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ACT4CH7 - Endgame Part 2
🕑 Added 2024-01-30 18:32:42 +0000 UTCHarry Potter knew that Hermione Granger was trying to kill him. She wasn’t even pretending to do otherwise anymore. After Harry had ‘killed’ five of the nine professor facsimiles she had ‘imagined’ into existence, the girl hadn’t regenerated them at all. No doubt keeping track of all nine at once had been taxing the girl’s brain, even with the Diadem amplifying her skill. Instead, she was content to let the remaining four attack him, and they had become faster at casting, quicker at deflecting, and far more imaginative at combating him, while the room generated more illusory monsters to attack him from all sides.
“You cannot win, Harry,” said Hermione. “Here in this Room, my power is infinite, the will of the future made manifest. Each thought brings forth more of my Champions to die in my name. Each impulse takes form with the power of Fate itself. And… And...”
The surprising part was that it was difficult to pick anything beyond the sound of the spellfire and explosions, but he could still hear her without an issue. Like she was more than human…
“And then I will be God..”
Harry froze. That cold, raspy tone did not belong to Hermione. It was the kind of power that made Harry’s hair rise yet again. This was a twisted, evil power, one that he had felt many times in his short life, a power that had almost always been responsible for everything wrong in his life.
A power that he associated with the intense, malevolent shade of crimson burning in Hermione’s eyes.
“Voldemort,” Harry clenched his teeth.
“Harry Potter,” whispered the cold dark voice of Voldemort. “The Boy-Who-Lived. Defence Professor. Vessel of Death itself, and vanquisher of my other self. I want to tear you limb from limb. I want your death to be a lesson for all that stands before the might of Lord Voldemort. I also want to see what you become at the peak of your potential. What an interesting conundrum you are.”
“Hermione—”
Voldemort smiled through Hermione’s lips. “Your friend is quite the specimen, Harry Potter. So righteous, so committed… She reminds me of old Mulciber. How unfortunate, that she’s just another mudblood.”
“Let her go,” said Harry, fisting his hands as he slowly pushed himself up.
“No can do, Harry Potter. She’s currently far, far away. Why, she’s even calling for you to help her.” As he spoke those words, Hermione’s expression shifted again, and just for a moment, Harry caught a glimpse of the old Hermione in those eyes. A single tear trickled down her cheek, before the brown eyes morphed into the sinister crimson again.
“I will make it easy for you, Harry Potter. Give up, accept your fate. And I will end you swiftly. You won’t even feel it.”
“Or,” said Harry, clenching the blade tightly. “I’ll destroy that diadem and with that, you as well.”
“A challenge?” Voldemort let out a high-pitched laughter, an eerie mix of his own and Hermione’s. And around him, dozens of Death Eaters materialised, complete with their robes and face-masks. “How entertaining! Then let us match the powers of Lord Voldemort, the greatest Dark Lord in history, and owner of the Prison of Possibilities… and the famous Harry Potter, Death’s Vessel.”
“The one from the diary said the same thing,” said Harry evenly. “Didn’t stop him from getting skewered by a basilisk fang.”
Their eyes met, and an agreement was made.
Only one of them would be leaving the fight alive.
The illusion army attacked Harry from all sides. Meanwhile, the static in his eyes grew more intense.
He had the power. He could feel it rushing through his body in great torrents, empowering his every spell. This power… he didn’t know what was creating it, but it surged within him with as much ease as Death itself, a multichromatic radiance compared to Death’s monochromatic grey. Magic poured through his wand, promising him the ability to cast a thousand more spells without running low on power, but that wasn’t what mattered. Every single spell he cast, it made his blood burn hotter. Every single time he slid Gryffindor’s sword, wreathed with cold Death against the enemy, ice and emptiness filled his heart. It numbed his pain, but the muscles were strained beyond comparison, and he could feel something behind it, breaking him down from within. His vision was so coated with static that he could barely see to aim, only acting out in instinct. And that was good, because his limbs were feeling so heavy that he wasn’t even sure he could run, much less keep fighting like this. He was rotting from within, his muscles breaking down and his brain shutting itself off one tissue at a time.
He needed to choose. Either magic or Death. Using both of them would only bring forth his end.
Do it. A voice whispered within him. Wear it. Reveal the demon within. Let Death take them all in her arms like a lover. Feel her, feel what her touch is like. Cold, slow, sweet.
It would be so easy. To just give in. Become the Demon. What magic could touch him then? These facsimiles would be destroyed in a heartbeat. The girl — she was prey — she would die, and the tiara — he would crush it with his own hands, feel its twisted magic screaming as he devoured it whole.
A death-eater attacked him with a Levicorpus — Snape, he realised, utterly aware of the irony. He took it just so that he could deliver a sledgehammer banisher to his gut. Magic cushioned his fall, and he pushed himself back to his feet, only to see the floor turn to quicksand and pull him deeper. Another conjured a massive sheet of glass, and with a twist of hand, shattered it and sent the jagged shards converging at him.
Harry lifted his wand to cast the strongest shield he could, and felt the quicksand pull him deeper with every passing second. Meanwhile Snape kept shooting dark curses at him from every available direction. The facsimile clearly did not know about his immunity to esoteric curses, and there was no way he was going to correct its misconception.
But despite everything, he knew that this battle of attrition would only end with his demise. He had to end it quickly, and no spell he cast or no magic he had access to could end this battle. Only and only Death could end it all, and he knew exactly how.
Never before did the invisibility cloak in his pouch feel this heavy.
The wand went spinning back into his holster, as he reached for the Cloak. His vision flickered, just in time as a blasting curse hit him in the face, breaking several of his teeth and spitting blood everywhere.
“And this is how you are going to die, Harry. Alone. Against impossible odds,” said Voldemort. Worse, he was making it look like Hermione was saying it. “I know it’s hard to accept it, but sometimes things must be done for the greater good. Your power is an anathema, and I cannot let you destroy the Future.”
“Die?” grunted Harry through his blood stained lips. “Trust me, Voldemort, me dying is the least of your concerns.”
A haze was filling up his mind, and images of an alternate reality began to swim in front of his eyes. Maybe he was experiencing a Vision, or maybe the overuse of magic and Death for so long was fucking with his senses. The Room was swirling before his eyes, replaced by a rotten and magic-less Great Hall, with half-decayed busts and portraits and tapestries on the walls. Torches erupting with an eerie blue flame, while blood, mangled bodies and headless corpses desecrated the floor.
Dead bodies and the stench of stale body odour mixed with the languid, arrhythmic pulsing of corpses filled with maggots, the dried blood all across the floor, the tattered robes, a girl with golden hair and blue eyes….
No! He thought with growing horror. He wouldn’t let that happen! He wouldn’t —
“Embrace Death, become one with it….” came Daphne’s voice whispering into his ears. “What magic can touch you then?”
And that was merely the beginning.
“You cannot forever wait at the crossroads…..”
“Your half-hearted efforts will lead to this.”
“‘E refuses to accept the future he will bring.”
Gryffindor’s blade reflected in his eyes. The black miasma pouring out of it shone with an intense black light.
Images of Hermione’s fallen head rolling on the floor made a whole new sense. A crescendo of voices were already calling out in unison, an ethereal choir, resounding within his skull, telling him to FORGET. Forget his ideals, forget his magic, forget everything and become one with the Emptiness —
His fingers touched the fabric of his Cloak.
And Harry Potter vanished.
The death-eaters fired spells at where he had been sinking into the quicksand, exploding the entire place until it was one large crater. But it was useless.
For Harry Potter was gone. And in his place —
“What…?” Voldemort hissed, sensing the oddity as a vacuum arose where Harry had been, and began pulling in power. Whatever it was, it was not exploding outward, but was flowing in. Everything around it felt transitory… almost like an incomplete figment of imagination.
THRUM!!!
The sound did not come from within, but instead it emanated from everywhere else, as if converging into that coalescing mass of… something unseen to the naked eye. To Hermione’s eyes, the colourful shades of magic all around were slowly dissipating, drawing into the space that Harry had been until then — an invisible black hole that defied all physics, had no form, and yet continued to compress more and more energy into itself.
THRUM!!! THRUM!!! THRUMMMM!!!!
And when a long, vengeful howl gutted the world and shattered the fragile foundations of Reality, as an impossible, all-consuming destructive aura of a force as unyielding as a mountain, descended upon the Room, Tom Riddle realised that he might just have made a mistake.
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I am too late.
That was the only coherent thought that passed through Albus Dumbledore’s mind as he stood, high up in the air, he stood, disillusioned and afloat, gawking at the eldritch horror manifesting before his very eyes. Many months ago, he had seen a similar thing in a pensive memory sent to him by Tom Riddle, to distract and confuse him. Even to this day, that memory lay vivid in his mind.
And now, history was repeating itself, and like before, he was too late to stop it.
Instead he watched as thick, skeletal limbs, exuding flames as dark as the blackest night, grabbed at the edge of Existence and pulled.
The head came first. It was a misshapen construct, obscured by strange, lumpy outgrowths of scales and fur. Beneath its ghastly, grey eyes was a mouth too wide to be real, filled to the brim with serrated teeth too sharp and yellow to be from this earth. The Wrongness let out a weird laugh — monstrous, deep, resounding, with blood-stained mirth. It was the kind of laugh that started from its maw and ended up freezing the spines of those that heard it. It wasn’t a matter of strength or speed or reserves — it was the primal sensation of fear coursing through the veins of prey when cornered by a ferocious predator.
The body came next, a skeleton roughly humanoid in size and shape. Shadows substituted for muscle and fur, cloaking the thing in a supernatural darkness. Albus might as well be peering at something less than nothing.
This was Death.
There was no escaping it.
Even Tom Riddle was no longer smiling.
Before anyone could do anything, the demon charged at Hermione Granger like a mad dog, and the death-eater facsimiles arose between them, firing spells at it, ready to intercept the demon’s rush.
It was slightly less effective than scolding it.
The spells, fired at full speed, dissipated the moment it touched its shadowed flesh. A dozen javelins were hurled at it to alter the demon’s course mid-leap. One of the javelins struck it in the eye, a perfect strike, and likewise, bounced off harmlessly.
Immunity against the most potent curses, and a body so strong that lesser attacks simply don’t cause damage… thought Albus, marvelling at the entity before him. Durability on that level marked the demon — whatever it was — on the level of dragons and basilisks, creatures so powerful that even he would consider twice before attempting to subdue them. Further, everything he knew and understood about the creature told him that this power should not have taken over Harry, and yet, it had.
He had known that Harry’s power — Death, was powerful, having tasted that power firsthand back when young Harry had escaped out of the Anima. But this…
Luckily, or unluckily, Albus wasn’t sure which — but Hermione, or rather, Voldemort, instantly apparated, avoiding the demon’s claws. It didn’t slow down its charge at all, and instead, it twisted its body and slammed into a facsimile that had been unfortunate to be in its way.
SNAP!
It ate the upper part of the facsimile’s body off in a single bite. The rest of it dissipated before the body hit the floor. The second one got hacked through with the same air of a nundu clawing at a kneazle. One snap to the right, a third’s chest erupted in fumes, and his wand went spiralling off his hands as the rest of his body vanished in fumes.
“No matter,” he heard Voldemort whisper. “If Death wants to come for me, it has to consume the infinite creations of the Prison of Possibilities first. Spells cannot affect you, but claws can still tear your heart out.”
And hundreds of werewolves and vampires materialised around the mad beast, and began attacking it all at once.
It didn’t matter.
A single swipe from those shadowed claws lifted a werewolf off the ground and into the air. The maw snapped another’s head off. Another blow turned the insides of three more into pulp, shattered their bones with a force so brutal that its crushed ragdoll remains rolled away, dissipating as they did.
A group of vampires came flying at the demon from all sides. They bit into the shadowed flesh, and instantly froze, their bodies sinking and crushing inwards, as if their inwards were being sucked into an invisible void.
A death-eater stepped into the way. Five more joined him. They cast killing curses. The streaks of green left those wands and vanished into the dense, shadowed fur like they meant nothing. They tried to cast again, but the demon was faster. The claws tore their bodies like knives through hot butter.
“INCENDIO DIABOLICA!” Yelled Voldemort, but instead of a primordial totem of flame, all that escaped his wand was a shaft of white flame that struck the demon head-on. Albus almost felt pity. He had warned Tom that Miss Granger’s extremely rational and logical bent of mind made her extremely unsuited towards spells of a more esoteric nature, but Tom had ignored his advice.
Dark Lord or no, some habits never changed.
A horde of dementors surround the demon from all sides. Their cold, alien stuttering croak sent shudders down Albus’s spine. The demon grabbed them by their cloaks, and actually pulled them into its body. The dementors screeched and screeched before they vanished into Death’s shadow.
The scenes repeated again, and again, and again.
Albus grimaced. Things had indeed gone out of control. And somewhere deep within him, a desperation grew. A fear that he had always known, always feared, was now coming to pass.
His Hogwarts. His world — it was in danger. If there was one duty of the Headmaster, it was to protect the school and every single person in it. As despicable as it sounded, that was a duty that superseded anything else he could choose to perform. The Headmaster might do whatever he pleased, but he may not undermine the Hogwarts Charter, and that meant warding it against every single danger that threatened the school and its occupants. As tribal as it sounded, it allowed him leeway to kill hundreds and thousands of people if it meant fulfilling his duty, but another person harming even a single of the school’s occupants on his watch was intolerable.
Not even when said occupant was possessed by the horcrux of one of the deadliest dark wizards on the planet. Greater Good be damned.
And that duty now demanded that he stop Harry Potter, once the Defender of Hogwarts, from unleashing Death and destruction upon the school. But if he did that, it would allow the horcrux to escape the Room of Requirement, thanks to that obnoxiously stubborn young woman. Tom Riddle would possibly kill innocents on his way out, and escape the boundaries of the school with information that was vital in winning the war.
In his soul, he felt a twinge of fear at the realisation.
Two choices, and both were wrong. A few months ago, he would have chosen to do the lesser evil, but now…
Think Albus, he told himself. You are not allowed to give up. You are only allowed to solve this problem. You are in the Prison of Possibilities, and….
His thoughts geared to a halt.
He was in the Prison of Possibilities. A pocket reality that was capable of manifesting everything he could imagine. And that meant…
A small smile gracing his lips. Wystan Potter claimed the Room could show him every single possibility out there. Perhaps it was time he saw some of them himself.
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Tom Riddle couldn’t believe his eyes.
The Prison of Possibilities was the greatest magical creation in all existence, matched only by the darkness sealed beneath the Sunken Vault. He had been absolutely enraged when Albus Dumbledore had hindered his plans of unleashing HELL within Hogwarts, and had as a measure of vengeance, left his own horcrux, inhabiting Rowena’s fabled Diadem, inside her Prison of Possibilities. With the combination of the two, he was undefeatable.
A God that could create anything and everything.
So why were his creations failing against this twisted abomination?
A demon that consumes magic? No, deletes it from existence itself. What an astonishing source of strength it was, he thought in wonder and a slight tinge of jealousy. Harry Potter was strong, talented even, but this power that lay within him was one that defied all logic. He, Lord Voldemort, that had traversed the realms of unknown and the Abstract, he who had developed a way to harness that which cannot be harnessed, a way to tame the untamable, he who had gone so far to free himself from Death’s clutches and made himself immortal…
Even he was struggling against this demon.
Such talent, and power wasted on the Light side, thought Voldemort wistfully. Such prodigious talent could’ve served me. It’s unfortunate I have to be the one to end him.
“Enough of this…” He had finally run out of patience. Looking back, he should’ve just used his mastery over everything dark against this child and killed him when he had the chance. He should’ve chopped off his head, dismembered his corpse, set his pieces on fire and scattered the ashes to the winds.
But he had not done so. Instead, he had been too concerned about Albus Dumbledore. He had been too sure of the fact that no one could ever hope to match his power, not that muggle-loving fool of a headmaster, and certainly not this child playing at the adult table.
It was a mistake he was sorely regretting now.
Creating physical beings would not stand before this demon’s might. If he wanted to overwhelm this beast, he’d need to exercise the greater and more primal commands that the Room had available. The girl had a sharp mind, but it was not conducive to exercising the more Abstract powers of Dunamantic manipulation, but he could still use it to draw enough raw power to annihilate every single inch of this demon’s physical form. Eldritch or otherwise, he doubted that even Death could manifest if its vessel was destroyed.
Closing his eyes, he began to chant in archaic tones, feeling the unbridled power that flowed through the ley-lines beneath surge through the wardstone and….
…slipped away from his clutches.
What was happening? Snapping his eyes open, Voldemort looked around. It wasn’t the work of this demon. That left…
“DUMBLEDORE…” He snarled in frustration. The old fool was somewhere, hindering his actions. He was the only one capable of wrenching control away from a ley-line evocation mid-spell. Without drawing more power from the ley-line, and with the demon butchering through his illusions, it would come for him sooner or later.
He doubted that it would distinguish between friend and foe while it was in this form.
But that didn’t mean he was out of options.
“Are you really going to let this happen, Dumbledore?” He asked, his voice magically amplified. “That demon will kill this innocent little mudblood. You are not snatching control from me, you are letting this beast butcher every single man, woman and child. Do you wish the death of all Hogwarts on your hands?”
Silence was his answer.
Meanwhile, facsimiles arose to meet the demon in battle, and got shattered, smashed, torn, hacked apart, eaten and clawed through those massive, hateful claws. More and more illusions rose out of the Room’s innate energy, and they kept repeating their actions without complaint. Werewolves, vampires, dementors, dragons, dark wizards, every single dark creature that Voldemort could imagine, every single form of defence he could conjure without being inhibited by the girl’s limited mind, he hurled at the beast.
It didn’t matter. Throughout it all, the demon laughed. It was no sound like anything in nature, a mechanical, formless, cold laugh that heralded the end of everything living and magical. It laughed as it clawed werewolves. It laughed as it sucked dementors into itself. It laughed as the vampires scrunched and imploded into themselves, trying to kill it, trying to stop it, and failing utterly in every single way.
Voldemort clenched his teeth. Dumbledore, that crackpot fool, was playing the oldest game in the world. Patience. Where he who spoke first, lost. The wily Headmaster knew that Voldemort would not, could not let the girl die, because with her death, the illusions would fall apart, and the demon would destroy the diadem, killing Voldemort. And with him fighting for control over the Room, all Voldemort could do was —
He paused, feeling a strange, unknown presence in the Room.
A sensation, a power that felt so very similar. And yet, so strange. Oh, so strange. He closed his eyes, and the entire Room fit inside his mind, and he quickly spotted this strange aberration —
Running —
Towards him — away from him — right, no left, no right, she wanted to come to him — she was escaping him — she was going towards Dumbledore — no, towards the demon — towards the Great Hall — towards —
His eyes snapped open. This odd power, he had sensed it. Used it. It was the same as the Diadem. But something like that could only mean —
He froze.
A dunamantist? At Hogwarts? What were the chances?
A sneer formed on his face. Fate is on my side.
The realisation did nothing to slow the demon’s aggressiveness. One strike became three. A single leap created a small crater on the ground. The demon howled and leaped in his direction, and Voldemort apparated. He apparated several hundred feet away and —
BOOM!
He narrowly avoided getting maimed by an inch, apparating away right on time. Focussing on the magical signature of this dunamantist, Voldemort apparated again, and narrowly missed being clawed through the stomach yet again.
How was this mad abomination keeping up?He apparated —
—Only to appear a short distance away, and then keep apparating on and off for the next ten locations, evading ten buckshot hits that was the demon somehow following his apparition and striking with an alien precision. Even worse, he was failing to pinpoint the dunamantist’s location accurately. Like she was all over the place.
Or apparating around. Just like him.
“Excuse me, are you the dabberblimp?”
Voldemort froze.
Slowly, he looked to his side, and found a strange little girl with the dirty-blonde hair and very pale eyebrows peering at him with her protuberant eyes. Even through the mudblood’s limited mind, he could sense something utterly magnetic about her. Like she had her own weight and strained space, making it almost impossible to not notice her.
More frightening was the fact that he hadn’t even sensed her presence. Just… What was she?
“You don’t feel like Hermione Granger,” said the oblivious girl. “Are you the dabberblimp that is playing with her? If you are, you’ve got to stop. Hermione Granger doesn’t know the rules.”
The Dark Lord stared at her, befuddled. Her obliviousness notwithstanding, how had he not sensed her in the first place?
Then he realised that for once, the demon was not attacking. No, he was not even anywhere around him. Had he finally left it behind?
“You’re really rude, you know,” said the girl matter-of-factly. “You keep appearing wherever I go. How am I supposed to hide for Harry Potter to come find me? That’s not how you play hide-and-seek.”
The accused blinked several times in confusion, before inhaling to make a statement —
“You know what I mean,” the girl’s eyes narrowed dangerously, as if daring him to contradict her statement.
“Who… who are you?” VoldemortH asked, tentatively. Witches and wizards far older and greater had died for less. And yet, something about this girl just made him feel perplexed. Had he been more in control of himself, he’d have realised that all his thoughts about her just slipped from his mind, leaving him befuddled.
“Luna,” she said. “Luna Lovegood. Though, some people mistake that for Looney. Harry Potter is not one of them.”
“Miss Lovegood,” came Albus Dumbledore’s voice, as the old man popped in before them. The rest of his words died amidst a loud howl as the demon leaped through the air from Voldemort’s right —
—Only for Albus Dumbledore to trap him within an ever-morphing stone structure.
Voldemort laughed, and with a flick of his wrist, bound the dotty girl with a band of raw magic, silencing her with nary a thought.
“Ah, Dumbledore,” drawled Voldemort. “I would never have anticipated such cunningness from you. Hiding a dunamantist within the safety of Hogwarts. Was this your ace in the hole against the other me out there?”
“Tom…” said Albus Dumbledore, softly raising one hand, while his other hand held steady in the other direction, the wand in his hand vibrating as he kept resisting the demon. “Tom… do not do this. You don’t know what you are about to do.”
“I know exactly what I am about to do,” Voldemort snarled. “I have beaten you. And now, with this dunamantist under my control, I will become God of this Vault.”
Said dunamantist was still trying to wiggle out of her bindings.
Had Voldemort paid more attention, he’d have recognized that Albus Dumbledore was not reacting like he should’ve been. Cold rage, seething anger, righteous outrage — all of that could have been within his character. But there was none of that in his voice.
Just… regret. And resolution.
“Remember this after your world lies in ashes, Albus Dumbledore,” Voldemort said. “For you cannot risk my demise tonight, I shall exercise this girl’s talent to take over this Room, and cast the demon out. It will kill every single person within these halls, and you won’t be able to do a thing. After this, you will never see me again.”
“Yes,” said Dumbledore, though to which statement was unclear.
Hermione Granger let out a wail as tendrils of dark crimson arose out of her body. blinked twice, her face falling into what was precisely the same confused expression on Luna. A trickle of blood ran down her eyes, and then she fell down like a stringless puppet. The tendrils coalesced with an ugly howl into an outline of a serpent, which coiled and then lashed out, as if to strike, at the dunamantist that was still incarcerated and bound and levitating a feet above the ground. It plunged into her chest, her expression startled as ever. She didn’t even have time to flinch, before her eyes morphed into thin, reptile-like slits.
And Lord Voldemort spoke. “I win.”
The Diadem of Ravenclaw rose up in the air, and it floated to Luna’s head and —
Then he felt it.
A sudden, horrible pressure. A whole body agony, like a man trying to hold off the weight of a tide. A boulder trying to hold back an exploding volcano. But he was no ordinary man. He was the greatest dark wizard ever. He took the pressure, his ability with Occlumency coming to his aid but to no benefit.
It was just too much.
Was it light? Was it darkness? Magic, Death, Life, Shadows, Lightning… What was it? His mind ran through a million possibilities into his immediate future, an unlimited array of alternate futures with each of them with an almost imperceptible difference between each. And yet they were all different outcomes, and every single outcome expanded into another infinite possibilities, pacing the next step and repeating that over and over and over. He knew it all — all the answers to godhood — he could taste the power — wild, crimson and golden coming from every direction, as did choking, searing heat of Summer and Fire and winter and frost — soaring at him to meet their forger, no, their ruin, vessel, nemesis —
No matter what he tried, he couldn’t make anything out of these abstract senses as they thrashed his entire existence around. One force pulled at his emotions, making him weep and cry in glee and despair, while another made him want to rage and annihilate everything in his path. He was like an ant in between two brawling elephants, with the jungle itself suffering the wrath of the behemoths. It was the kind of power that cowed mortals and made them believe in the demonic and the divine. Powers too great for their feeble minds to even begin to comprehend, lest they be driven insane just by being in their very presence. It was almost poetic, when granted with the ability to see everything, all he could do was watch and do nothing as he truly experienced what it was to be in Luna Lovegood’s mind.
His mouth fell open, his eyes gazing starkly at nothing. He hadn’t even known when his knees had given away—when he had fallen down to the ground, curling into himself like a newborn and weeping tears of joy and sadness, of hatred and remorse. Every word he tried to express came out as gibberish. Every thought he conjured shattered like a raindrop hitting the earth from above.
He screamed.
And in the middle of it all was the Room itself. Not the Room as he knew it, but a wellspring of possibilities, now swamped with corruption and death, slowly sinking into the inky blackness of its own creations. Dark emotions—greed, lust, hatred and rage—hung over it like a thick shroud, covering it, engulfing it, distorting it. Every single inch of space was filled with extreme malevolence and a burning tar-like substance that threatened to suck in light and life and leave cataclysms in its wake. Ghosts, wraiths and restless spirits soared everywhere, and skulls of all shapes formed entire mountains as far as the eye could see.
His eyes burned like coals as his taut muscles strained even further, silent screams escaping his throat. His mind recoiled at the horrors he was witnessing, and they never stopped.
This was Death. Solid, tangible, real death draped atop the world around him. Death by fire, death by penalty, death by betrayal, death by murder, death by burning and death and death and death and—
SNAP!
And then Lord Voldemort knew no more.
Comments
Siva Chandan Chakka
Love it
Durdens Wrath
It's an old trope, but I've always loved the "Luna's mind is poison to anyone who invades it"
