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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 450: Traps and Games
🕑 Added 2025-03-30 14:00:32 +0000 UTCChapter 450: Traps and Games
21 June 1995, Nurmengard
Slowly but surely, the corpse died and started to release a golden glow. He barely had time to conjure a shield before the fortress started to shake, and everything turned white.
When the Light faded from his eyes, and he could finally see once more, Harry let out a grin as the seemingly impregnable fortress of Nurmengard started to crack and fall away. There were no traces of the Elder Vampires, only Grindelwald, who was doing his best to hold the entire fortress together, to shape his ritual. The moment Nurmengard fell, the entire ritual, which was etched across every single stone in the fortress would fail.
Despite himself, Harry relaxed slightly. After all, this was proof that Daphne was well and that she was able to activate the ritual. While he trusted her with his life, he really didn’t want to make her complicit in the ritual. She was essentially using the deaths on a battlefield to power her ritual, and he knew that deep down, it would change her. He wasn’t happy about it, to say the least.
Nevertheless, it was also something that Grindelwald didn’t see coming. Harry's letting Daphne be part of the fighting was something completely uncharacteristic, and it worked splendidly. Sure, choosing Pettigrew to replace Daphne was a bit vindictive on his part. Harry still remembered being in the Garden of Avalon and the agony he felt for what felt like a lifetime, and he remembered Pettigrew’s role in this. He was also pretty forgettable and very easy to access given he was bound by Daphne.
And now, Nurmengard was falling, just as he planned. He turned towards Grindelwald and saw the Dark Lord surrounded by pure darkness, obviously straining at the fact that he was holding an entire magical fortress by himself. He turned towards Harry and growled, “What did you do?”
“Me? I did nothing,” the young wizard replied, “I was right here with you, playing our game.”
“Do not play jokes with me, Peverell!” the Dark Lord snarled.
“I’m not. You were the one who took the bait and took Daphne. You were the one who planned on using her as a hostage. You were the one who took her deep inside your castle, beyond the wards, beyond your security enchantments, because what harm could she do, right? Now, Nurmengard is falling, and eventually, so will your ritual. I didn’t even break the rules of our game. I did nothing to stop you, after all. I had already arranged for everything before I came here. You should really focus on the wording whenever you do a binding deal, after all.” Harry answered, echoing back the man’s words.
Grindelwald remained silent for a fraction of a second as if processing what was happening. It was obvious that he didn’t expect this, which was a very good thing. Tricking a seer was very troublesome, especially one as powerful as Grindelwald, but in a time where Fate was in flux, divination counted for very little.
Finally, the Dark Lord’s eyes steeled, almost glowing in anger, and he whipped his wand towards Harry, “This changes nothing, you know. Nurmengard will remain standing until the ritual is complete. My subordinates will take my place, keeping it together at any moment now. All you have achieved is inconveniencing me for a moment.”
“Perhaps, but it’s enough for me. But I believe we have a game to finish. Do you remember the board’s position? It was your turn, if I’m not mistaken?” the young mage asked, pointing his wand at his enemy as well.
The Dark Lord’s eyes almost glowed in his fury, especially given his tone, “The game is over, Peverell. You have nothing to win by trying to fight me. If your plan was to destroy Nurmengard, then it failed. Your plan to destroy the Light and Dark has failed. Soon my army will hold the fortress, and the ritual will be complete. You have achieved nothing. You are gaining nothing by stubbornly looking at a game that you will inevitably lose.”
Harry suppressed the urge to grin and spoke up, “About that army of yours. I believe that it’s been substantially reduced.”
Grindelwald stiffened, and spoke up, “Knight to Queen three.”
“You didn’t seriously think that I’d use such a ritual just to destroy this fortress. I could have done so myself or found a lot easier ways to do that. And I know that you’d have been able to hold it all back yourself. You’re a very clever man, Grindelwald, but you’re also a narcissist. You assume that this was about destroying Nurmengard to stop the ritual. This was about removing all your pieces, one by one, but to do that, I had to trick you. Bishop takes Knight.”
“Bishop takes Bishop,” the Dark Lord retorted, forcefully steeling his expression.
“You didn’t make it easy. Being a seer is a bit of a cheat, to be honest. You probably evaluated thousands of futures, seeing every single one of my reactions and I knew that. It was only right that I use a cheat of my own. I believe this is familiar,” Harry answered while throwing him a familiar diary.
Grindelwald caught it and his eyes widened as he recognized it. Harry explained it to him, “One of your counterpart’s diaries, I believe. I was trapped in his universe after the whole fiasco in Durmstrang. It was quite revealing. The divination was extremely useful, even if I would never master it in time to fight you in it, but it did give me a lot of insight into how you used it. I knew that you would bypass my initial counter, so, I decided on something far more subtle. I knew exactly when you tried to divine the future, and I arranged for you to see exactly what I wanted you to see. I had safeguards to stop you from going with any of them, each one stopping the final task from taking place, forcing you to delay this confrontation until the last moment, when Fate is in flux when you are at your weakest, when you wouldn’t see me coming, when you wouldn’t see her coming. Bishop takes bishop.”
“You played our game well, but that doesn’t change its outcome. Rook takes Bishop.”
“Rook takes Rook. Look at your army and tell me what you see,” Harry simply retorted.
Grindelwald glanced towards the window and froze. It was completely silent. There were no sounds of spell fire or deaths; without any prompting, the vampires slowly turned to ash despite the sun being clouded, Vampire Lords and Elders alike, “How?”
“I told you that the ritual was never meant to destroy the fortress. This is just a nice side effect. No, it’s an expanded form of my mother’s ritual she used to turn werewolves into Lycans. Blood magic is finicky like that. I needed a sample of what makes a vampire, and thankfully, I had the first one in my corner.”
“Vlad,” Grindelwald practically snarled, “Pawn takes Rook.”
The Dark Lord must have realized just how much he’d been played. Vlad had been the one to arrange for Daphne to be taken. Harry had fed him information that would almost guarantee his trust if Grindelwald used his divination.
Harry, though, continued, “Of course, you can’t modify something without changing something else in return, and believe me. It’s a rule of blood magic. I’m not a master in the field, of course, but Daphne is quite gifted. She was Lily’s apprentice, you know. It took a while, but we found a way to increase the strength of your vampires, make them stronger, faster, and so much more, but that came at the price of being weak, not just to sunlight, but to every source of light. It’s an equivalent exchange, more power in exchange for more weakness, light is everywhere, isn’t it? Most of them died in seconds, the rest, their regeneration is stopping them from dying. These ones will either die at the hands of my weeping angels or will remain dying and regenerating for an eternity. I think the former is kinder, to be honest. Bishop takes Pawn, check.”
Grindelwald remained silent for a fraction of a second, processing what has just transpired, and just glared at Harry, “I really should have killed you when I had the chance, prophecy be damned.”
The young mage nodded, “You probably should have. But the past is the past, and the ink is dry. Shall we finish our game?”
“Once I’m done with our business here,” the Dark Lord replied, staying oddly neutral, but the undercurrent of his rage was extremely obvious, “I want you to know that I’ll find the most creative endings for Ms. Greengrass and her family.”
Harry slowed down his perception of time and observed his surroundings. Grindelwald’s advantage was very simple. He was a lot more powerful and had the Dark on his. Harry’s main advantage, on the other hand, was the man’s rage, and the fact that he needed to keep an entire fortress together for his ritual.
Grindelwald was the one who made the first move, conjuring a beam of Darkness which Harry transmuted into ash, which he slowly used to fire back an attack at him. The Dark Lord shielded; however, the young mage created a pulse in space, destabilizing the entire structure. Grindelwald buckled and Harry used that to conjure an Ice blade, channelling the resurrection stone, and impaled him with it. However, the Dark Lord dodged banishing away, a baton of Darkness that disintegrated everything around him, Harry used his invisibility cloak to phase through without too many issues and impaled the man with his blade.
The fortress shook but remained stable, Grindelwald then releasing a pulse of Darkness around him, catching Harry and throwing him away. Slowly but surely, Darkness started to overwhelm everything in sight, swallowing everything around him. Harry released a beam of Light, countering the attack, and they struggled in a contest of magical strength.
It wasn’t something that Harry was going to win. He knew that for a fact. There was a reason he engineered the fight against Grindelwald to be this way, weakened by holding an entire fortress together with his army gone completely.
And, just as he planned, Grindelwald’s beam of Darkness fizzled away as the fortress shook once more. Harry let go of his spell and watched Grindelwald buckle, as if connected to the fortress itself, the darkness receding.
He suppressed a grin. After all, Harry had tasked his army to physically attack the fortress after the attack. Each spell took away a part of his concentration, a part of his control over his magic, and Harry channelled his crest to take advantage of this moment of weakness as much as possible, his cloak, the stone on the ring he wore, and his wand heating up, creating a translucent grey, almost misty, scythe. He warped space in front of Grindelwald and bisected the man.
Right as he was about to do that, Grindelwald did the unthinkable and released a pulse of Darkness so powerful that it literally destroyed the very fortress he sought to keep together.
Harry was thrown away from the crumbling fortress, ready to activate his measures to contain the magical release from the ritual, only for nothing to happen. The ritual was still active somehow, and that meant that Grindelwald was still alive.
Cracks of apparition echoed across the battlefield. Technically speaking, their contracts were done. The fortress was destroyed, and the vampires were gone. Harry had specifically told them not to fight Grindelwald or Dumbledore. They wouldn’t last long. No one would.
Slowly, shadows started to come together, morph into what seemed to be a tall humanoid figure with glowing red eyes, which rasped, “Did you think that this was it? Did you think that I would be defeated by a few clever tricks and a twist of fate?”
The voice was warped, layered with too many voices at once. The creature that emerged from the darkness no longer resembled Grindelwald—not entirely. His form was taller, leaner, and unnatural. His skin was stretched too tight and the air around him shimmered overwhelmed by the darkness.
Harry rose slowly to his feet, wand steady, cloak fluttering behind him, doing his best to understand what he was witnessing. Grindelwald was using himself as a living avatar of the Dark, replacing his very body with its energy. It was beyond foolish. Binding yourself to an entity like that was insane, but theoretically, if he had planned on using his soul only to ascend to another realm, taking the magical world with him, then he didn’t technically need his body in the long run.
Even for a champion of the Dark, this was just wrong, and despite himself, Harry echoed, “What have you done?”
“I am Nurmengard, boy. It’s more than just some fortress. I laid every brick, and made every enchantment. It is an expression of myself, and so long as I live, Nurmengard does as well. And as long as Nurmengard exists, then my ritual will take place.”
“You’re using your own soul to finish the ritual,” Harry spoke up, realizing what was happening, “Do you have any idea what could happen? Your very being will be warped, you will die in every way that matters. Even if your soul doesn’t implode, the being that will remain will not be you, not really. It will not even be human.”
“I am prepared to do what’s necessary for my people, for my future. I did not want to do that, but you were the one who pushed me. I will suffer, I know, but it will be worth it. This is my dream, my destiny, and I will do what is necessary to achieve it. You will not stop me. No one will. You never had any chance at winning. Surely, you realize this now. Our game was always rigged.”
“No,” Harry retorted, “You haven’t won, not yet. Killing you will stop the ritual.”
“You don’t have a good track record here, I’m afraid. Your mother failed to do it with an entire realm at her back. Why do you think you would fare differently?”
“Because I am the Master of Death, the man who united the Deathly Hallows, the Lord of Space and Time, and the Last Peverell, and you, Gellert Grindelwald, have broken the rules of Death and Fate, and it’s time to pay the price for your transgression.”
The silver scythe appeared in Harry’s hand once more, and he grinned, “And I’m also not alone.”
As if they were waiting for his words, a familiar man walked out of the shadows, Vlad. Harry had made sure that the vampire would remain far away when Daphne’s ritual took place, to avoid being affected as well. Similarly, Alexander Marinakis appeared in a burst of Lightning, holding a trident in his hand, ready to attack as well.
Surprisingly, Grindelwald grinned, “This is going to be fun!”
AN: These chapters are taking a lot longer to write, to be honest. I didn’t expect how hard it would be to tie things together like that. I’m not sure if this one came out like I wanted it to, 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
Abe 7
Just for a second when Harry says that he isn’t alone, i was reminded of that epic scene from Lord of rings prequel series(Hobbit) where Galadriel and her companions banish the dark lord temporarily. Looking forward to the epic showdown!!
Monzter E
Nice...
