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(Enchanting Melodies) Chapter 365: The Fiery Pit
🕑 Added 2024-10-29 13:30:29 +0000 UTCChapter 365: The Fiery Pit
17 April 1995, Mount Olympus, Greece
Still, Harry stood there, in front of both Daphne and Johnson and spoke in a very clear and even voice, “We only wish to leave this place. There is no need for us to fight.” The creature’s amusement obviously spiked and it conjured a ball of fire and threw it at them. With a wave of his wand, Harry negated it entirely, “So, be it.”
The monster leapt forward with remarkable speed, its fiery whip making them all duck. Harry countered by making everyone duck and threw a metallic sphere that dropped the temperature of everything it touched. The ball seemingly slowed it down for a fraction of a second, countering its heat, only to be overwhelmed immediately by the sheer heat, and the creature sent a beam of fire at them, which Harry shielded against.
Using his Arcane Hearing, he felt the creature run at them, probably hoping to physically overwhelm the shield. Instead, Harry cast an illusion, making them look frozen, while they sneakily walked by the sides. The creature leapt at the shield charm, breaking it, only to phase through their forms and be impaled by the invisible metallic spikes that Harry had conjured seconds prior.
Harry hoped that would have been it, only for the creature’s tails to immediately turn towards them and try to impale them with some kind of stingers that appeared made of ash. Harry could swear those things weren’t there before, but he didn’t have time to process that, as he simply shielded against them, not confident that Johnson and Daphne would be able to dodge them appropriately.
While Johnson stood there, frozen, Daphne, thankfully, reacted to the danger by conjuring hundreds of vines that bound the impaled creatures even further, probably hoping to finish it off somehow. As the tails tried to kill them once more, somehow stretching their size as they tried to reach them, Harry ducked behind one of them and conjured a steel blade that cut off the offending limb.
The creature growled in pain and released a massive shockwave of fire and ash, which Harry was barely able to shield against yet was still blind to it. When the dust and ash settled down, Harry saw the monster just turn towards them slowly, its previously injured tail looking intact, and the holes in its chest slowly closing off.
There was a rumbling sound, a bit like it was amused. The creature's rumbling grew louder, echoing off the labyrinth's walls like distant thunder. Its molten eyes fixed on Harry, a sinister grin forming as flames licked around its jagged teeth.
Harry's mind raced. Hiding his capabilities was a bit of a crutch, one that he decided to disregard entirely. This was getting too serious to mess around, especially with Daphne and Johnson there, with a high risk of getting hurt. He didn’t particularly like Johnson, nor did he know her, really, bar her role in Gryffindor’s Quidditch team, but she didn’t deserve to die for his recklessness, her soul forever bound to this cursed place.
A plan started to grow in his mind, however, before he had the time to relay it to his teammates, the creature slammed its fiery whip into the ground, sending a fissure of flame racing toward them. "Move!" Harry shouted, grabbing both of them as they narrowly dodged the searing heat.
“I have a plan! Daphne, try to keep it in place. Johnson, cover me!”
They barely had any time to respond when he shielded them from another barrage of fire, which splashed harmlessly through his shield. The creature seemed to want to overwhelm their shields once more, only for Daphne to release a beam of ice at the leaping demon.
That seemed to take it off-guard, at least not expecting the impact, as it froze in its tracks. Daphne then pressed her arms into the ground, making an entire forest appear from the ground, its strong roots, binding the creature next time. Johnson was doing her best to try to hit the monster’s eyes, hoping to blind it.
Out of sheer physical might, the creature pushed through the roots and vines binding it, only for five more to appear the moment one of them was burned off. When Johnson hit the creature’s eye with a dark cutting charm, the beast roared in fury, but this was followed by a few of Daphne’s vines being overtaken by shadows and impaling it.
The obviously cursed vines kept it bound and furrowed into the ground. The creature was about to reply, only for Daphne to cut her palm and touch her plants with her bloody hands. The protections strengthened and she yelled, “I can’t do this for long.”
Harry didn’t even have time to yell anything back, as the beast released another shockwave of fire and ash, rendering their corridor into nothing more than a small hellscape. Both Daphne and Johnson were thrown back by the impact, and the beast ran to finish them off, only for Harry to finally release his spell.
A wave of cold mist appeared from his wand, freezing everything in sight. The demonic creature walked into it, expecting to bypass it easily as it had the previous attacks, only to start freezing with every step it took.
It was an improvement on his ‘Ice Age’ spell, the one he had used on Sirius Black. It sucked away any form of heat, the very movements of the molecules, leaving only the coldness and death. Instead of Harry being forced to stay in a single place, Harry bound the spell into a physical manifestation – the mist – which he was able to do thanks to his magic had gotten stronger since then.
Harry watched as the fearsome creature froze and conjured a black raven made of shadows that flew towards the beast, shattering it into thousands of small fragments.
“Is it gone?” Johnson asked.
Harry shook his head, “I don’t think so. This place has different rules. Remember what happened to the Minotaur when it died, how it turned into golden dust? This didn’t happen here.”
As if it were listening to him, the cloud of ash started to rise before them, slowly forming back into the monster, letting out bursts of fire as it reassembled itself. The creature's eyes burned hotter than before, its gaze locking onto Harry with renewed fury.
Harry yelled at them, “Run!”
They did just that, with the monster becoming more whole with every step it took. It was slow but there was a menacing undertone to him. Then in the middle of their run, Harry stopped and turned back towards the incoming monster. Daphne noticed it and exclaimed, “What are you doing?”
“Finishing the plan!”
Her eyes widened and she just nodded. Johnson just remained stood there, frozen in fright, “Plan? What plan? The fucking plan failed, you idiots! We need to run!”
Harry gave her a nonchalant response, “You really think that destroying a beast capable of regeneration was the plan? No, this was always where I was heading.”
The monster’s pace increased with every step he took. As it got closer and closer, it readied its fiery whip, and was about to use it, only for Harry to wave his wand and the Labyrinth to shift once more. Harry could hear the beast’s outrage at being denied its prey. He could feel everything heat up at the monster’s sheer anger and hate.
The three of them released a sigh of relief and Harry gave Johnson a smug grin, “Now, that was the plan! What do you think?”
“You could have said something,” she complained without any heat in her voice.
“It was smarter than it let on. There’s something odd with it, something that I haven’t seen in any magical creature before.”
“The regeneration,” Daphne asked.
“No, I’ve seen something like it once, but no. There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.”
The older witch shook her head, “Well, I’m not interested in a Magical Creature’s lesson right now. We need to get out of here. You can control the maze, right?”
Harry shook his head, “Control is a very strong word. I learned how to activate its shifting, but any sort of precise control is beyond me. But you’re right, we do need to get out of here.”
Suddenly, a whip of fire appeared out of nowhere. It was so quick that Harry didn’t even hear it with his Arcane Hearing. Surprised, Harry looked at its source and saw a small hole in the Labyrinth’s wall. Daphne yelled, “Harry!”
He turned towards her and saw the severe gash on Johnson’s chest. She had jumped in front of them, out of reflex more than anything and had paid the price for it. Half of her chest was burnt off and the other was flowing with blood. Harry turned towards Daphne and said, “Stabilize her. I’ll hold the beast off.”
The Labyrinth was trying to shift once more, to widen the gap before it, but Harry reactivated it, doing his best to reverse it. It was akin to a tug of war, and Harry was obviously losing. With how close they were to one another; he could hear the beast’s smugness in its song with his Arcane Hearing. It had obviously learned to control the maze, and it was much more refined than Harry’s own. To be fair, Harry was barely there for a couple of hours, while the beast, given its regeneration, had to have lived in this place for at least centuries, and had much more time to refine its control.
Johnson’s condition was his fault. He tried to be clever and never expected the beast to be able to have any sort of control over the Labyrinth. He thought he was smart by using the Labyrinth against it, but it had backfired massively.
As Harry was doing his best to stop the beast from coming, Daphne yelled out, “It’s not working. The wound is cursed. I can’t heal her without the proper equipment.”
Harry wasn’t under any illusion that he could surpass Daphne in healing and felt his heart drop at that. The older witch, however, seemed to find it amusing, “Harry Potter! I should have known. Carmichael was never this competent. I have to say, you had me with the whole enchanted metal balls schtick.”
“Well, you got me. I’ve always thought there was more to you than Quidditch Johnson.”
The girl chuckled at that and Harry turned towards Daphne who shook her head. The girl was dying, and there was nothing either of them could do about it. No, Harry could make sure that she wouldn’t die in this place, that her soul wouldn’t be trapped in this cursed maze.
He suddenly shifted his attention from trying to stop the monster from entering to trying to find any way out. Trying to do both was giving him a headache, especially given how much the maze kept shifting back and forth.
Suddenly, he found it, a way out, and an activation sequence that could work. He didn’t even have time to verify this, and changed his activation of the Labyrinth, before banishing Johnson, constricting space to make her hit the exit immediately. A quick spell, slowed down time for her body, giving her more time in case she was rescued but Harry wasn’t hopeful for it. She was swallowed by a white light, which was quickly closed off as the beast changed the Labyrinth once more.
If it had been smug before, now it was angry. It had obviously not wanted any of them to escape the Labyrinth, and Harry walked fearlessly towards its towering form and spoke up, “I know what you are. It took me a while to realize it, but I can see it now. You were human once, weren’t you? So were most of the monsters in this place. Because this place was never about being a maze, it was a prison. You all got stuck here, in this Labyrinth, and fell to the compulsion. You got more violent, angrier, more monstrous, slowly but surely, until you inevitably died. At that time, you had to have been too feral to even care about escaping, or leaving the maze and just died due to some reckless or stupid decision. But your soul didn’t move on, it was reborn here, in this place, with a monstrous body. Every time you died, you came back, stronger, better.”
The beast tried to use its whip to hit Harry, only for it to freeze, the space between it and Harry being enlarged massively, making it appeared frozen in time.
Instead, Harry continued, “You’re probably one of oldest ones here, and until you were granted enough regeneration to resist the compulsion, to become essentially immortal. You stopped being feral and you learned instead. You figured out how to control the Labyrinth and that meant that you had more than enough time to escape, but you didn’t want to escape, did you? You liked being here, to sadistically punish those who come before the gods.”
Harry shielded against a jet of fire coming at way and ducked as the monster tried to punch him. He pointed his wand at the monster, bypassing any of his resistance, and banishing it far away in the corridor.
The beast got up as Harry slowly walked towards it, “But you see, this is where you made a mistake. I was perfectly willing to let you continue whatever you were doing. Live and let live and all this crap. But you just had to kill someone I liked. Well, I mostly tolerated her. She was a good person, and she didn’t really annoy me. Believe me, that’s rare, at least for me. And well, the most important thing is that the gloves are off.”
The beast ran at Harry before being lifted in the air, gravity itself pressuring it outwards, before suddenly imploding and being turned to ash once more. Only, this time, Harry raised his hand, and the ashes gathered into a sphere instead. He could feel the beast resisting his manipulation, but Harry overwhelmed it all the same, “Remember this name, Harry Potter. This is the name of the person who defeated you, and imprisoned you in your own body, unable to move, to do anything really. When you slowly lose your reasoning, I want this to be the last detail remaining in your soul before you succumb to your madness. Farewell, Beast, for no one will ever see you again.”
Harry alchemically controlled the ball of ash and made the ball of ash the beast’s permanent form in exchange for cannibalizing the monster’s fire magic. With a wave of his wand, Harry made a hole in the ground and put the ball inside. He then filled it up once more, before turning back to his flabbergasted girlfriend, “Let’s go.”
Before she said anything, Harry controlled the Labyrinth once more, found another exit and stretched space between them. Harry walked forward into the glowing gate, Daphne following silently behind him.
AN: This chapter was pretty difficult to write, even if I had a blast doing it. The beast’s name will be revealed in a later chapter, and it will be recognizable, so that’s a small hint. Anyway, I rewrote this three times, trying to get it just right. I don’t know if I pulled it off, but I’m more than happy to change it up depending on your feedback. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
Comments
Everbond
Hmm.. I wonder if the 'sanity enchantment' that diggory has caused an outbreak of the monsters in the labyrinth
Trifle
Taunting your defeated but alive opponent with your name didn't end up very well for Odysseus. Let's hope Harry is a bit luckier
Afterdark230
Bad ass Harry, that is all, it’s time for kids gloves to come off
Monzter E
People died... what will the other world react?
