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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 454: The Grey Death
🕑 Added 2025-04-08 14:00:10 +0000 UTCChapter 454: The Grey Death
21 June 1995, Nurmengard
Then he saw him. White robes, unmarred. Hair gleaming like silver fire, but it was his eyes, brilliant, blinding white, that silenced everything else. Dumbledore had arrived. Harry suppressed the urge to groan. As if everything hadn’t been complicated so far.
Harry watched as Dumbledore entered the battlefield at last. He knew that it would have happened initially. Hell, he’d been prepared to fight both him and Grindelwald at once. Well, it was more accurate to say that he’d been planning on turning them against one another, revealing Grindelwald’s plans to him, and getting them to fight. It would have allowed him to set up a trap, or to just buy some time until his plan came into effect.
When Dumbledore disappeared after their fight in Hogwarts, a part of him was glad, as he would have one less enemy to deal with, but it also removed a piece on the board that he’d been planning on using, which messed up a lot of his plans for the fight against Grindelwald. The young mage was actually taken completely off-guard when Dumbledore destroyed one of the Light’s most potent weapons, something he could have used against Grindelwald to great effect, because of the prophecy tied to it. Excalibur was a mythical blade, a weapon unlike anything Harry had seen before, an abomination surely, but a powerful one, to say the least. The Light had obviously not taken kindly to that, and a part of Harry hoped that this would have been it. Of course, the more logical part said that it was very unlikely that the Light would give up on its only champion just minutes or hours before Ragnarök. It would practically guarantee the Dark’s victory, as it would have abandoned its only remaining agent on Midgard.
So no, Dumbledore’s return wasn’t surprising. In fact, it was inevitable.
But that didn’t mean Harry had to like it.
Still, it was funny how Dumbledore had turned into a piece of the game instead of a player. In a way, he’d always been a piece, probably since he’d been thrown out of Hogwarts. Looking back, it was probably meant to destabilize Dumbledore’s position completely. Grindelwald hadn’t just taken away his political influence, but literally shattered his dreams for magical Britain, which he spent decades carefully planning, and just as quickly, he replaced them with his own, with the crisis that was Ragnarök, slowly and methodically making the Champion of the Light fall into darkness, lose his morals for the sake of a greater goal, humanity survival, enough that he would even betray the Light, enough that he stopped being a player and just a piece, a powerful one, of course, but a piece, nonetheless.
And now, it seemed that he’d done something foolish again, given the way he was radiating Light. It wasn’t flowing through him; it was consuming him, puppeteering his body like a divine marionette dressed in robes of order and judgment. The spear of light that materialized in his hand was just as abominable. It just felt wrong, and Harry hadn’t had to time to properly analyse it yet, given that Dumbledore had just attacked him moments prior, but he recognized the soul magic hidden beneath the surface, while the weapon itself was essentially a small, minuscule shard of Light. By that, Harry didn’t mean the way Dumbledore had done before with the Light’s energy, but an actual fragment of the realm of Light itself, given form. By slowly wielding it, Dumbledore, his very soul, his very essence, was being consumed by it.
Grindelwald seemed to stare at it in horror as well, his body trying to mimic that of his former human self, “What have you done, Albus?”
“What was necessary,” the former headmaster’s voice answered, steely, and missing the very small piece of humanity that the man had left, “To atone for my actions.”
“Well, you couldn’t have come at a better time, old friend. It appears that the boy is craftier than I expected. Mind lending me a hand.”
The former headmaster didn’t say anything to answer, and just raised his spear towards Harry, who protested, “Are you seriously siding with the man who betrayed you? He literally admitted to me that the ritual he told you about is a lie.”
This was it. The turning point. The moment he’d tried to avoid for months. Now, he was running out of time—and allies. He couldn’t bluff his way out of this one. Not with Dumbledore like this.
The young mage was doing his best to try to salvage whatever remained of his plan. To be perfectly honest, he didn’t think he could last a long time against the two Champions working together. He couldn’t exactly overpower them and Harry’s fighting style, which relies on misdirection and layered traps wouldn’t exactly work on multiple opponents of their calibre. It was a long shot at best and he knew it, but it was a shot worth taking.
Dumbledore didn’t deny the claim, though, and just stated, “I am aware of Grindelwald’s actions. Our fated battle will take place as planned. But that battle cannot begin while you still draw breath, anathema.”
The word landed like a curse. Not “enemy.” Not “threat.” Anathema. A contradiction. Something to be erased.
Harry barely had time to process what the former headmaster stated, when the man raised his spear towards him and the world paused. The attack could barely be called magic, not really. The spear didn’t glow, it resonated, sending ripples through the fabric of reality like a tuning fork struck against the foundation of existence. The wind stopped. Sound fell flat. Even Grindelwald paused, unease etched into the flickering lines of his half-formed face.
This wasn’t just Light. It was Order—pure, mechanical, absolute, and energy started to gather, spinning very quickly, creating gusts of wind from the sheer pressure alone, and then he let go of it.
The gathered energy condensed into a singularity of spiralling brilliance, a beam that spun with impossible precision. The air fractured from the pressure alone, collapsing inwards before it even touched the beam. Wind ceased. Gravity bent.
Harry couldn’t help but be marvelled and horrified by the attack. It didn’t burn—it froze. Not in temperature, but in principle. Everything it touched stopped existing, locked into a state of absolute equilibrium before simply vanishing. The earth beneath it turned smooth and glasslike, then cracked and shattered into white dust. The skies above pulled back in a spiral, forming a tunnel of utter silence.
And it was heading straight for him.
The young mage barely had more than a fraction of a second to process the incoming attack, but with a flick of his scythe, he created a subspace, essentially a miniature dimension mirroring the material realm, and used it as a shield, making the attack hit it instead.
Harry could feel the miniature realm fracture from the sheer intensity of the attack, and he pushed the entrance of the subspace forward, hoping that it would trap Dumbledore inside it, only for Grindelwald to conjure a ball of Darkness, smashing it into prismatic shards that seem to fluctuate between existence and non-existence.
Nevertheless, the young mage persevered and banished the shards of broken space-time towards the Dark Lord, but he didn’t have the time to see what happened, as he felt Dumbledore suddenly appear behind him in a bust of Light. Harry barely dodged the thrust of the Light spear on his back, used his scythe to block the following sweep, and spun it, releasing a breach in space-time, that Dumbledore punctured with his weapon, it gave him enough time to warp space and get away.
However, the former headmaster didn’t let off the pressure, sending a beam of Light at him, which Harry conjured a singularity to swallow. He was about to follow with a counterattack, only for Grindelwald to leap out of a shadow, his hand unnaturally elongated, and try to skewer him in the back. The last Potter was barely able to block the attack, followed by creating a portal right in front of Dumbledore’s incoming attack, making it hit the Dark Lord instead.
Grindelwald’s figure screeched unnaturally, as it was thrown back by his ally’s attack. Suddenly, Harry’s Arcane Hearing warned him about a surge in magic on the ground, and he conjured a magic circle to send himself flying into the air. It seemed to have been the correct choice as the entire ground turned to a sea of white flames that looked unnaturally still for some reason.
Harry made his magic circle physical and stared as Dumbledore seemed to walk on the white fire, manipulated with barely any thought. They stared at one another, silent for what felt to be an eternity, “You’re not Dumbledore anymore, are you? The Light took that from you when you destroyed Excalibur.”
The former headmaster’s neutral expression shifted slightly at the mention of the sword, “Everything has a price, Potter. I have paid for my mistakes. For my failure, the Light took away what made me weak, and gave me the opportunity to right my wrongs. The question is, are you prepared to pay the price for your actions?”
Damn it, was there even anything left of Dumbledore? The Light had obviously decided to take a very heavy-handed approach to get the former headmaster to follow their orders. Harry didn’t know if Dumbledore had done so willingly or not, but that took away a lot of the young mage's tricks against the man. Harry had always planned around the older man’s motives and dreams. It was what gave him the main advantage, to essentially try to make a victory so bitter that it might as well have been a defeat.
But now, this inhuman version of his former headmaster made that very unlikely. Dumbledore had always wanted to kill him, but not like this, not with this intensity. There would be no talking this down, that was what Harry realized, not because of any difference, but because the Champion of Light could no longer conceptualize not following the Light’s order, and if the entity wanted Harry dead, there would be nothing to dissuade him.
It had to be the spear, Harry realized. It had to have been what the soul magic was doing, essentially morphing Dumbledore into an unbending avatar of the Light’s will for as long as he wielded it. Now, he needed to get rid of the damn thing.
Before he could even think of a plan, Harry barely dodged the beam of Light that Dumbledore tried to sneakily conjure from his eyes. He ducked and felt it punch a hole in the mountain, far behind him. He felt the white flames on the ground rise up and morph into a spike, trying to kill him, and he used his invisibility cloak to phase through them and create a pulse of space, which sent everything flying back. He used the fraction of a second this awarded him to slow down his perception of time and stab his scythe through the flames, channeling the energies of the void between worlds, to power a quick transmutation array.
In the blink of an eye, the sea of white flames turned into the familiar prismatic broken shards of space-time, which Harry threw at Dumbledore. Unfortunately, the Light Lord was able to vanish them all before touching him, and sent a beam of energy towards Harry, probably expecting him to redirect it.
He didn’t. Instead, he pushed the prismatic blade of his scythe forward and channelled it down towards the runes that he’d been secretly conjuring, hidden using Solomon’s magic, which would specifically destabilize any energy cast with the same signature as the power source. For a fraction of a second, the Light around Dumbledore dimmed slightly, and Harry created a portal, extending his scythe through it, hoping to kill Dumbledore, only for a shadow hand to appear out of nowhere, and conjure another blade to stop the attack, with the former headmaster raising his own spear in defence as well.
The explosion as all three weapons touched one another rang into their very soul, creating a pulse of energy that literally sent everyone flying. In mid-air, Harry did his best to activate the second layer of his trap, conjuring chains that grabbed all of the debris and sent them at his opponents. He landed with a roll and started to sing. This time, it wasn’t a realm, more of a subspace, a mirror dimension, really, that was small enough that he could tweak the rules. He slowed down the passage of time and slowly sucked the heat from inside.
Like he expected, this didn’t last for long, the subspace started to crack from their sheer combined strength. Holding one of them was technically doable even if it was extremely difficult, but both of them at the same time, were beyond Harry.
In the blink of an eye, the spear of light appeared in front of him, and Harry parried it with his scythe but felt a small cut just below his shoulder. He felt weaker, slower, the moment he got hurt. Holy shit, was that the spear’s soul magic? It was essentially absorbing life force somehow. He barely had any time to process that as his arcane hearing warned him of Grindelwald trying to attack him from the back.
Harry instinctively conjured another blade on the lower end of his scythe and used it to block that attack, spinning it while warping space around him to make it move faster. Harry phased through the second attack with his invisibility cloak, and instead conjured a singularity right above them, which his two opponents negated while giving him space, but Harry had added a small caveat to it, which would open a breach in space-time when it was negated.
From the created breach, a gigantic meteorite appeared just a few feet above them, and fell to the ground, without giving them enough time to retaliate. Harry, himself, had turned himself into a raven and flew away to safety, having warped space just before, to get far enough away not to get hit with his attack.
The explosion was massive, but Harry saw the giant projectile almost cut into four pieces with a slice of Light and Dark, just a fraction of a second before it hit, the floating dust turned into a black cloud of pure destruction that threatened to swallow everything it touched, but Harry contained it by conjuring a small breach to a vacuum, which sucked it all away.
This left all three combatants staring at one another for a moment, but it felt like an eternity. Then suddenly, Dumbledore turned to Grindelwald, who nodded, and then the world shifted.
Harry felt it before he saw it—his Arcane Hearing screamed. Not in warning, but in inevitability. The very concept of magic twisted, as two impossibilities began to converge.
Light and Dark.
Order and Entropy.
Creation and Destruction.
It should have been a paradox. Two enemies, eternal opposites, whose very nature rejected one another. But now, they acted in concert. And the result was something that should have never existed.
The sky itself recoiled.
Dumbledore raised his spear once more, the Light gathering, not in a burst, but in a spiral—refined, focused, calm. At the same time, Grindelwald opened his palm, and darkness spilled out like ink bleeding through reality, wrapping around the gathering Order like a parasite that knew exactly how to live within its host. The two forces didn’t repel—they merged, folding into one another like coiled wires, creating a singular, massive spiral of absolute contradiction.
It spun with the mathematical perfection of the Light, every curve sharpened by divine precision, but beneath that structure swam the hunger of the Dark, flickering with madness, decay, and endless endings.
And it was coming straight for him.
His magic whispered in fear. His will screamed in defiance.
And beneath it all, he was smiling. After all, an idea bloomed in his mind.
It was the first true idea he had since Dumbledore arrived, beyond fighting for as long as possible while hoping for the best. Now, things were different. Harry Potter had a plan, and well, that rarely tended to bode well for his enemies.
AN: I’m not really sure about this one, to be completely honest. I wrote it in a bit of a hurry since I had to deal with a lot of work I missed last week. This was mostly a chapter with Harry trying to figure out how he’ll fight both Dumbledore and Grindelwald and keep getting stonewalled whenever he tricks one of them since the other one would attack him before he retaliates properly. He tried to deal with it with wide-area attacks, which wasn’t really effective. I wasn’t planning on putting the other half in another chapter, but it really did get away from me, and the chapter would have ended up being double the size, so I decided to split them since I wouldn’t have had time to do the rest of it. 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
Garri Sarkisov
Sing it baby one more time
Derek Williams
Me thinks it’s time for harry to sing like he never sang before
