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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 443: The Last Prophecy
🕑 Added 2025-03-16 14:00:07 +0000 UTCChapter 443: The Last Prophecy
21 June 1995, Hogwarts
Marinakis muttered, “Now it begins.” Harry shook his head and answered, “No, now it ends.” They were both right, in a way. The moment the task began, so would Ragnarök as well, and with it the end of an era, no matter what the outcome would be.
Harry sat in silence as McGonagall made her announcement about the task and every school’s standing. It wasn’t exactly exciting. Everyone was assigned points given how many other people remained in the arena when they would be eliminated, and that the scores would be added for each school to get the winners of the tournament. The last person standing would, of course, win Ascalon, much to the excitement of the spectators.
Honestly, everyone started going nuts whenever the sword was mentioned. Harry could understand the historical value of the artefact and maybe even a bit of its power, but it was obvious that Dumbledore had an angle by offering it, which should have made people very cautious. Harry could see hundreds of different ways to use this donation, even if the whole mess with Ragnarök wouldn’t happen. It was an easy way to regain some influence in Britain, and maybe even a show of wealth which would get Fudge to pardon him for an appropriate donation given the country’s fragile economy.
Sure, Harry knew that it was all just to make people come to see the sword in person, which would help with him breaking the prophecy, but the sheer negligence these people came up with was surprising, to say the least.
And to make things worse, Harry watched the sorry state of the Hogwarts Champions. It was obvious that the school’s chances were pretty low. Most of the champions were made up of fourth and fifth years, who had been forced to compete since they hadn’t had the opportunity to do so with Hogwarts being locked down during the war. They looked like gangly children against their opponents, who all looked to be of graduating age.
Nevertheless, this was not the time to vent his frustrations about the unfairness and the stupidity of other people, and instead, he watched the arena carefully, hoping to see a small sign of magic being channelled from the crowd to somewhere else. It required a lot of focus, especially given how much magic was being generated from the crowds. It was like trying to find someone’s voice in a concert.
For almost fifteen minutes, he found nothing, until the first contestant was eliminated, some guy in Nebelheim who was caught by a stray curse from a Durmstrang student. The crowd roared and for a fraction of a second, Harry saw a small pulse of magic being drained near a certain section of the arena. He focused on it, and it pulsed as well when another contestant was eliminated soon after, showing Harry a clear path towards the forest.
Honestly, Dumbledore had done a far better job hiding the connection, using the castle’s very own ambient magic to mask the connection, making it feel more like a ward than anything. Harry’s runes which he had put all around the school to warn him of a high concentration of magic moving around, hadn’t been triggered at all.
If Harry had been anyone else who didn’t have his Arcane Hearing, then he wouldn’t have been able to find the ritual. Even then, he could only get a proper lead whenever the crowd’s emotion soared, causing a pulse of magic to be sent towards Dumbledore’s ritual. It was a bit annoying but fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long.
He was able to make a good estimation of the ritual’s location after just the third elimination, slowly narrowing the search. He turned towards Marinakis and muttered, “It’s in the Forbidden Forest.”
The former headmaster nodded imperceptibly and slowly walked out of the arena. Harry turned towards Daphne and spoke up, “I’ll be going now. You know what that means, right?”
She nodded, “Good luck.”
“Good luck to you too and be ready. Remember the plan. I’ll see you on the other side.”
Harry rushed out of the arena, following Marinakis, and practically ran near the Forbidden Forest. It had been one of his suspicions in terms of where the ritual would take place. After all, Dumbledore needed somewhere private in the castle, where no one would try to interrupt him or stumble on the ritual by accident. To be fair, there was also the option that the ritual would take place outside the castle grounds altogether. After all, Hogwarts was surrounded by vast stretches of empty mainland, plenty of space to conceal a ritual without much difficulty.
Still, his detection runes should have alerted him of a high concentration of magic travelling through the forest. After all, he’d put more than enough of them there to prepare him. However, the moment he stepped foot in the forest, he understood why his runes failed so badly. The Forbidden Forest always had a thick form of magic inside it, which Harry had to personally tune his runes to bypass this effect. Well, apparently, Dumbledore altered the ambient magic somehow. It was different, and had a similar frequency as the ones belonging to the crowd’s energy, even if it was less concentrated.
Seriously, Dumbledore had to be personally involved; Harry couldn’t see anyone else being able to do such delicate work. The man really decided to make the ritual’s location as obscure as possible, which was pretty impressive given the scale of the whole thing.
Nevertheless, Harry was able to trace the connection given the concentration of magic, despite it being hidden rather cleverly. He motioned to Marinakis to follow him, and he ran towards the path the energy was taking.
It brought him directly towards the Acromantula nest. With barely any thought, Harry flicked his wand, releasing a form of black mist that literally wiped every single gigantic spider that tried to come near him from existence. It wasn’t exactly hard. Harry had analysed the creature’s magical make-up before and created a curse that he infused with his family crest to make it extremely corrosive to the spiders and infused it in a mist to spread around him.
He hoped to create one to kill vampire thralls in high concentration, but their magics were extremely resilient, and he didn’t find anything that was effective enough to hurt them on a small dosage, like using it as a mist, but it seemed to work on other creatures, like Acromantula.
It wasn’t something he was especially proud of, but it proved its uses. Behind him, Marinakis whistled, “That’s a very dangerous piece of magic there, kid.”
Harry didn’t say anything and ran towards the direction of the ritual, literally wiping out anything that came his way. Half a minute later, he found his next opponent in the form of two giants. With barely any thought, he sent two curses, having tailored their magic to specifically bypass their natural magical resistance, literally cutting them into halves in less than a couple of seconds.
Then came the plants. They were frankly horrible, a weird mixture of twisting vines and gaping maws, their petals glowing with an unnatural luminescence. Their roots pulsed with eerie white veins, obviously enhanced by the Light, while their blossoms snapped open like jawed traps, revealing rows of crystalline thorns dripping with some kind of silver liquid. Harry didn’t exactly have the time to properly assess them, but given their obvious taint from the Light, they should have been dangerous. Deciding not to take any chances, Harry just sang them out of existence, literally conjuring a force of magic that was the antithesis of their very being. They melted into a grey puddle.
Harry barely had the time to savour his victory as he dodged an attack from behind him, conjuring a spear of ice at the vampire that tried to take him by surprise. He then saw Marinakis immediately wipe out a group of them by conjuring some weird golden lightning that jumped between them. Deciding to replicate the feat, he put the curse he designed especially for vampires into a small bolt of lightning and released it.
The small bolt literally jumped from one vampire to another, killing the thralls in seconds, and even the vampire lords. The feedback continued until he heard a scream. Huh, the spell failed to kill one of them for some reason. Harry warped space in front of him to appear near the man, only to see a Vampire Elder kneeling, trying to resist its effects. To be fair to him, Harry hadn’t exactly designed the curse with an Elder in mind, and the spell did get weaker the more it travelled, as most curses of this kind tended to do. All of these must have been his servants, and Harry had essentially wiped out most of his sources of power. After all, vampire often thrived on the power of their underlings.
Instead of relishing the being’s suffering, Harry conjured a blade of black ice, which he channelled the Resurrection Stone into and just decapitated him.
Marinakis whistled, “Well, that’s the fastest Vampire lineage I’ve seen extinguished, kid.”
“We’ll brag about it later. We need to get to the ritual as quickly as possible.”
They made their way to the ritual once more, which thankfully didn’t take long. The vampires were obviously the last defensive measure of Dumbledore’s death. They found themselves in a clearing with a ritual dagger floating in the middle of a runic array, with five Elder Vampires chanting in a language that Harry didn’t know, but the magic’s purpose was very clear. They were using themselves as channels for the energy coming from the arena, but they were also using a small part of the energy to power a ward separating them which would stop any magic or physical object from entering.
It was a crude thing, with multiple layers of wards, each depending on the very nature of each Elder’s very soul. They would die after the ritual was concluded, and they obviously knew that. Fucking fanatical bloodsuckers.
Still, given the nature of the ritual, they would need to kill all five of them before the prophecy was broken to truly stop the prophecy from breaking. He turned towards Marinakis and the former headmaster had obviously come to the same conclusion, “I need thirty seconds to break the wards. Do you think you can hold them off?”
Harry was, of course, talking about the small mountain of thralls and Vampire Lords running at them. The older man released a bloodthirsty grin, “You worry about the wards. I’ll deal with them.”
Marinakis then raised his hand, and clouds gathered on top of them, with the thrum of thunder. In a single blinding attack, a gigantic bolt of lightning fell towards the clearing, essentially vaporizing most of the vampire thralls in a single moment.
Yet Harry didn’t care, and instead focused on each layer of the shield, analysing their songs using his Arcane Hearing. As he promised, it took him a few seconds of concentration until he released a black beam of energy that was precisely aimed towards bypassing the wards. The spell moved slowly, looking like a projectile, breaking through every single ward as if it was just made of paper, until it found the final one, finding itself at the centre of the ritual. It touched the ritual knife and released a small space-time singularity, which expanded suddenly, swallowing everything around it, before collapsing into itself.
And just like that all five vampire elders were killed, and with it, everything was destroyed. Marinakis turned towards him, the clearing having become nothing more than a graveyard of vampires, and spoke up, “Is that it?”
On paper, this should have been it. The ritual was interrupted, and the ritual blade was destroyed, which was what Dumbledore was planning on using to break the prophecy in the first place. And yet, there was nothing there to indicate a prophecy, nothing that they were planning on destroying or sacrificing.
To be honest, Harry didn’t think he’d stop the ritual, hoping to still use some of the magical release against Dumbledore and Grindelwald. There was some irony to it. Given the effort that Dumbledore obviously took to hide the traces of the ritual’s location, this was too easy.
There was something missing, something that should have been obvious. It couldn’t have been that easy. For one, Dumbledore wasn’t there. There should have been more resistance. Harry tried using his Arcane Hearing, hoping that it would help shed some light on what happened, only to freeze. The magic was still being channelled into the ritual ground. Only this time, it was far lower. Harry raised his hand, and the ground parted as if it was made of mud, revealing something that was letting out a golden glow, a rock, perhaps.
Harry didn’t have time to really process what he was as he had to warp space to avoid an attack coming his way. He didn’t know what it was, but his Arcane Hearing was screaming. He turned to see his attacker, only to freeze slightly as he saw the familiar figure of Albus Dumbledore glaring at him. He had expected a fight with the man, of course, but he never expected to see him wielding a sword, especially one that seemed to literally give him a headache whenever he tried to analyse it. The sword felt more like a fragment of Light, a crystalized fragment of a realm that was somehow held together with a small strand of time.
It was an abomination, to say the least, something that should have never come into being. Dumbledore smirked as he saw the frown on Harry’s face as he looked at the atrocity in the shape of a sword, “I have to admit that when Gellert said that you’d see through my little trick, that it would have taken you far more time.”
“No offence, but the last time we fought I took your wand and vaporized your arm. You should have learned to not underestimate me by now.”
“The element of surprise only works once. Still, it achieved its purpose. You are too late to stop the ritual, not that you had a chance. I had simply hoped that you were wise enough not to try to do this, that things wouldn’t get… messy. Fighting here achieves nothing, Potter; there is no path where you would emerge from this encounter stopping me from breaking the prophecy, even with the extra help,” he spoke motioning to Marinakis.
Harry digested what Dumbledore implied very quickly. The whole thing was a labyrinth of sacrifices, each layer meant to delay any interference. The vampires were just lambs he sent to slaughter who were actually protecting nothing beneath his wards. Dumbledore had lied to them, and used them as a misdirection, either hoping that Harry would not notice that the magic was still flowing into the boulder or to give Dumbledore more time to set something else up.
Either way, the entire setup was designed for one thing: time.
Still, Harry forced himself to roll his eyes, trying to perceive Dumbledore's inevitable trap, “I see that you’re still trusting Grindelwald blindly, even after all this time. Your reliance on his divination will backfire on you horribly, that I can guarantee.”
During the conversation, the young wizard hadn’t remained idle. Instead, he did his best to ignore the sword and focused on the weird golden boulder beneath it. It was filled with what seemed to be hundreds of layered enchantments and they were definitely old, practically ancient even. It was also familiar, very much so. Not the magic itself, but the core of its structure.
It took him a second to place it back to its source. He remembered it when he confronted Nimue. So, this stone had some Fae magic for some reason. Was it part of the prophecy somehow? If so, then why try to channel so much magic into it. Something didn’t make sense, and Dumbledore was obviously not going to tell him.
Still, the former headmaster shook his head sadly, “Please leave. You are doing nothing more than endangering our world. What I am doing here isn’t out of malice but survival.”
Marinakis burst into laughter, “Only a deluded mind would say that bringing about the End of Days is about survival.”
As Dumbledore opened his mouth to reply, Harry twisted space and conjured an ice blade, infused with the Resurrection Stone's essence, then banished it toward the Champion of Light.
Dumbledore lazily stepped aside, not even bothering to raise his sword—only for the blade to vanish midair, reappearing directly above him—now a hundred times its original size. Harry really liked non-Euclidean space magic, which alone made studying Solomon’s magic worth it.
The idea was simple—use the attack as a distraction, force Dumbledore’s attention away, and let the real target—the boulder—shatter unnoticed.
It was a long shot at best, more of a probing attack, really.
With a single, fluid motion, Dumbledore cut the entire thing in half, his blade of crystallized Light unravelling the spell as though it had never existed. In the same breath, he raised a luminous shield, neutralizing the gigantic bolt of lightning Marinakis had hurled at him.
The shockwave that followed was apocalyptic, ripping through half a mile of the Forbidden Forest, reducing ancient trees to splinters, and carving a crater into the earth.
And yet, Dumbledore remained untouched, standing at the centre of the destruction as if it were beneath his notice. The only indication that anything had even happened was the slight furrow in his brow.
Harry exhaled slowly.
He knew deep down that this was different from his last fight with Dumbledore. There was a finality to it, whereas he had previously been blinded by his overconfidence and his hate for Harry, where he didn’t expect a teenager to be able to hurt him.
The man before him was different. This was Dumbledore the warrior who had fought wars, who had wiped out entire armies with a single attack, fully prepared to attack with everything he had. And that was definitely a different kind of beast entirely.
As if he was proving his point, the man raised his sword in the air, and Harry felt the entire world take a breath of anticipation.
AN: This was extremely hard to write and I’m not really sure about the result. For some reason, I had this whole thing planned out in my head but putting it into writing felt like a struggle. I rewrote it twice and I still don’t think it came out right. The pacing felt a bit off, I suppose, and I don’t think I said why Dumbledore did the ritual this way. The idea was to delay them as much as possible, after which the ritual would be at a point of no return. He had essentially used the vampires, his traps, as bait, a delay tactic more than anything. It will be addressed properly in the next chapter. Still, I’m very excited about the next chapter, specifically with the duel against Dumbledore. As usual, I don’t mind rewriting this chapter depending on your feedback, so, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Comments
Abe 7
Was expecting more condescending and self deluding preaching/justification from Dumbledore but overall pretty good prelude to the duel.
athass_prkr
I fixed it up a bit. Thanks for letting me know.
Jafarr710
You had one run on sentence when talking about breaking the wards on the vampires. It was kind of confusing and took me a while to read.
