![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: In Death’s Midnight Garden
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None, gen
Content Notes: AU, Voldemort raises Harry, surrealism, present tense, Dark Arts, animal death, references to past character deaths
Wordcount: 4400
Summary: AU. Voldemort finds himself reincarnated in a body again, without explanation, six years after Godric’s Hollow, and with his sanity returned. For a reason he does not, cannot, understand, he tracks down Harry Potter and kidnaps him from the Dursleys, taking him to an isolated garden full of magic.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is for Lillian78, who requested a sane Voldemort kidnapping Harry from the Dursleys and raising him. This went in a wildly different direction from what I was first envisioning; I hope that you still enjoy it.
In Death’s Midnight Garden
Voldemort opens his eyes.
The world is quiet. And green.
He turns around, staring. It appears to be a soft, cool evening in early spring. The leaves on the trees around him have barely pushed out of their buds, and the stars have infected the air with their spiky branches of silver. He stands, barefoot and clad in black robes that move softly of their own volition, in the ruins of a house.
He would recognize it anywhere, however, ruined or whole. This is the house where he met his death.
Where he did not meet his death.
Voldemort remembers the backlash of the Killing Curse, the feeling of his body dissolving. He does not remember the pain. He remembers that the child survived. He does not remember what happened next. He reaches out a hand in the air, frowning, flicking his fingers to Summon his wand the way he has been doing for years.
Something else settles beneath his touch instead.
Voldemort turns his head, staring. A creature stares back at him from so close that Voldemort does not know how he missed feeling it earlier, except that it puts out the same cold as the air around him instead of heat. It takes Voldemort a long struggle to pull the name to the surface of his mind, as though he is fighting to swallow food through a clogged throat.
Thestral.
But this creature is not like any other thestral he has ever seen. It is huge, for one thing, looming more than a foot higher than Voldemort. It has three twisted spiral horns on its head, branching around and entwining with each other, and if Voldemort squints, he can make out marks etched on each of them. One seems to be a triangle, another a straight line, the third a circle.
And the thestral is silver instead of black, shining like the starlight, like an Invisibility Cloak, like unicorn blood.
The thestral spreads wings as blank as clouds and drops to one bony knee on the ground.
Voldemort turns and slings his leg over its back.
He has never ridden a thestral, and he is unprepared for the stretch in his body, how much it takes simply to fit his legs around the creature’s barrel. He does not know why he concentrates on that and not the need to know where they are going as the thestral takes a single cantering step and flings itself, flickering, into the air. He does not know why he wraps his hands around the creature’s neck, which glints like metal beneath his hands, and looks down on the rushing countryside far below.
He should be planning his return. This is the gift of a sudden, unexpected chance, the clearest sign he has ever received of the grand destiny that is his. He should hide and rebuild his strength and launch his attack on an unprepared magical world as soon as he has a sufficient army.
Instead, Voldemort rides the thestral towards the dawn, and his mind is as calm and quiet as it has ever been in fifty-four years.
*
The thestral touches down in a distinctly Muggle neighborhood.
Voldemort feels his lip curling as he stares around at it, and the first return of something like normal emotion. The houses repeat the same pattern over and over in endless sequence, almost the same colors, as well as Voldemort can see them in the pearly light of half-sunrise. The gardens are the same size, all as well-tended as each other. Only the house numbers are different.
“Why have you brought me here?” he demands of the thestral, nearly lapsing into Parseltongue.
The thestral takes a single striding step forwards, and Voldemort is suddenly standing on the ground beside it, not sitting on its back. The thestral bends towards the door of the house in front of them. Voldemort sees that it bears the number four in the moments before unseen wards bow, and bend, and break, and the door opens.
The thestral looks at him. Voldemort has not met its eyes before. They are dark, and looking at him out of them is something as fathomless as the universe.
He turns and stumbles into the house, staring around.
He has never been in a Muggle place like this, except momentarily when his Death Eaters have chosen certain targets. There is what looks like a placid drawing room off to the side, and walls covered with photographs that do not move, and a kitchen, and stairs rising to the first floor. Voldemort stares at the photographs in particular, but no one in them looks familiar, or even as if they could be magical.
He swallows and faces the only thing in the house that calls to him, the only thing that does glitter with power.
That is the door of a small cupboard under the stairs. Voldemort drops to one knee like the thestral did when he mounted and reaches out to trace a rune on the door. No, not a rune. A symbol that he does not remember seeing before but knows instinctively. A triangle with a circle inside it, bisected by a line.
The door opens.
Curled inside is a small child exhaling magic with every breath he releases. His hair tumbles over his forehead, his skin nearly as pale and silver as the thestral’s coat, but he rolls over and stares at Voldemort, and on his forehead is a scar as red Voldemort’s eyes. The child’s eyes, in turn, are as green as Voldemort’s favored curse.
“Daddy?” the child whispers.
Voldemort does not answer the question. He knows the child is his. That is enough. He reaches out and gathers him up, and the boy, after a momentary hesitation, curls his arms around him. Voldemort stands and walks out to remount the thestral.
He knows without asking that the business they came here to accomplish is done.
*
The thestral flies through the morning and the early afternoon, and when it touches down at last, Voldemort is neither thirsty nor hungry. The child has clung to him without complaining, but he does look around, eyes wide with wonder, as Voldemort climbs off the creature’s back.
His legs ache as if he is still mortal, at least.
They are standing on a grey cobblestone pathway that runs over a moor, as straight as though houses were planted all along its length. The moor in the direction it runs from is empty under the sun. The path plunges beneath a pair of locked silver gates, which themselves stand in the middle of a fence with an enormous arch built on top of it, as beautifully curved as a dolphin’s back.
Voldemort steps towards the gates. The same symbol that he traced on the door of the child’s cupboard is repeated over and over again inside curlicues of metal and light on them. Despite it being the middle of the day, starlit evening waits beyond those gates.
Voldemort lays his hand on the curlicue in the very middle.
It shudders and stirs. Voldemort hears distant hoofbeats, and the shriek of a raven, and the howling of a Grim.
The messengers of Death.
Where it might have frightened him once, Voldemort feels only iron calm now as the gates swing open. Has he not gone beyond Death? Has he not been returned to life without even the price of wandering as a wraith for a time?
Perhaps he did that, in the years that have obviously passed between the moment he threw a Killing Curse at the Potter child and this one. But he does not remember it, and that means it might as well not have happened.
The gates open, and Voldemort and Harry Potter step through.
*
The gardens are endless, in every direction except the one where the great fence runs.
Voldemort would have fretted at the captivity before, he thinks—before. But now, he does not. He has acquired patience as immutable as an iceberg’s, and infinity with one border is enough for him.
Harry, too, rejoices in the sweep of the gardens. The cupboard was small, from what Voldemort understands from Harry’s fragmented stories and memories, and allowed no room to run.
Here there are no walls, the fence always excepted. Here, there are small stone buildings scattered about on the silver grass, always without walls so the wind can blow freely through them. Or there are walls that are only curtains of subtly shimmering silver chains, or stone pillars without connections. Harry runs through them, laughing wildly, and the thestrals neigh back to him.
There are thestrals everywhere here, as silver although not as large as the creature that carried them to their destination, and with less intimidating eyes. Harry has never had any problem seeing them. Well, Voldemort has to acknowledge, he witnessed the death of his mother. He runs in circles, and laughs, and the thestrals take him into the air or fling themselves on their backs to roll alongside him.
Here are forests as continuous as the sky, consisting of trees like sketches of light on the air, framing darkness, their leaves clanging together, as metallic and silver as everything else here. Voldemort walks through them and sees yellow and red eyes light up in the hollows near their roots. He sits down with them, and creatures he never sees whisper the secrets of Death, of necromancy, of the Higher Arts and the Deeper Arts and magic so far beyond either of them that Voldemort comes to think of them as the Further Arts.
There are fountains of cold and springing water, which quench thirst with only a drink. Voldemort cannot remember a time when he has not had to fight constantly for survival, for food and drink and warmth in the orphanage, for privacy and power as he grew older. But here, he can sit on the softly glowing white stones that form the basins of the fountains and extend his hand and find the cup of his palm filled with cool silvery drops. When he lifts them to his mouth, they taste like moonlight.
Here are other creatures of Death than the thestrals, and Harry seems to befriend them as easily. The first time Voldemort saw him talking with a raven, the great bird sitting on a leaning white stone and staring at the boy eye-to-eye, Voldemort lifted his hand. All he could think of was that ravens eat the eyes of the dead. And tongues.
But Harry laughed at him and said in the purling tongue of snakes that is the one they speak in this place, “His name is Caller and he’s been alive for ten thousand years,” and Voldemort sat down next to Harry and let himself be enchanted by the wisdom of ravens.
There are trees heavy with fruit, all of it black or purple or a burning dark blue that Voldemort has never seen on any blueberry alive. One bite of it fills the mouth with sweetness and the mind with knowledge. He rests his hand on Harry’s shoulder when they eat, and drops of fat, glowing juice fall to the forest floor around them, and they do not need to speak.
Here are white stags with glowing red eyes and red ears and antlers that are dazzles of radiant gold so bright that Voldemort cannot look at them directly, and Voldemort and Harry bound through the forest on feet that have grown swifter since they came to the gardens, hunting them. The stags run in utter silence, not even their hooves stirring the leaves, and it becomes a game of guess and seek and find, of teeth locking in throats, of thick meat hot with the blood of life roasted over blue fires. Harry eats his fill, always, of the meat in a deeper way than he does with the fruit, and Voldemort caresses his hair and whispers the names of great predators down the centuries, a chant he learned from the basilisk.
Here, there is wonder.
*
And, too, because Voldemort has a magical child on his hands and he does not want the child to grow up to be a feral beast, stag-hunting with bare hands and bare teeth notwithstanding, there is teaching.
Harry is an apt pupil, leaning forwards on the other side of a blue fire with all the questions of the world in his eyes, and Voldemort teaches him what he knows—of the magic he already knew before he came to the gardens, and of the Higher and the Deeper and the Further Arts that he has learned from the creatures of the forest.
Harry could read, barely, before Voldemort took him away, and now he devours the books that appear silently inside the temple-like buildings. Books of alphabets, of stories, of natural history, of spells, of languages older than English and darker than Parseltongue. Voldemort teaches him to read the latter, sprawling on the ground beside him like a large snake coiled around a smaller one and answering questions and arguing with him when Harry takes the bit between his teeth in his stubborn way.
“But I don’t understand why the Statute of Secrecy was put up,” Harry grumbles, one night in the endless succession of nights, crossing his arms. He has grown since they came to the gardens, and now looks perhaps nine. “We’re so strong here. We have to be stronger than the Muggles. Why didn’t we just take over the minds of the powerful ones and go on living the way we wanted?”
“Because there were many more of them than there are of us,” Voldemort hisses at him, reaching out with one hand to pet the springy black hair on his head. Harry twists towards him, unselfconscious as a raven. “And because there have been as many cowards among wizards and witches as there have been among Muggles. There were many who feared that it would not work, and what would follow. They already feared what Muggles were doing to us.”
“There’s another reason.”
Voldemort smiles. Harry can always sense when Voldemort is holding something back. Voldemort has never been understood so completely in his life. “We are not as strong outside this garden as we are in it, Harry. You see how much magic is around us here. There are few places as magical in the whole world. Hogwarts, perhaps. Some portions of the ancient monuments or castles raised by mages on the Continent. Some of the most ancient places where civilization began in the Americas. Few outside that.”
“So we could have attacked Muggles here or resisted them here, but not outside?”
“Yes.”
“Will I go to Hogwarts?”
Voldemort does not speak for a long moment. Sometimes speaking with Harry like this jolts him into a remembrance of the world outside the gardens, the place he has not even gone to the fence to gaze on for—
He does not know how much time has passed.
Years, it must be, or Harry would not look as old as he does. Nine, or ten? Voldemort cannot judge by the progression of his own facial features in the reflection of the fountains and pools. He does not age.
But Harry looks as if he is nine or ten, so it must be several years at least.
“Do you wish to go?” Voldemort asks instead. “Hogwarts is a powerfully magical place, and they do have a herd of thestrals living in the Forbidden Forest.” He has told Harry many tales of the school and the forest, especially when explaining a spell he learned there. He does not have a wand, but neither he nor Harry need one, in the endlessness of the gardens. “But it is not the gardens, and they do not have the kind of magic there that we have here.”
Harry gazes thoughtfully around the gardens. They are sitting around one of their blue-flickering fires just outside a forest. The grass around them is taller than their heads and shining silver thinning to black and white flowers at the top. Above their fire, ravens sing.
Harry turns back to him and shakes his head. “Not yet. But maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m older?”
Voldemort nods. That must be it. He himself remembers that Hogwarts was his first home. Harry will feel the same way when he goes there.
And Voldemort will get back to fighting his war. Yes. To building his strength. He remembers his plans, as abstract as the notion of closed space in some of the gardens’ temples, and he remembers that he has loyal Death Eaters out there.
The name “Death Eaters” calls a soft laughter into his mind. Voldemort tilts his head. He does not know that laughter. It is not that of a raven or thestral or Grim, or of Harry, either.
“Voldemort?”
“You will probably feel differently when you are older,” Voldemort says, and dismisses from his mind the fact that he has not thought of his plans in years. “Now, let me teach you of how to use starlight to weave a cage no one can escape from.”
*
Voldemort opens his eyes, and for the first time in years, is afraid.
He is not in the gardens. He is not with Harry. He is in the middle of blackness, studded with stars. The only thing he can liken it to is that he has fallen into one of the fountains that reflect the endless starry sky.
But he is not in the gardens. He knows he is not. He struggles silently against the bonds holding him, which he knows are not bonds so much as the motionlessness that comes along with having fallen into pure space. He cannot move because there is nothing to push against.
Let me go!
A creature appears before him.
Voldemort screams. This creature is as far beyond the Further Arts he has learnt in the forest as those magics are beyond the simple incantations taught in Hogwarts. It is made of silver and golden fire and other colors Voldemort has never seen before, and it has the body and four legs of a thestral, the wings of a raven, the head of a Grim, and the burning eyes of a human.
Green eyes. The kind of green that Harry’s might become if he ascends, someday, to the kind of mage Voldemort thinks him capable of being.
Are you enjoying your stay in my gardens?
Voldemort blinks, slowly. Those words are impressed upon his mind like hot wax upon the base of a candle, but they are not destroying him. He understands them.
“Death,” he whispers.
Which you tried to flee from, Tom Marvolo Riddle.
The name rocks through Voldemort, severing ties he has made with Harry, stirring up peace that has settled in him like the fall of leaves down endless years. He screams again. He shakes his head. “Do not—do not let me be that. I do not choose to be that.” He knows his voice is pleading, but he also knows that he cannot be that.
I have destroyed your Horcruxes.
“I don’t care!” Voldemort cries. He does not even know if it is true. He knows that he—
He does not want to think about Horcruxes. He does not want to ever create any again. The mere thought of thinking about people outside the gardens is painful. He does not want to return to them. He wants to walk beside Harry again. He wants to teach him.
You would have torn the fabric of existence to flee from me. The fabric of your own soul.
It is beyond Voldemort how he ever thought Death a cold force, or a neutral one. Death is a blazing force, a fire beyond anything Voldemort has ever known, the kind of fire that devours suns and planets and finally the universe.
You truly do not care.
“No,” Voldemort whispers. “I want to go back to the gardens. I want to stay in them. I want to stay with Harry.”
He pauses then, swallowing, wondering. He can understand why Death wanted to trap him in the gardens, if it is a punishment, because he tried to flee from it. But he does not understand why Harry is with him.
“Why?” he breathes.
Death shines, the kind of radiance that no man can encompass. Voldemort already knows that he will never remember this dream exactly as it is. Because he might have become the sort of person who could trap me, who could wield the weapons that could subdue me.
“How—how are there are such weapons?”
Because everything in the world must have one exception, Tom Marvolo Riddle—
“Do not call me that!”
Voldemort, Dark Lord, guardian of Harry Potter, Death whispers. The weapons Harry Potter might wield were my exception. They destroy those who try to possess them. But they could be gathered by the right kind of person. An extraordinary sort of person. But I do not wish to be ruled.
Voldemort nods frantically. He understands. He does not wish to be ruled, either. He simply wishes to walk through the gardens with Harry.
I could not destroy either of you, you because you pursued a forbidden exemption to my laws, and Harry because he has the power to gather those weapons. Death lowers its head. Three spiral horns have appeared on the top of it, between its ears, bearing the symbols Voldemort remembers from the thestral that carried them to the gardens. Circle, triangle, straight line. But I can imprison you. I can keep you from fleeing. I can keep Harry James Potter from mastering me.
Memory stirs in the back of Voldemort’s mind, of a tale he read once, of a place where he has seen those three symbols combined into one, of what someone needs to become the Master of Death—
But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to remember.
Death pauses. Then it says, You do not care that the gardens are a prison.
“They are everything I have ever wanted,” Voldemort whispers, and he realizes that is true. What he has wanted, not what he has needed. What he needed was an escape from Death. Fear pressed on his mind, and deformed it.
What he has wanted, what he has worshipped, is magic. And the knowledge of the forests, the teaching of that knowledge to Harry, the infinite time and space to roam the gardens, that has brought him something further than joy.
Death bows its head. Its voice is low, amused. Outdone by my own exceptions. Trapped by my own traps. But free.
And the black mirror of the dream explodes, and Voldemort wakes on the other side of the fire from where Harry sleeps, his chin cradled on his folded hands, his scar a faint silver line on his forehead.
Voldemort reaches across the fire to touch Harry’s forehead, and leaves his hand there for a long time.
*
“Voldemort?”
“Yes?” Voldemort turns around. He and Harry have walked to the top of a black hill, one that rises so high that it is impossible to see over but rises so gently that it is not tiring to walk. Harry is looking up at him with eyes as impossible as mortality. He no longer has to look up as far as he once did; his head now reaches Voldemort’s shoulder.
“Shouldn’t I have got my Hogwarts letter by now?”
Voldemort thinks about it. Yes, Harry should have. The question flickers to life in his mind if any letter borne by owl could find its way past the gardens’ gates.
The question dances behind that, bright as flame, of why they have not gone to the fence and looked beyond it in years.
How many years?
“Do you want to go to Hogwarts?” Voldemort asks quietly. He remembers a conversation, one of the millions of conversations he and Harry have had, where he said that Harry would probably want to go to the school when he was older. Well, now he is older. How much older, Voldemort is unsure.
Harry thinks about it, his head bowed and his eyelashes veiling his eyes. Voldemort waits. He doesn’t panic, the way he once would have thought he would if Harry was considering leaving him. Because he knows the answer.
“No,” Harry says, and gives him a brilliant smile. “I want to stay here and learn from you instead.”
Voldemort nods, tranquil as a thestral, and lays a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “And I want to keep teaching you.”
Harry beams up at him, and then they reach the top of the hill, and Harry lets out a gasp.
Voldemort stares at the endless rippling expanse of silver grass beneath them, under a sky that shows the beginnings of—he struggles to remember the word, remembers it—sunrise.
“We’ve never been here before,” Harry whispers. “Or in a place that looks anything like it.”
“No,” Voldemort agrees quietly. While it is probably impossible to retrace the course of their wanderings through the gardens, one forest or fountain or building tends to greatly resemble another. They have never seen anything like this vast plain, tipped with white flowers like foam on the waves of the sea.
Voldemort remembers the sea. A great hunger stirs in him, a question about whether an ocean of water might lie beyond this ocean of grass.
Harry looks up at him in the light of dawn and smiles. “I want to go see what’s on the other side.”
Voldemort remembers a blazing voice whispering to him, You do not care that the gardens are a prison.
Voldemort feels a slow smile stretching his lips. Is anything a prison if it does not feel like one?
He claps a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and hisses, “Let us see.”
They walk down the hill, and Harry laughs aloud as a golden thestral sweeps overhead on wings as wide as a roc’s, the first golden one they have ever seen. It neighs a song at them, flaps white feathery wings, and turns and flies towards the far side of the plain.
Voldemort and Harry follow it, and vanish into the endlessness.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None, gen
Content Notes: AU, Voldemort raises Harry, surrealism, present tense, Dark Arts, animal death, references to past character deaths
Wordcount: 4400
Summary: AU. Voldemort finds himself reincarnated in a body again, without explanation, six years after Godric’s Hollow, and with his sanity returned. For a reason he does not, cannot, understand, he tracks down Harry Potter and kidnaps him from the Dursleys, taking him to an isolated garden full of magic.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is for Lillian78, who requested a sane Voldemort kidnapping Harry from the Dursleys and raising him. This went in a wildly different direction from what I was first envisioning; I hope that you still enjoy it.
In Death’s Midnight Garden
Voldemort opens his eyes.
The world is quiet. And green.
He turns around, staring. It appears to be a soft, cool evening in early spring. The leaves on the trees around him have barely pushed out of their buds, and the stars have infected the air with their spiky branches of silver. He stands, barefoot and clad in black robes that move softly of their own volition, in the ruins of a house.
He would recognize it anywhere, however, ruined or whole. This is the house where he met his death.
Where he did not meet his death.
Voldemort remembers the backlash of the Killing Curse, the feeling of his body dissolving. He does not remember the pain. He remembers that the child survived. He does not remember what happened next. He reaches out a hand in the air, frowning, flicking his fingers to Summon his wand the way he has been doing for years.
Something else settles beneath his touch instead.
Voldemort turns his head, staring. A creature stares back at him from so close that Voldemort does not know how he missed feeling it earlier, except that it puts out the same cold as the air around him instead of heat. It takes Voldemort a long struggle to pull the name to the surface of his mind, as though he is fighting to swallow food through a clogged throat.
Thestral.
But this creature is not like any other thestral he has ever seen. It is huge, for one thing, looming more than a foot higher than Voldemort. It has three twisted spiral horns on its head, branching around and entwining with each other, and if Voldemort squints, he can make out marks etched on each of them. One seems to be a triangle, another a straight line, the third a circle.
And the thestral is silver instead of black, shining like the starlight, like an Invisibility Cloak, like unicorn blood.
The thestral spreads wings as blank as clouds and drops to one bony knee on the ground.
Voldemort turns and slings his leg over its back.
He has never ridden a thestral, and he is unprepared for the stretch in his body, how much it takes simply to fit his legs around the creature’s barrel. He does not know why he concentrates on that and not the need to know where they are going as the thestral takes a single cantering step and flings itself, flickering, into the air. He does not know why he wraps his hands around the creature’s neck, which glints like metal beneath his hands, and looks down on the rushing countryside far below.
He should be planning his return. This is the gift of a sudden, unexpected chance, the clearest sign he has ever received of the grand destiny that is his. He should hide and rebuild his strength and launch his attack on an unprepared magical world as soon as he has a sufficient army.
Instead, Voldemort rides the thestral towards the dawn, and his mind is as calm and quiet as it has ever been in fifty-four years.
*
The thestral touches down in a distinctly Muggle neighborhood.
Voldemort feels his lip curling as he stares around at it, and the first return of something like normal emotion. The houses repeat the same pattern over and over in endless sequence, almost the same colors, as well as Voldemort can see them in the pearly light of half-sunrise. The gardens are the same size, all as well-tended as each other. Only the house numbers are different.
“Why have you brought me here?” he demands of the thestral, nearly lapsing into Parseltongue.
The thestral takes a single striding step forwards, and Voldemort is suddenly standing on the ground beside it, not sitting on its back. The thestral bends towards the door of the house in front of them. Voldemort sees that it bears the number four in the moments before unseen wards bow, and bend, and break, and the door opens.
The thestral looks at him. Voldemort has not met its eyes before. They are dark, and looking at him out of them is something as fathomless as the universe.
He turns and stumbles into the house, staring around.
He has never been in a Muggle place like this, except momentarily when his Death Eaters have chosen certain targets. There is what looks like a placid drawing room off to the side, and walls covered with photographs that do not move, and a kitchen, and stairs rising to the first floor. Voldemort stares at the photographs in particular, but no one in them looks familiar, or even as if they could be magical.
He swallows and faces the only thing in the house that calls to him, the only thing that does glitter with power.
That is the door of a small cupboard under the stairs. Voldemort drops to one knee like the thestral did when he mounted and reaches out to trace a rune on the door. No, not a rune. A symbol that he does not remember seeing before but knows instinctively. A triangle with a circle inside it, bisected by a line.
The door opens.
Curled inside is a small child exhaling magic with every breath he releases. His hair tumbles over his forehead, his skin nearly as pale and silver as the thestral’s coat, but he rolls over and stares at Voldemort, and on his forehead is a scar as red Voldemort’s eyes. The child’s eyes, in turn, are as green as Voldemort’s favored curse.
“Daddy?” the child whispers.
Voldemort does not answer the question. He knows the child is his. That is enough. He reaches out and gathers him up, and the boy, after a momentary hesitation, curls his arms around him. Voldemort stands and walks out to remount the thestral.
He knows without asking that the business they came here to accomplish is done.
*
The thestral flies through the morning and the early afternoon, and when it touches down at last, Voldemort is neither thirsty nor hungry. The child has clung to him without complaining, but he does look around, eyes wide with wonder, as Voldemort climbs off the creature’s back.
His legs ache as if he is still mortal, at least.
They are standing on a grey cobblestone pathway that runs over a moor, as straight as though houses were planted all along its length. The moor in the direction it runs from is empty under the sun. The path plunges beneath a pair of locked silver gates, which themselves stand in the middle of a fence with an enormous arch built on top of it, as beautifully curved as a dolphin’s back.
Voldemort steps towards the gates. The same symbol that he traced on the door of the child’s cupboard is repeated over and over again inside curlicues of metal and light on them. Despite it being the middle of the day, starlit evening waits beyond those gates.
Voldemort lays his hand on the curlicue in the very middle.
It shudders and stirs. Voldemort hears distant hoofbeats, and the shriek of a raven, and the howling of a Grim.
The messengers of Death.
Where it might have frightened him once, Voldemort feels only iron calm now as the gates swing open. Has he not gone beyond Death? Has he not been returned to life without even the price of wandering as a wraith for a time?
Perhaps he did that, in the years that have obviously passed between the moment he threw a Killing Curse at the Potter child and this one. But he does not remember it, and that means it might as well not have happened.
The gates open, and Voldemort and Harry Potter step through.
*
The gardens are endless, in every direction except the one where the great fence runs.
Voldemort would have fretted at the captivity before, he thinks—before. But now, he does not. He has acquired patience as immutable as an iceberg’s, and infinity with one border is enough for him.
Harry, too, rejoices in the sweep of the gardens. The cupboard was small, from what Voldemort understands from Harry’s fragmented stories and memories, and allowed no room to run.
Here there are no walls, the fence always excepted. Here, there are small stone buildings scattered about on the silver grass, always without walls so the wind can blow freely through them. Or there are walls that are only curtains of subtly shimmering silver chains, or stone pillars without connections. Harry runs through them, laughing wildly, and the thestrals neigh back to him.
There are thestrals everywhere here, as silver although not as large as the creature that carried them to their destination, and with less intimidating eyes. Harry has never had any problem seeing them. Well, Voldemort has to acknowledge, he witnessed the death of his mother. He runs in circles, and laughs, and the thestrals take him into the air or fling themselves on their backs to roll alongside him.
Here are forests as continuous as the sky, consisting of trees like sketches of light on the air, framing darkness, their leaves clanging together, as metallic and silver as everything else here. Voldemort walks through them and sees yellow and red eyes light up in the hollows near their roots. He sits down with them, and creatures he never sees whisper the secrets of Death, of necromancy, of the Higher Arts and the Deeper Arts and magic so far beyond either of them that Voldemort comes to think of them as the Further Arts.
There are fountains of cold and springing water, which quench thirst with only a drink. Voldemort cannot remember a time when he has not had to fight constantly for survival, for food and drink and warmth in the orphanage, for privacy and power as he grew older. But here, he can sit on the softly glowing white stones that form the basins of the fountains and extend his hand and find the cup of his palm filled with cool silvery drops. When he lifts them to his mouth, they taste like moonlight.
Here are other creatures of Death than the thestrals, and Harry seems to befriend them as easily. The first time Voldemort saw him talking with a raven, the great bird sitting on a leaning white stone and staring at the boy eye-to-eye, Voldemort lifted his hand. All he could think of was that ravens eat the eyes of the dead. And tongues.
But Harry laughed at him and said in the purling tongue of snakes that is the one they speak in this place, “His name is Caller and he’s been alive for ten thousand years,” and Voldemort sat down next to Harry and let himself be enchanted by the wisdom of ravens.
There are trees heavy with fruit, all of it black or purple or a burning dark blue that Voldemort has never seen on any blueberry alive. One bite of it fills the mouth with sweetness and the mind with knowledge. He rests his hand on Harry’s shoulder when they eat, and drops of fat, glowing juice fall to the forest floor around them, and they do not need to speak.
Here are white stags with glowing red eyes and red ears and antlers that are dazzles of radiant gold so bright that Voldemort cannot look at them directly, and Voldemort and Harry bound through the forest on feet that have grown swifter since they came to the gardens, hunting them. The stags run in utter silence, not even their hooves stirring the leaves, and it becomes a game of guess and seek and find, of teeth locking in throats, of thick meat hot with the blood of life roasted over blue fires. Harry eats his fill, always, of the meat in a deeper way than he does with the fruit, and Voldemort caresses his hair and whispers the names of great predators down the centuries, a chant he learned from the basilisk.
Here, there is wonder.
*
And, too, because Voldemort has a magical child on his hands and he does not want the child to grow up to be a feral beast, stag-hunting with bare hands and bare teeth notwithstanding, there is teaching.
Harry is an apt pupil, leaning forwards on the other side of a blue fire with all the questions of the world in his eyes, and Voldemort teaches him what he knows—of the magic he already knew before he came to the gardens, and of the Higher and the Deeper and the Further Arts that he has learned from the creatures of the forest.
Harry could read, barely, before Voldemort took him away, and now he devours the books that appear silently inside the temple-like buildings. Books of alphabets, of stories, of natural history, of spells, of languages older than English and darker than Parseltongue. Voldemort teaches him to read the latter, sprawling on the ground beside him like a large snake coiled around a smaller one and answering questions and arguing with him when Harry takes the bit between his teeth in his stubborn way.
“But I don’t understand why the Statute of Secrecy was put up,” Harry grumbles, one night in the endless succession of nights, crossing his arms. He has grown since they came to the gardens, and now looks perhaps nine. “We’re so strong here. We have to be stronger than the Muggles. Why didn’t we just take over the minds of the powerful ones and go on living the way we wanted?”
“Because there were many more of them than there are of us,” Voldemort hisses at him, reaching out with one hand to pet the springy black hair on his head. Harry twists towards him, unselfconscious as a raven. “And because there have been as many cowards among wizards and witches as there have been among Muggles. There were many who feared that it would not work, and what would follow. They already feared what Muggles were doing to us.”
“There’s another reason.”
Voldemort smiles. Harry can always sense when Voldemort is holding something back. Voldemort has never been understood so completely in his life. “We are not as strong outside this garden as we are in it, Harry. You see how much magic is around us here. There are few places as magical in the whole world. Hogwarts, perhaps. Some portions of the ancient monuments or castles raised by mages on the Continent. Some of the most ancient places where civilization began in the Americas. Few outside that.”
“So we could have attacked Muggles here or resisted them here, but not outside?”
“Yes.”
“Will I go to Hogwarts?”
Voldemort does not speak for a long moment. Sometimes speaking with Harry like this jolts him into a remembrance of the world outside the gardens, the place he has not even gone to the fence to gaze on for—
He does not know how much time has passed.
Years, it must be, or Harry would not look as old as he does. Nine, or ten? Voldemort cannot judge by the progression of his own facial features in the reflection of the fountains and pools. He does not age.
But Harry looks as if he is nine or ten, so it must be several years at least.
“Do you wish to go?” Voldemort asks instead. “Hogwarts is a powerfully magical place, and they do have a herd of thestrals living in the Forbidden Forest.” He has told Harry many tales of the school and the forest, especially when explaining a spell he learned there. He does not have a wand, but neither he nor Harry need one, in the endlessness of the gardens. “But it is not the gardens, and they do not have the kind of magic there that we have here.”
Harry gazes thoughtfully around the gardens. They are sitting around one of their blue-flickering fires just outside a forest. The grass around them is taller than their heads and shining silver thinning to black and white flowers at the top. Above their fire, ravens sing.
Harry turns back to him and shakes his head. “Not yet. But maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m older?”
Voldemort nods. That must be it. He himself remembers that Hogwarts was his first home. Harry will feel the same way when he goes there.
And Voldemort will get back to fighting his war. Yes. To building his strength. He remembers his plans, as abstract as the notion of closed space in some of the gardens’ temples, and he remembers that he has loyal Death Eaters out there.
The name “Death Eaters” calls a soft laughter into his mind. Voldemort tilts his head. He does not know that laughter. It is not that of a raven or thestral or Grim, or of Harry, either.
“Voldemort?”
“You will probably feel differently when you are older,” Voldemort says, and dismisses from his mind the fact that he has not thought of his plans in years. “Now, let me teach you of how to use starlight to weave a cage no one can escape from.”
*
Voldemort opens his eyes, and for the first time in years, is afraid.
He is not in the gardens. He is not with Harry. He is in the middle of blackness, studded with stars. The only thing he can liken it to is that he has fallen into one of the fountains that reflect the endless starry sky.
But he is not in the gardens. He knows he is not. He struggles silently against the bonds holding him, which he knows are not bonds so much as the motionlessness that comes along with having fallen into pure space. He cannot move because there is nothing to push against.
Let me go!
A creature appears before him.
Voldemort screams. This creature is as far beyond the Further Arts he has learnt in the forest as those magics are beyond the simple incantations taught in Hogwarts. It is made of silver and golden fire and other colors Voldemort has never seen before, and it has the body and four legs of a thestral, the wings of a raven, the head of a Grim, and the burning eyes of a human.
Green eyes. The kind of green that Harry’s might become if he ascends, someday, to the kind of mage Voldemort thinks him capable of being.
Are you enjoying your stay in my gardens?
Voldemort blinks, slowly. Those words are impressed upon his mind like hot wax upon the base of a candle, but they are not destroying him. He understands them.
“Death,” he whispers.
Which you tried to flee from, Tom Marvolo Riddle.
The name rocks through Voldemort, severing ties he has made with Harry, stirring up peace that has settled in him like the fall of leaves down endless years. He screams again. He shakes his head. “Do not—do not let me be that. I do not choose to be that.” He knows his voice is pleading, but he also knows that he cannot be that.
I have destroyed your Horcruxes.
“I don’t care!” Voldemort cries. He does not even know if it is true. He knows that he—
He does not want to think about Horcruxes. He does not want to ever create any again. The mere thought of thinking about people outside the gardens is painful. He does not want to return to them. He wants to walk beside Harry again. He wants to teach him.
You would have torn the fabric of existence to flee from me. The fabric of your own soul.
It is beyond Voldemort how he ever thought Death a cold force, or a neutral one. Death is a blazing force, a fire beyond anything Voldemort has ever known, the kind of fire that devours suns and planets and finally the universe.
You truly do not care.
“No,” Voldemort whispers. “I want to go back to the gardens. I want to stay in them. I want to stay with Harry.”
He pauses then, swallowing, wondering. He can understand why Death wanted to trap him in the gardens, if it is a punishment, because he tried to flee from it. But he does not understand why Harry is with him.
“Why?” he breathes.
Death shines, the kind of radiance that no man can encompass. Voldemort already knows that he will never remember this dream exactly as it is. Because he might have become the sort of person who could trap me, who could wield the weapons that could subdue me.
“How—how are there are such weapons?”
Because everything in the world must have one exception, Tom Marvolo Riddle—
“Do not call me that!”
Voldemort, Dark Lord, guardian of Harry Potter, Death whispers. The weapons Harry Potter might wield were my exception. They destroy those who try to possess them. But they could be gathered by the right kind of person. An extraordinary sort of person. But I do not wish to be ruled.
Voldemort nods frantically. He understands. He does not wish to be ruled, either. He simply wishes to walk through the gardens with Harry.
I could not destroy either of you, you because you pursued a forbidden exemption to my laws, and Harry because he has the power to gather those weapons. Death lowers its head. Three spiral horns have appeared on the top of it, between its ears, bearing the symbols Voldemort remembers from the thestral that carried them to the gardens. Circle, triangle, straight line. But I can imprison you. I can keep you from fleeing. I can keep Harry James Potter from mastering me.
Memory stirs in the back of Voldemort’s mind, of a tale he read once, of a place where he has seen those three symbols combined into one, of what someone needs to become the Master of Death—
But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to remember.
Death pauses. Then it says, You do not care that the gardens are a prison.
“They are everything I have ever wanted,” Voldemort whispers, and he realizes that is true. What he has wanted, not what he has needed. What he needed was an escape from Death. Fear pressed on his mind, and deformed it.
What he has wanted, what he has worshipped, is magic. And the knowledge of the forests, the teaching of that knowledge to Harry, the infinite time and space to roam the gardens, that has brought him something further than joy.
Death bows its head. Its voice is low, amused. Outdone by my own exceptions. Trapped by my own traps. But free.
And the black mirror of the dream explodes, and Voldemort wakes on the other side of the fire from where Harry sleeps, his chin cradled on his folded hands, his scar a faint silver line on his forehead.
Voldemort reaches across the fire to touch Harry’s forehead, and leaves his hand there for a long time.
*
“Voldemort?”
“Yes?” Voldemort turns around. He and Harry have walked to the top of a black hill, one that rises so high that it is impossible to see over but rises so gently that it is not tiring to walk. Harry is looking up at him with eyes as impossible as mortality. He no longer has to look up as far as he once did; his head now reaches Voldemort’s shoulder.
“Shouldn’t I have got my Hogwarts letter by now?”
Voldemort thinks about it. Yes, Harry should have. The question flickers to life in his mind if any letter borne by owl could find its way past the gardens’ gates.
The question dances behind that, bright as flame, of why they have not gone to the fence and looked beyond it in years.
How many years?
“Do you want to go to Hogwarts?” Voldemort asks quietly. He remembers a conversation, one of the millions of conversations he and Harry have had, where he said that Harry would probably want to go to the school when he was older. Well, now he is older. How much older, Voldemort is unsure.
Harry thinks about it, his head bowed and his eyelashes veiling his eyes. Voldemort waits. He doesn’t panic, the way he once would have thought he would if Harry was considering leaving him. Because he knows the answer.
“No,” Harry says, and gives him a brilliant smile. “I want to stay here and learn from you instead.”
Voldemort nods, tranquil as a thestral, and lays a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “And I want to keep teaching you.”
Harry beams up at him, and then they reach the top of the hill, and Harry lets out a gasp.
Voldemort stares at the endless rippling expanse of silver grass beneath them, under a sky that shows the beginnings of—he struggles to remember the word, remembers it—sunrise.
“We’ve never been here before,” Harry whispers. “Or in a place that looks anything like it.”
“No,” Voldemort agrees quietly. While it is probably impossible to retrace the course of their wanderings through the gardens, one forest or fountain or building tends to greatly resemble another. They have never seen anything like this vast plain, tipped with white flowers like foam on the waves of the sea.
Voldemort remembers the sea. A great hunger stirs in him, a question about whether an ocean of water might lie beyond this ocean of grass.
Harry looks up at him in the light of dawn and smiles. “I want to go see what’s on the other side.”
Voldemort remembers a blazing voice whispering to him, You do not care that the gardens are a prison.
Voldemort feels a slow smile stretching his lips. Is anything a prison if it does not feel like one?
He claps a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and hisses, “Let us see.”
They walk down the hill, and Harry laughs aloud as a golden thestral sweeps overhead on wings as wide as a roc’s, the first golden one they have ever seen. It neighs a song at them, flaps white feathery wings, and turns and flies towards the far side of the plain.
Voldemort and Harry follow it, and vanish into the endlessness.
The End.
