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ACT3CH7 - There In The Darkness Part 2
🕑 Added 2023-08-08 13:58:08 +0000 UTCThe world is grayscale. Except for the prey.
They are bathed in red. Fear, coldness, anticipation, resentment, horror — he recognizes a plethora of emotions. How? It doesn’t matter. All it matters is that these strange creatures with bony limbs and tattered shadowy cloaks that surround him. It reminds him of something… no, of someone, seeing someone on the other bank of shiny waters — a brilliant white light, antlers.
But who?
“ —EXPECTO PATRONUM—”
He recognizes those words. Every individual fragment’s contribution. But what do they mean? That voice, it feels familiar. Like it is a part of him, or was a part of him, long shattered, long gone, fallen apart like grains of sand slipping through his fingers. Something that defined him before he was this—
Wait. What is he?
He tilts his head. The shadow cloaks stir, and screech, and come for him. He grabs the first one by the neck. The screams it lets out are eerie, something no one should hear. It makes him feel….
Hungry.
Snap.
Gulp.
The headless shadowy cloak falls down upon the shining lake. One down, many to go. His hunger is not so easily quenched, and these creatures are making him very, very hungry. These cloaks, filled with a void that is the antithesis of the soul, a shrieking emptiness that lessens the world by being present. An existence that makes him feel hungrier and hungrier.
He will feed. He will kill. He will kill them all.
Pour a little coldness into them. Clench his ice, cold fingers around their necks and snap it. Give their hollowness some meaning. Allow it to revel in the true darkness of the Empty Night until there is no room for anything but stillness. The prelude to the Dirge. A comforting existence with no questions, no worries about good and evil, about right and wrong. No quibbles about motivations, about emotions, about life, death or magic.
Just cold, serene silence.
More shadowy cloaks come. They surround him from all directions. He looks up, and finds more of them circling around him from above. He walks upon the sparkling, moonlit waters of the lake, and finds skeletal hands trying to pull him down into the depths of the waters below.
Do they think their defiance makes any difference? Death is the only thing that is fair in this world, and thus, he is the most merciful. They might not understand it, but they will. And so will the universe.
His tail flicks, and the skeletal arms beneath him go still. Grunting, he moves around, staring at his prey. The cloaks exude fear. Funny, for all the emptiness they embody, it is not bereft of emotions.
Peculiar existences these are. Lesser beings crafted by lesser beings. A mockery of the true anathema that is Life.
But good meals, nonetheless.
He snorts again.
So much emptiness. So much hunger. So much… fear. These cloaks carry coldness, carry the stench of death. Yet they shiver, yet they hesitate, yet they leap and screech and snarl in rage and agony when the Great Beyond comes for them.
The cloaks come from all directions. Useless. A petty tide trying to swallow the moon. The scuttling insects on the floor, large and small, come for him — spears trying to reach the sky. They tear and bite. They claw at him with their pincers.
They die at the first touch of his presence.
A quick slash of his paw. Reality screams as the world twists around him. The world is screaming. It considers him an enemy. How nasty! He didn’t even want to be here.
It would not let him stay. It would not let him go.
It wants him to become a puppet in its mockery. Be trapped forever in its illusions.
Carelessly it plots. Tirelessly it agitates.
He snorts. Little does it know that it too is a puppet, moving upon strings it’s never envisioned.
The worst is still ahead.
….
….
….
The sound of an owl screeching brought him back.
Harry opened his eyes, and looked up, at the towering wooden door in front of him. Blinking several times, Harry realised that he was lying on the ground, shadowy fumes arising out of every part of his body — his hands, his back, his shoulders. If not for the absence of a hood, he was sure he could have passed off for a dementor. Calming himself, he pushed himself up, and felt the fumes slowly dissipate.
There was that screech again.
“Bloody buggering owls,” he muttered, and pushed himself up. He wasn’t in the forest anymore. In fact, he had been lying in front of the main door of Hogwarts. He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened after he had changed. He had slight memories of hearing dementors screeching, and spiders rushing at him, but everything felt so alien that he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The important bit was that he was out of the forest, and that was what mattered. Now only if he —
He paused that thought and looked in front of him.
Hogwarts.
The place he had always associated with magic. His ticket away from the Dursleys. The confirmation that he wasn’t a freak; that Magic existed; that he was a wizard. The place where people like him came to learn magic.
His first home.
He turned around and looked back in the direction of the gates. Surprisingly, there was no forbidden forest between where he stood and the outer entrance where Ignotus had left him. The thestral had warned him from walking forth, asking him to return, but he had disregarded that advice. And now…
Should I go back? Or should I…
That screech again.
An eerie, foreboding sensation gripped him. Something about this was weird. Why had the forest disappeared? Why was this realm trying to kill him earlier with the acromantula and the dementors? Why show him all those illusions? Why?
It was like every time he arrived at an answer, it only led to more questions.
Only one way ahead.
He touched the wooden door, and felt a jolt of static flood through him, a wave of power too little to do anything but present none the same. He tried to push a little further, and the static fizzled out.
“Incredible,” he muttered. “So Death took away all the magic from this place, but the enchantments somehow… remain?”
Coalescing a little raw power into his palm, he pushed it into the door, and felt it greedily drink it until nothing remained. He touched the door again, and this time, felt the static return, stronger, but this time, it didn’t repel him. Instead, it welcomed him, like a servant welcoming a master home.
Is that because I fueled it with my magic?
He turned the knob, but the door did not budge.
Weird.
Touching the wood, he channelled more magic through his fingers, and whispered. “Alohomora!”
There was a soft click, but the door did not budge. Something was blocking it. Closing his eyes, he touched the wood surface again and tried to get a feel of it. Magical sensing, according to Professor Vector, was a NEWT-level discipline that very few people were capable of, and such practitioners were quickly snatched by Gringotts for a career in curse-breaking. Harry reached out and put more power into the feeling, trying to picture what was trying to oppose him on the other side. There was a moment of startled stillness, and then a wild, bucking energy, a resistance poured out, one that made his heart pound in his chest, like someone had poured salt over a fresh wound.
Whatever this was, it was powerful magic. This place was nothing but ruins, and yet the defences on this door were strong enough to deny him entry. Not just that, the energy felt alive, as if judging him.
Remembering Ignotus’s words, he placed his hand on the door one last time, and allowed his energy to permeate into it, focussing on what he intended. He was Harry Potter, a student of Hogwarts. This place was the first home he had, and the first thing that had made him believe that he was more than just a freak. That Magic was real.
He wasn’t trying to break in. He was trying to enter his home.
A sudden incandescence flared before him, but it vanished before he could open his eyes.
The door clicked open.
….
….
….
The insides were old and rotten, practically collapsing under its own weight, but the rusted metal hinges seemed strong enough to keep it upright. Harry could see several half-decayed busts along the hallways, portraits whose colour had faded, leaving a layer of grime and dust over it. The stone floor was mostly bare, with a few rotting tapestries still adorning the walls. Even Grimmauld Place had looked better than what Hogwarts did now, and that was saying something. But unlike the ignorant boy that had strolled through the dark corridors of the Black townhouse without preparation, Harry had learnt a few things.
About Magic.
About Intent.
Pressing his hand against the wall, he channelled his desire to illuminate the entire place. If the enchantments on the door had stood strong against the test of Death, there was no reason why the enchantments within the school wouldn’t. The torches on the walls, which had long since burned out, erupted with an eerie, blue flame, bathing the entire place with its iridescence. And what Harry saw in them made him all but throw up.
Blood.
Mangled bodies.
Headless corpses.
All around him were bodies. Dead bodies. 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 and half-rotten robes that could only belong to students that lay dead, killed in the most barbaric and heinous way possible. His eyes met a wad of ginger hair with a half-melted face, before he spotted a broken camera next to it. The stomach-churning horror around him was everywhere, no matter where he looked, all he could find were bodies and more bodies — brown, ruffled hairs, thin and falling from the skin, a girl, with a book in her hand; a tall, rotten body with ginger hair trying to protect the former, only to be gutted out through the heart; a woman’s form with bright, silvery, blonde hair—
Harry shut his eyes, but the ghastly image did not leave his mind.
“Stop this,” he said with clenched fists. “You — whoever, whatever you are, stop playing games with me. I know you’re showing me all this to make me walk away from this place. But I am not. I am not going to leave until I get what I want.”
“And what do you want, my Harry?”
He couldn’t help himself, and opened his eyes. There, standing before him, her body rotting and filled with maggots, her intestines carved out and her ribcage on open display, stood the one person he had never expected to see like that. Her face was still the same, with two large gashes hacking into her cheeks, her bright blue eyes still shining from her dried, sunken eyeballs. She stood before him, her golden hair now mixed with dirt and blood, meeting his eyes with a strange intensity.
“You…” He said with clenched teeth. “You are not Daphne.”
“Of course not,” she said. “But she will be me.” Corpse-Daphne tilted her head, and said. “ Eventually.”
Her right eyeball dropped out of her skull and rolled down on the floor.
“Eventually, everyone will join me, here, in this mausoleum. After you destroy it.”
“What do you mean?” Harry asked.
“Do you not remember, my Harry?” she asked. Her head shifted a little further down than was possible. “You promised me that you would help me, free me of my curse! And you could have. Had you embraced Death, become one with it. There is nothing that Death cannot undo. Those were your words, remember? Instead you stuck to your stubbornness. Stuck to magic, and in your selfishness, you did this. Your half-hearted efforts turned me into a muggle. A dead, decaying muggle. And then you left me with all my sorrows and loss, running away from me, from Hogwarts, all because you couldn’t face the truth. You. Destroyed. My. Life. Harry Potter!”
“‘E doesn’t believe it,” said another voice. Harry spun around to see Corpse-Fleur behind him. Like Daphne, she too was mutilated beyond imagination. Just the sight of her like that was going to give him nightmares.
“E’s too obstinate. ‘E refuses to accept the future he will bring. A fool who knows his dreams are unattainable but pursues them anyway. A fraud, who’s neither of Death, nor of La Magique.”
“I did not,” Harry repeated calmly, looking at Corpse-Daphne from the corner of his eye. “Destroy. Your life. If anything, I’m doing my best to keep it from being destroyed. The Daphne I know would know that. The Fleur I know —”
A feminine laugh reverberated through the Great Hall, as Hermione’s corpse stood up. She couldn’t balance herself properly, and her skull fell off her neck, rolling down to the floor.
And yet, the terrible, menacing laughter did not stop. He took a step back, clenching his wand tightly as he tried to deny everything around him. One by one, the corpses around him began to stir and stand up.
“It is over, mate,” said Corpse-Ron, helping Corpse-Hermione to hold her fallen skull properly.
“I always told you, Harry,” said Corpse-Hermione's skull. “You are different! Too different!”
“You were my hero, Harry,” said Corpse-Ginny, smiling through her toothless mouth. “My hero saved me, and then he led me to my death. You could have had power. True power. But you rejected it. Because of your stubbornness. Your ignorance. All of our deaths are on your head.”
“No,” Harry repeated slowly. “It isn’t.”
“What did you think, Potter?” said Corpse-Snape, staggering up. His cloak was still around him, tattered and torn and billowing in the absent wind. “That you could make a difference? The Dark Lord was right. You should have taken his offer. In the end, you caused more destruction than anything else.”
“I always knew that boy was up to no good!” nodded Corpse-Amos Diggory. “Killed my son, he did.”
“I was just fodder,” said Corpse-Cedric. “Just so that they could get you.”
The torches began burning brighter and brighter. The shadows flickered, and in them, Harry saw all kinds of shades approach him — ghosts, malevolent spirits, faces known and unknown, acromantula, inferius-versions of the centaurs in the forest, the professors— they were gathering around him, whispering, chanting, cursing his name, calling him—
“FREAK!” said corpse-Vernon Dursley. “That’s what you are! Freak! Freak! Freak!”
“Always choose what is right, not what is easy,” claimed the corpse of Albus Dumbledore, his face reduced to a skull, except for those bright, blue eyes, the half-moon spectacles still on them. One of his hands looked blackened, like it was scorched by fire. “You, my boy, chose what is easy. The hardest of choices require the strongest of hearts and you, Harry, were weak. Death’s Avatar could have been the one to end the Dark Lord. But you chose to be selfish.”
“Is that why your father and I died for you?” said a voice that he had heard in his nightmares, and when dementors came close to him. The corpse stood up, her red hair shining bright. “I asked him to spare you. I should have taken his offer. At least me and my husband would be alive.”
“Yer not a wizard, Harry!” boomed the voice of Corpse-Hagrid. “Yer a freak!”
“Freak!” They chanted. “Freak! Freak! FREAK! FREAK! FREAK!”
Their sounds grew louder and louder, until it was booming all over the Great Hall.
Harry stared at the incoming horde and closed his eyes. The thestral, the forest, the acromantula and the dementors, and finally this — it wasn’t the Anima realm that was trying to enrage him, it was something else.
“I really am an idiot,” he said, as a small smile formed on his lips. “You are right, Ignotus. Or at least, I think you are.”
The curses stopped, as if reality itself had frozen over, and was watching him.
“Back when I was at the Dursleys, I often wondered why I was weird. Why these things happened to me, why the Dursleys hated me. Bloody hell, a lot of the time I thought about how nice things might be if I hadn’t been one. Yes, magic is my birthright, as is, perhaps, Death, but I won’t lie that I haven’t tasted the darker side to this power. The satisfaction of seeing an enemy fall to my strength, the lust to test myself against another, to challenge them and see who’s stronger; the mindless hunger for more that, if once indulged, I’d never be able to slake it off.”
He opened his eyes.
“You told me the reason I fought so hard to do what I did was because I was terrified of what I could do, if I decided to act without fear or remorse. You were right. For a long time, I wished I was like everyone else. I tried to even pretend to be even. To blend in. To be Normal. Average. I claimed I was just me, just Harry. But no matter what I did, what I tried to pretend, the world kept pounding my head that I wasn’t. In the end, all the prices I have paid so far, whether it be in suffering at the hands of the Dursleys, the bigotry and the whims of the people of Britain, because of Voldemort… it was all because I was trying to be something I wasn’t.” He laughed again. “Hell, even my very first action in Hogwarts was to pretend to be something I wasn’t. Not Slytherin, I said. Not Slytherin. And got placed into Gryffindor.”
He smiled again. “But here’s where you are wrong. True, taking up the mantle of Death will bring my enemies to my feet. I imagine that’s why you had the thestral come to me before everything else? Why it wanted me to walk away, despite the other spirits calling for me? The acromantula and the dementors were a nice touch, forcing me to embrace the aspect of Death. But that’s not all I am. I am Harry, son of James and Lily Potter. My real parents sacrificed their lives, just so that I could live. They would’ve wanted me to live and love, not take up some mantle like this fraud over here.”
The corpses began to snarl.
“Same for the others. The Daphne Greengrass I know would have happily embraced death than blame me for not being able to cure her. The Fleur I know would come to me despite knowing that my powers were the antithesis to her own. She’d accept me knowing exactly what I am. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe by rejecting your offer, I am damning this world. Maybe this is how the future ends for me. But that doesn’t mean I have to accept it. I will change it. I will make it better. I stood against Voldemort to keep him from taking the Stone. I faced a basilisk without a wand. I have fought against dementors and dragons and death eaters and wraiths, I have been cursed and humiliated and killed and risen again.”
Power grew in him. If Magic was emotion and feeling, then what he was feeling was the strongest thing in the world. And with it, the scenery around him began to change, and for a second, it was like looking at himself through half a dozen reflections.
One was of him just like he should be, laughing with Sirius and Daphne and Fleur. There was an innocence in him that seemed so alien, like a life that he did not lead. A shadow of a stag, just like his previous patronus, loomed over him. One was an emaciated version of himself, as though he had been starved or strung out on hard drugs, his eyes glowing with a strange, eldritch light. A strange ring on one finger, a wand with concentric beaded rings that rose all the way to the tapered tip in his right hand, and his cloak fell over him. A shadow of the thestral he had seen before hung over him, yet never touching, never leaving. It was almost like… almost like Ignotus himself. A third faced him in a dark blue cloak, his face scarred, his crimson thestral-hair core wand in one hand, and another white yew wand in the other. And as much as he wanted to deny it, he knew what it was.
Voldemort’s wand.
Daphne and Fleur stood on either side of him. An ethereal boa constrictor rose around him, entwined around his waist, glaring down protectively. Next to it, a large spectral grizzly bear let out a loud roar.
The last one wasn’t him. Oh, it looked like him, externally. But the eyes gave away. They were flat, as a reptile’s, empty. It wore all black, and though it looked like him, it wasn’t. Not light. Not dark. Not even a wizard. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if it was even human. The power — it was not life, not magic, not even death. Just a numbing, empty void that seemed to make the world feel darker and gloomier with every single second he looked at it. An existence that was utterly, utterly bad, a black hole, with shadowy wisps swirling around him, whispering sweet nothings in dulcet tones. Hatred made manifest.
Just looking at it made him want to tear his eyes out.
Harry knew what he was looking at. Possibilities. He was looking at possibilities. They were potential images of himself, and in all them, he was a person of power — different kinds of power certainly, but he was strong in all of them. However he was going to end up, it would depend on the choices he would make.
“This is what you do not understand, Ignotus,” said Harry. “I’m not just the Boy-Who-Lived, or the Vessel of Death. You, who have lived so long in Death’s dominion might not understand it, but I do.” He smiled again. “I am the child that my parents sacrificed their lives for. The godson that Sirius broke Azkaban to be with. The partner of Fleur Delacour and the love of Daphne Greengrass.”
The corpses became a massive cloud of darkness, swirling around him as they tried to swallow him up. It crawled along his body, his feet, his hands, his skin and nerves, seeking to pervade into his very existence and rewrite it with the stillness of Death and the End of Existence…
And then it pulled back.
Harry didn’t have a body, but he could still feel the warmth. He didn’t have eyes, but he could still see. He looked up, and what he saw was —
Light.
It was everywhere. It burned with its brightness. His vision was blinded by flashes of it as it approached him. Two wings of white spread out in the darkness, lashing against the darkness, ripping it apart, without dimming in the slightest. The screaming corpses were torn away like cobwebs in a hurricane, the swirling mist of darkness detonating as the light engulfed his entirety. It was antithetical to the coldness of Death, a golden shimmer of something so beautiful and perfect that it could only have come from something just as bright, just as beautiful.
His soul.
A loud screech tore through the air, as the light condensed, twisting, coalescing into a familiar shape. A form that reminded him of his oldest friend, someone that had been with him right from the moment he had realised he was a wizard. Something that had been the messenger, illuminating the darkness of the cupboard with the assurance that he was not a freak, that his relatives were wrong.
That Magic was real.
His friend, his familiar, his symbol of freedom.
With its long, earlike tufts, its intimidating stare, and it's deep, resonant, hooting voice, the majestic owl sat upon his shoulder, and let out a loud screech. Somewhere far away, he could hear the sounds of hooves, the howling of wolves and the screech that felt like rusted metal scratching on glass. He knew what they were, what they represented. He knew what they could help him achieve, what they wanted him to become.
“This is a mistake, boy,” he heard Ignotus’s resounding voice, reverberating through the mix of light and darkness. “If you walk away from this, you will be forsaking true power. Instead you chose—”
“Life. I choose Freedom. Freedom to live my life the way I want it. I chose to defy the whims of greater powers and create my own destiny. To be happy, to make friends… to love.” said Harry, smiling.
Maybe all of this was a mistake. Maybe, it would all end up just like the fiendish illusion Ignotus had conjured.
But did that mean he shouldn’t even try?
“Love? Freedom?” The scorn ringing in Ignotus’s voice was clear. “Of all things, you choose that?”
Harry beamed at him. “I do. After all, where there is love, there is life.”
The light engulfed him, as a spiralling vortex of power began to pull him into itself. For all he knew, he was being lifted and thrown across the vastness of the universe. No sound, no colour, no movement, and yet he knew he was simply being pulled and pulled into something, or out of something. And in that moment, Harry James Potter had an inkling of what Infinity looked like.
Comments
Shadowsmage
very nice
Akinola Ologunde
What an absolutely beautiful chapter 🥰, by reading it, I saw it.
