the crucial memory you have succeeded in procuring for us, we are closer to the secret of finishing Lord Voldemort than anyone has ever been before. You heard him, Harry: "Wouldn’t it be better, make you stronger, to have your soul in more pieces...isn’t seven the most powerfully magical number...' Isn’t seven the most powerfully magical number. Yes, I think the idea of a seven-part soul would greatly appeal to Lord Voldemort.'
'He made seven Horcruxes?' said Harry, horror-struck, while several of the portraits on the walls made similar noises of shock and outrage. 'But they could be anywhere in the world—hidden—buried or invisible—'
35 Votes in Poll
Please share your thoughts on this theory: A member of the House of Gaunt was the one who cursed Nagini's ancestor with the Maledictus Blood Curse.
49 Votes in Poll
Guys -
Cedric Diggory
Draco Malfoy
Harry Potter
Girls -
Hermione Granger
Cho Chang
Nagini (Crimes of Grindelwald)
My choices -
Kiss: Harry and Cho
Marry: Malfoy and Hermione
Kill: Cedric and Nagini
Feel free to do whichever gender you feel comfortable with :)
I was bored and on, so this is the product-
It has a twist, btw. It’s all the worst/most evil characters.
For ✨women✨:
Voldemort
Peter
Lucius
For ✨men✨:
Umbridge
Bellatrix
Nagini (I couldn’t think of anyone else, okay? 👁️👄👁️)
I don’t mind if someone does the same as their gender, does both, yada yada, yada.
Have fun!
105 Votes in Poll