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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 460: Seed and Thorns
🕑 Added 2025-04-22 14:00:36 +0000 UTCChapter 460: Of Sprouting Seeds
21 June 1995, Nurmengard
And then, his body finally faded away, the last fragment of the Dark in existence. His soul moved on, and the energy within it was released. The greatest ritual in the history of humanity was unravelled, and it started to pulse. The world held its breath for a fraction of a second, and then everything turned white.
Harry Potter had planned everything to the last detail, and yet, he had to admit that things came pretty close to unravelling, especially during the battle with Grindelwald and Dumbledore. He hadn’t expected Dumbledore to win so quickly, or for the Light Spear to be so effective against the Dark Lord. To be fair, it was the perfect weapon against him, something that absorbed life force was the direct counter to a being whose flesh couldn’t be destroyed, and that had an insane amount of energy in his soul to deal with it. He had made his calculations, and the ritual should have taken slightly more time to work than his own portals and traps, but he didn’t know the effect of Grindelwald using his own soul to fuel it, whether it would increase the time or not. He only did these calculations with Nurmengard in mind, hoping to force Grindelwald to constantly weaken himself trying to keep his fortress, and hence, his ritual, together.
Harry hadn’t expected Grindelwald to use his soul as a buffer just to bypass that disadvantage. He hadn’t expected the battle to stray too much away from Nurmengard either, as it was the centre of the ritual. He hadn’t expected Dumbledore’s new spear as well, and that meant that he had to adapt to buy himself some time.
Turning them against one another was supposed to end in an endless stalemate with both of them regenerating through their patrons until Nidhogg would start to attack the Light and Dark directly. And yet Dumbledore had won with his spear, and Harry had almost revealed himself early just to restart the fighting, until he felt it. The feedback of the portals opening to Nidhogg, of the living concept of hunger and entropy attacking the Light and Dark at once, meaning that he won in every way that mattered.
It had been obvious in hindsight. The whole plan hit him in the head the moment he began to think of Solomon’s plan, specifically when dealing with Azkaban’s ruins. He had arranged for Ekrizdis to get his grimoire, knowing that he’d make a connection with Nidhogg, that the breach would grow too strongly after the fortress’ destruction, and he arranged for Harry to go there, and see the Hunger, the Devourer of Worlds, with his own eyes, letting him use his Arcane Hearing to be able to replicate the breach into a trap against the Light and Dark.
It was never about learning Solomon’s magic, even if it had been very helpful in keeping up with Dumbledore and Grindelwald and allowed him to bypass a lot of power requirements which were necessary in hindsight. But it was obvious that the main objective was always Nidhogg. Thousands of years of planning, of small steps taken seemingly at random, converged to a perfect plan, the perfect strike against the Light and Dark.
They wouldn’t be summoned to Midgard, even when Gjallarhorn was used, because they were too busy surviving, and whatever power-ups they gifted to their champions would quickly fade with them. Hell, even Grindelwald’s body would malfunction quickly. All he needed to do was put the final nail in the coffin and deal with the release from the ritual. Seven major broken prophecies, enhanced by the summer solstices, enhanced with months thanks to ley lines, all being released at once. It was a nightmare to deal with, but it was also an opportunity.
And so, he did his preparations, and when he was done, he stabbed Grindelwald in the chest with his scythe. It had such a vindicating feeling, to finally kill him, the man who had arranged for all of this to happen, out of misguided arrogance and confidence in his divination. He took some pleasure in ruining Dumbledore, having arranged for any form of scrying to work, having done his best to endure that this moment, this conversation, would forever be immortalised in the annals of history. Scrying it, even thousands of years into the future, would work easily without any issues. They would know of Albus the fool and Gellert the arrogant, the two men who almost destroyed the world.
And so, Harry finally killed Grindelwald, leaving Dumbledore for last. As he expected, the Dark Lord started to disintegrate, his body losing whatever cohesion it had, and cracking like glass, letting the energy from the ritual slowly leak out before bursting out as his soul moved on.
The only thing remaining was his final trick. The last way to close the circle, and the magical world would be free at last. And so, Harry used the remaining energy stored in the Elder Wand, which he had absorbed during Excalibur’s destruction, and channelled it through his scythe, expanding space around Grindelwald’s soul, containing the blast as much as possible.
He groaned as he did his best to contain a magical release that could wipe out an entire continent, and activated his final trick, hoping that it would be contained easily enough.
Dealing with the magical release was always the endgame, the final sentence, the final plan. He’d made his preparations well before the battle. Grindelwald hadn’t seen it because he very likely just couldn’t. It was funny. Magic, for all its abnormalities, tended to act a lot like normal energy, at least in its raw form.
One couldn’t just make it disappear. You could store it, channel it, transform it into spells, but this was the equivalent of someone trying to hold on to a nuke.
And Harry was holding it.
Every drop of magic he had ever stored, every trace of energy accumulated over months of preparation, was now being burned to keep the ritual’s release from tearing the world apart. His magic circuits burned as they channelled power far beyond what any physical body was meant to endure.
And yet, he held on and started singing.
The realm bloomed slowly, painfully, like a star birthing itself from the void—raw, pure, painfully radiant. It wasn’t a sanctuary. It wasn’t protection. It was a prison. A white dome of containment, made of nothing but magic and defiance, layered over and over again as the pressure kept rising. He sang again. And again. Each verse folding into the last, twisting the rules of space, time, and energy until they screamed in unison.
The realm became blinding, light pressing from within, luminous and infinite, as if the entire world had turned into a sun. It wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t meant to be. It was a pause. A breath before collapse.
Then his countermeasures were finally activated.
Harry almost released a sigh of relief. At least, he would have, if he weren’t still stuck singing the realm that contained a magical disaster from happening.
The ground beneath him pulsed. Runes, ancient and interlocked, revealed themselves in a burst of gold and silver. They cracked apart into fractals, shards of reality bending to his design, and transported the entire clearing through space, vanishing in a shimmer of collapsing containment, leaving an immense crater in its place.
There was a reason why he couldn’t use the void between worlds to help contain the ritual. It was already tricky to transport that much energy without accidentally rupturing space-time. High-density magic bent the rules, warped space and time in subtle but dangerous ways. Normally imperceptible. But not now. Not with a ritual of this scale. Any attempt to displace it through a portal would have ended in disaster. He couldn’t have used a normal portal but actual breaches to avoid them collapsing in the first place, and then, he had to make sure that the breach would be stable and remain stable, which was what took so long in the first place.
He opened his eyes and finally smiled as he found himself in a familiar location.
Stonehenge.
This place had seen its fair share of excitement in the last couple of months, from Dumbledore almost destroying it to heal himself after their duel, then to Harry saving its energy, and the time-travelling god that tried to usurp it.
Ready, Harry concentrated, focusing his magic to make the realm smaller and smaller, despite the pressure. This was the finish line, his last piece of responsibility to the future, his gift to the world.
It took some effort, but the realm shrank. He yelled in exertion as he did so, and he kept pushing, while walking to the centre of the prehistoric stones. And yet, he didn’t touch them. Instead, he knelt down, his realm of energy, almost the size of a marble.
His magic circuits were hissing, steaming, really. And yet, as if hypnotised, he knelt down to a familiar golden sapling and sank the miniature realm into it.
The moment the marble of compressed energy touched the roots, the sapling pulsed once.
Then, it blazed.
Golden light, not fire, not heat, just light, radiated from the core of the young tree, pulsing like a heartbeat synced with the world itself. The air stilled. The stones of Stonehenge trembled. Harry raised his head weakly, just in time to see the sapling split open, golden bark fracturing like glass, not in destruction, but in metamorphosis.
And then it grew.
It didn’t rise; it ascended, soaring skyward in a spiral of glowing branches, golden leaves bursting into existence with each heartbeat. The roots dug into the earth, the trunk thickened with impossible speed, spiralling upward like a spire of molten sun, taller than mountains, taller than clouds, until it dwarfed everything around it. Light bled from every inch of it, pure, golden, sacred.
The core of one of the oldest forms of magic on Earth, concentrated into a seed, with the desire of protecting humanity, enhanced with the essence of a god of insight, and the power of the greatest ritual the world had ever seen, merged into a single being.
Like a circle being completed, the World Tree was born, a monument, a shield for Midgard against external threats, a beacon of safety for humanity, and very likely the single most important event in history.
It was fitting, in a way, that Midgard’s saviour would be born on the day of its freedom from the Light and Dark, on the day of its greatest victory.
Harry slumped down, letting his magical circuits cool off, feeling relief as his final goal was fulfilled. The prophecy was fulfilled. The ritual was stopped. And he now had arranged for the material realm to have its own guardian, ready to protect it.
He let his back rest against the roots, which no longer looked like roots at all, but veins of starlight sunk into the earth. The bark glowed softly behind him, still warm with lingering power, the air thrumming like a lullaby wrapped in sunlight. Above, the branches unfurled into the sky like arms embracing the world, their golden leaves catching starlight that hadn’t even reached Earth yet.
The ritual’s energy was gone, not sealed, not destroyed, but repurposed, reforged into something enduring. Something sacred.
And Harry, for the first time in what felt like years, let himself breathe.
Of course, there was only one last hiccup, one last thing, until he could be at peace again, and that particular problem was staring at the World Tree with pure awe in his eyes.
Albus Dumbledore slowly straggled up, staring at his greatest creation, and spoke, “What is this?”
Harry almost regretted not killing him before killing Grindelwald, but the man wasn’t a threat, not anymore, and the ritual took precedence. The World Tree took precedence.
But now, he had a few final words to say to the man. He needed him to see what Harry had accomplished, that all this talk of ‘Greater Good’ while committing atrocities, was absolutely useless, “This is humanity’s victory,” Harry said, voice soft but steady. “And its protection. All in one.”
He pushed himself upright, slowly, letting his hand trail along the bark behind him. “You were wrong, Albus. About everything that mattered. About control. About utopia. Humanity is flawed, messy, and beautiful in its imperfection. Your dream of perfect order… it was a fantasy. It would’ve crushed us under its weight.”
He stepped away from the trunk, golden light dancing across his skin. “This tree will protect the magical world from what’s outside… and from what’s within. Even now, it’s beginning to reshape Midgard. One world is becoming two, one magical, one mundane. Not in the way we used to hide, not illusion or deception, but separation. Realm and realm.”
Harry let his eyes drift up to the glowing canopy. “In a few years, the split will be complete. Muggles won’t perceive us, won’t find us, won’t fight us. And we won’t be able to affect them so easily either. It’ll stop the war before it starts. That’s what this is. Not peace through dominance or erasure, but peace through distance. Mutual safety.”
Dumbledore’s voice was quiet, strained. “And the muggleborn?”
“They’ll adapt,” Harry answered. “They’ll grow up in the Muggle world, just as they always have. But their magic will tether them. They’ll feel the call. They’ll never belong entirely to one side, and that’s how it should be. They’ll bridge the gap. Imperfect, maybe, but far better than bloodshed.”
“They’ll cut it down,” the former headmaster retorted, “Muggles will notice it and the wizards will try to destroy it to preserve the Statute of Secrecy.”
“They could try, but I don’t think they’ll be even successful, even if they could perceive it. The Tree protects itself. It’s hidden, its presence layered in illusions, not just of sight but of thought, of memory. The world won’t see it until its work is done. Until its purpose is fulfilled. By then, secrecy won’t be necessary anymore. The Statute of Secrecy will be obsolete. Children will be able to use magic without having to hide, without fear of being attacked by muggles. This is it. What you and Grindelwald wished you could achieve, only without the genocide and domination.”
“But through lies and deception,” the former headmaster gritted out.
“Perhaps. But it worked, didn’t it?”
Dumbledore remained silent for what felt like an eternity, before glaring at Harry, “You really did take everything from me, didn’t you? You destroyed my reputation, my legacy. You ruined my dreams for Britain and the world I wished I could create. You took away my power, my Light, my purpose. Even now, you perverted my dream into this thing and are taunting me with it.”
Harry suppressed the urge to groan. Sure, he had wished to use this as the final nail in Dumbledore’s coffin, his proof that he’d won, in the end, and yet even now, the former headmaster was denying his involvement, justifying his actions.
No, he wanted the man broken. He wanted to rip the illusion, and so, he shook his head, “After all this time, you still don’t get it, do you? You still don’t see it. You don’t see the monster that you are, that your failures, that your dreams, were nothing more than perversions of goals. Maybe it was because of the Light’s influence, maybe not, but it doesn’t change anything.”
Harry took a step forward, eyes gleaming with the golden light of the Tree behind him, and his voice, though calm, carried weight.
“You dreamt of saving the world, Albus, but you never trusted it to save itself. You dreamt of peace, but only through chains. You dreamt of order, but it was always on your terms. You cloaked it in pretty words, guidance, protection, mercy, but you never understood what mercy truly meant. You never trusted people to be better. You only wanted to be the one to make them so.”
Dumbledore looked away, jaw tight, but Harry wasn’t finished.
“You called it a utopia. But it was your fear speaking. You feared chaos. You feared failure. You feared being wrong. And so, you took power, again and again, until you forgot what it meant to be anything else. You burned away anything that you thought could threaten your precious order, committing one atrocity after another, not seeing yourself for what you became.”
Harry’s voice dropped lower. “I’m not here to gloat, Albus. I’m here to bury the world you tried to build.”
He turned to the World Tree, whose branches now pierced the heavens, casting their light far beyond the horizon.
“This is what trust looks like. This is what real protection feels like. Something built not to control, but to shelter. Not perfect, but honest. And in the end, it will outlive us both. But that’s not important, not now, at least. What matters… is what I’m going to do with you, Albus Dumbledore.”
AN: These chapters are getting harder and harder to write, I swear. I rewrote it twice, and even then, I’m not sure about it. This is supposed to tie things with the World Tree’s creation, and have Harry show Dumbledore how wrong he was, essentially peeling away the falsehoods, one after another. I don’t know if I pulled it off, but I don’t mind rewriting it depending on your feedback. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Comments
Krazo
Albus is denial
Abe 7
Albus is in denial. He would never accept anyone else saving the world other than him even if the evidence hits him in the face. Best to bury him once and for all.
Chris Cyrus
I absolutely loved the tree birth scene! I imagine the golden trees from elden ring but yaknow alive
