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lomonaaerenTitle: The Creature That Crawled Chaotically Out of Space and Sat on the Doorstep
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen
Content Notes: AU, violence, gore, angst, dark humor, Cthulhu mythos, character death, insanity
Rating: R (for violence)
Wordcount: 4100
Summary: Turns out that there are worse things than Voldemort. Like what Harry summons to defeat him. And the thing Harry becomes in the process of defeating him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season,” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Joefromlegal requested Harry becoming a Cthulhu cultist to defeat Voldemort.
The Creature That Crawled Chaotically Out of Space and Sat on the Doorstep
“Harry, what are you doing?”
Hermione didn’t know what to think as she stepped into the small room in the dungeons that Harry had apparently converted into some kind of workspace. The floor was scrawled with glyphs, but not ones she recognized. And having taken Ancient Runes for four years, Hermione was pretty sure she recognized most of them.
Harry was standing in the middle of a circle made by a channel carved into the floor, and filled with bubbling water. He was swaying back and forth, arms extended, eyes closed as he—sang. Or sort of sang. It was a croaking sound that seemed to have incorporated the bubbling of the water into it.
“Harry!”
Hermione wanted to know what Harry was doing, and why he hadn’t trusted her with the secret of it, and where he had learned the glyphs. But something that wasn’t Harry opened his eyes and looked at her. His eyes seemed to spin with white spirals in the green, he had no pupils, and a voice spoke from his lips that said, “Leave.”
Hermione had been a Gryffindor for six years. But that didn’t make her stupid.
She turned and ran, aiming for Professor Dumbledore’s office. He would know what to do.
*
Albus frowned as he knocked on the door of the dungeon classroom Miss Granger had told him about. It seemed strange to him that Harry would feel the need to summon some kind of creature, which was her description of the ritual indicated. Were not their lessons about Voldemort’s Horcruxes going well? Sooner or later, Harry would realize that he was one and then he needed to go gracefully to his death at Tom’s hands.
And, well, Albus had ideas on how Harry might be able to return alive. It was possible that Tom’s Killing Curse would kill the soul-shard inside of Harry and not Harry himself.
But it was only a possibility, which was why Albus hadn’t shared it with Harry. Best not to get the dear boy’s hopes up and make his commitment to the sacrifice less than perfect.
It abruptly occurred to Albus that he was still standing in the middle of the corridor, and no one had answered his knock. He repeated it, hearing an odd shuffling noise inside the classroom.
“Harry?”
The door swung slowly open. Albus stepped inside.
He saw Harry, standing inside the water-filled circle carved into the middle of the floor. He saw the glyphs. Albus frowned. He didn’t recognize them, either, and having studied Ancient Runes for more than a hundred years, that was most unusual.
Harry turned towards him and opened his eyes, smiling. He had no odd spirals in the middle of them. But he looked wild and distant, unfocused. Albus felt his pulse beating hard in his throat.
“Headmaster,” Harry said, and nodded. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”
“What does that mean, Harry?”
“I mean, I know that the curse on your hand is killing you,” Harry said calmly. “But you don’t have to worry that you’re going to leave Voldemort undefeated. I summoned the ultimate power to defeat him.” He reached out and trailed his hand along the air, which thickened and turned darker the more rapidly as Albus stared. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
The thing that formed there—
It was wavering, gargantuan, formed of some kind of ancient darkness that snapped and flowed together in different shapes, with so many tentacles and wavering features that Albus felt as though his mind was bending under the pressure of looking at it. He raised his hand and locked it across his face, crying out as he backed away so fast that his foot hit the threshold and he tripped, barely catching himself on the wall.
His mind was still trying to part, like a string stretched too long. He rubbed his eyes and took another step away.
“Now,” Harry said, from the midst of a silence that was so deep it was the same as a roar, “we are going to hunt Voldemort.”
There was a flowing, squelching sound that traveled past Albus, and then it was gone.
Albus leaned against the wall, trembling. He lifted his blackened hand and wasn’t surprised to see that the darkness had paled. He had faced a greater darkness than the curse on Voldemort’s ring would ever be able to muster.
And he wanted to weep, now, that he had not done a good enough job of convincing Harry that he all he had to do was face Voldemort and allow himself to be hit by a Killing Curse. That he had allowed the Boy-Who-Lived to cling so hard to life.
It seemed he had doomed the world, instead of saving it.
*
There was a wavering in the air around him. Lord Voldemort broke off his perusal of an ancient scroll from deep inside the Malfoy libraries that proved the superiority of purebloods over all other life-forms and stood.
“Nagini, do you hear that?”
Nagini lifted her head and flicked out her tongue. “I sense the approach of something, Master…”
That Nagini did not know what it was concerned him further. With her capabilities enhanced by the Horcrux inside her, she could usually tell the nature of Dark magic and the like better than he could. Lord Voldemort drew his wand and moved towards the front of the Manor.
He glanced out a window on the way, and stopped. Where he would usually see either an enchanted view of mountains under stars or the real view of the grounds in winter, now he was seeing…
Ocean waves?
Lord Voldemort watched mesmerized as great waves rose and dashed against the Manor in silence. They were lit by a swollen, gibbous moon of shining white that loomed in the sky as if it were much closer to Earth than the true moon above them. His hand tightened on the wand, and he turned to face the Manor’s front doors.
“Lucius!” he called.
No one answered.
The doors of the Manor were open, but not as if they had been torn open, more as if they had been arranged so by the house-elves to honor an invited guest. Lord Voldemort took a few steps closer on silent bare feet.
But sounds were beginning to break the silence, sounds that echoed along the marble walls and bounced in Lord Voldemort’s head like snickering children, bringing unfortunate memories of the orphanage to mind.
Ia, ia, ia…
The maddening syllable repeated over and over again. Lord Voldemort moved another few steps nearer the doors, his wand trained on them.
He stepped on something. He bent down with a splayed hand, not taking his eyes from the doors and the darkness beyond them, and his fingers brushed a squirming, pulpy mass. Lord Voldemort jerked his hand back with an exclamation of disgust, and lowered his gaze after all.
Lucius Malfoy was dead on the floor, his skull broken open and his wand embedded in his brain. His hands clutched the eyes that he had apparently torn from his head. In the blood beside him, someone had scrawled with a broken fingernail, HE IS COMING.
Lord Voldemort turned his attention back to the doors. He told himself that he feared neither man nor beast, but a prickling terror ran up his spine that reminded him of the moment he had first fully understood that death existed.
Something moved in the doorway. It poked into the house and retreated, gibbering.
Lord Voldemort sneered at it, and at his own fear. The Malfoy wards must be keeping it out, and perhaps the body of Lucius sprawled on the floor was even an illusion. He moved closer to the doors, and whipped his wand down. “Show yourself!” he demanded.
The motion came again, and this time, the creature crawled fully into the light.
Lord Voldemort screamed, even the insanity that had shielded his mind so far and kept him focused on his purpose during his years as a wraith snapping before the sight of what crouched on the doorstep. His thoughts fled and he collapsed, and the creature moved slowly forwards, crunching and slurping as it turned his body to liquid.
Nagini coiled and struck in defense of her master, but the Horcrux in her was no match for what had come from beyond the stars.
Ia, ia, ia sang the walls.
*
Severus stood with his wand raised on the Astronomy Tower. Less than a month ago, he and Albus had planned that Albus’s end would most likely come here, and Severus would have to be the one to kill him.
They had planned that, and now…
Now, nothing was going according to plan.
A small figure walked up the stairs and paused near the parapets. The wild hair told Severus that it was Potter, and he felt the old familiar hatred stir in him, but he shoved it down. He had no choice, if what Albus had said was true and they had to combat a creature from beyond the Darkest realms of the Dark Arts that had taken up residence in Potter’s body.
“Where have you been?” Severus demanded. He had to lull the creature, make it think Severus was unaware of its identity until Severus got close enough to strike.
“Beyond.”
The voice made the stones of the Tower thrum with something beyond the stars. Severus controlled his shudder and moved another step closer, gliding, not hurrying. “That is not an acceptable answer.”
“Very well. I went to Malfoy Manor and ate Lord Voldemort.”
Severus narrowed his eyes. “You did not.”
“Very well. I also ate his snake.”
Severus shook his head. Potter had probably gone mad when the creature consumed him. At least that would make Severus’s task easier. He had sworn to protect Potter, long ago, but this thing was not Potter.
He raised his wand to cast the Killing Curse. Perhaps Potter had some mysterious protection, still, from whatever spell Lily had cast, but this creature would not.
The thing tilted its head, and green eyes looked up at him, piercing into his brain, dragging memories forwards that Severus would have given anything not to see again. He collapsed, one hand rising to his eyes. He did not scream.
“Ah,” said the creature in a thoughtful voice. “I sensed the shard of more than one soul when I ate the snake. It did not occur to me to look within my host to find a shard as well.” There was a grinding sound.
Severus raised his head, groping for his wand, wondering hazily if the creature was forcing open the stones of the Tower to disappear down some secret passage. What he saw made him fall back, vomiting.
The creature was turning Potter’s skull like a door, reaching into some molten mass of darkness that beat within his head like a heart. One tentacle grasped and lifted high a screaming, dripping mass. The toothed maw that gaped to receive it was the maw of some great sea creature; it was not human, had never been human.
By the time Severus recovered from his vomiting fit and staggered to his feet, he was alone on the Astronomy Tower.
*
Minerva drew her wand and walked slowly towards the noise around the corner. They were on the seventh floor—she had Severus and Filius behind her—and up ahead was nothing but a blank stretch of corridor with a tapestry of a foolish wizard trying to teach trolls to dance.
Or so Minerva would have said, until Albus had confirmed that this was the entrance to the Room of Requirement.
Whatever Harry Potter had become, it was imperative that they prevent him from learning the secrets of the room. He might be able to conjure anything he wanted, including a weapon that would kill everyone in Hogwarts.
Minerva glanced over her shoulder. Filius nodded determinedly back to her. Severus, lurking at the back, tightened his grip on his wand. At least that meant he would probably stay with them. He would be humiliated by what the creature had done to him, and want to get his own back.
Minerva grimaced as she stepped around the corner. I wish I could count on him more than that, but he is who he is.
The door to the Room of Requirement stood open, as Albus had feared it would. From beyond it came the crashing noises. Minerva moved forwards under the cover of that sound, although she knew the creature that had come to inhabit Harry’s body probably had other methods of detecting her.
She was a little startled to see the edge of what looked like a room full of rubbish. What would the creature want in there?
On the other hand, perhaps the room had simply granted it the hiding place of a weapon rather than the actual weapon. The creature might not have known enough to make the wording more specific.
Minerva began to thread her way through piles of discarded robes, cabinets of headless curios, stacks of torn books, and what looked like a truly astonishing number of half-smashed magical mirrors. She could hear Filius casting, although he did it silently, so she wasn’t sure what the spells were. Perhaps some to guard against the shards of glass on the floor.
They moved on, silently, and came around the corner.
The creature was a flowing mass of darkness imposed over the top of Harry’s body. It had two undulating arms that looked like tentacles studded with mouths, and they flailed and grasped and flung apart every object they came in contact with. At the moment, they were almost to a cabinet with a bust on top. And suddenly they were standing upright and quivering, aiming at the bust.
Minerva dared not hope the thing hadn’t sensed them. She still gathered Severus and Filius with her eyes and cast on a murmured count of three.
Her most powerful Transfiguration slammed into the creature, trying to force the tentacles back into the shape of arms. Her hope was to restrain the creature so that it could be pinioned in one place and an exorcism performed. Perhaps that would inflict the least amount of damage on Harry, and they would be able to restore his sanity.
Her Transfiguration splashed aside from the creature like water and landed harmlessly on the floor. The tentacles went on reaching up, and grabbed the diadem that was hanging from the crown of the bust.
There was a soundless scream. Minerva staggered back, deafened by the despair in that wail, clapping her hands over her ears. She was yelling even as she did so, trying to get away from the stunned shock and convince herself to return to the battle. The scream had probably been Harry’s.
The creature threw the diadem into its maw, and munched on it.
There was more screaming. Minerva winced to imagine what the diadem was probably doing to poor Harry’s teeth and how much healing he would need, and took down her hands from her ears to cast again.
The creature gave every sign of ignoring what she had done. Instead, it turned and flowed towards the doors.
Minerva closed her eyes in sheer self-defense, having heard Severus’s and Albus’s accounts. The creature brushed her with coolness and sound like distant chanting voices and a smell of ocean.
Then it was past, and there was nothing left in the room with them but the sound of slightly hysterical giggling. Minerva turned around, dread pulsing in her heart.
Filius beamed at her, said, “It was grey!”, and then fainted face-down.
Minerva and Severus gathered him up without speaking. They would take him to the hospital wing and hope that he could recover from the close encounter with whatever that—thing had been.
*
There was an official investigation. In Griphook’s experience, there was always an official investigation when something went wrong, in this case an intruder breaking into Gringotts and trying to attack the vaults.
And succeeding. Griphook knew that five years ago, someone had broken into the bank, taken nothing, and managed to escape, but this one had been successful.
He stood stolidly before Director Ragnok, ignoring the sounds of shifting behind him, which for his people were as loud as screams. Griphook was the only person who had seen the creature and who was currently conscious and sane, making him the only choice for witness. On the stone benches grouped around the room, a hundred goblins leaned forwards.
“Tell me,” the director said.
Griphook nodded and took a deep breath, not because he planned to lie to his supervisor, but because there was only so much about the attack that one could put into words.
“I’d just got back from bringing a customer down to his vault,” he said. “Mr. Runcorn. I started to hear odd rumblings, and turned around to stare into the tunnels, thinking there was an avalanche there. I think it was the only thing that saved my sanity, because it meant I didn’t look at the thing directly when it burst through the doors.”
“You think it was a Creature From Beyond the Stars?”
“Yes, sir,” Griphook said. The murmuring started up again. Goblins had wards up against Creatures From Beyond the Stars.
For Griphook to admit that he thought the thing had been one of those meant he was accusing expert goblin wardmasters of failure.
Director Ragnok’s eyes were grim. “Go on, please, Goblin Griphook.”
Griphook inclined his head. “I heard screaming. And I heard voices chanting a song that my mother once sang to me when I was a child.”
He could feel some of the others sitting up and taking notice. Griphook’s mother, Gnarot of the Silversmith clan, had been a renowned wardmaster herself.
“A song,” Director Ragnok said.
“Yes. A song that the Creatures From Beyond the Stars sing when they draw near. She taught it to me so that I could recognize if I was dealing with one of their cultists. She never expected a creature itself to show up, I don’t think.”
That made a few of them mutter and shift some more, but Griphook knew his rights, and continued to stand in front of his director. There was no proof that his mother had faced down a Creature From Beyond the Stars herself, or had dealings with them. This was still the presumption of people who had never known his mother.
Griphook had. She would have drawn a knife across his throat and her own before she dealt with one of the Creatures From Beyond the Stars. She had studied them only to have more success in warding against them.
Director Ragnok coughed, drawing Griphook’s attention back to him. “And then what happened, Goblin Griphook?”
“I hid,” Griphook said. There was no shame in admitting that when the opponent was a creature from beyond the bounds of reality, able to shape the reality in the area around itself. “But I know it was aiming for the vaults. And after some time, I heard the song again, and the creature passed me. I assume it got what it came for.”
“Why did it not consume you?” someone in the audience blurted out.
Griphook sneered at them. “I knew better than to look directly at it.”
“So we have to fight this thing blind?” asked what sounded like a different person.
Griphook stepped back and stood with his arms folded. He would let others tell this young idiot that fighting a Creature From Beyond the Stars was sheerest folly. All they could do was treat the goblins it had injured in its passage and hope they would recover, and replace the dragon it had apparently killed.
And the door of the Lestrange vault that it had apparently melted to slag. Griphook knew there would be no question of replacing anything the creature had stolen. Gringotts vaults were warded and secured in many ways, but their contracts made no promises about defending their clients’ possessions from the Masters of Reality.
Ia, ia, sang a voice in the distant parts of Griphook’s mind.
He slammed the door of his thoughts swiftly shut on it.
*
When the thing was gone, Kreacher crept slowly out of the corner where he had retreated and stood there trembling, staring at the hook where Master Regulus’s locket had hung so long.
The only thing left was a black mark on the floor. It wasn’t a stain. It wasn’t a burn. It was a thing.
Kreacher swallowed and spent a moment grasping at the air with empty hands. He had no task now. He had had a task all these years. He had failed at the task. But now he had no task.
He wandered through the house for long moments, and he stood in front of the cabinet that had contained the locket for a while. He stood in front of the tapestry and stared at the date of Master Regulus’s death on it. He stood in front of the portrait of his Mistress and stared at her face, which had gone silent after the thing had crawled back. Her hair had turned an odd yellow color.
Somehow, Kreacher did not think she would speak again.
He wandered back to his corner and stood staring at the hook again. Then a thought came together in his mind, and he nodded slowly.
He didn’t know what the thing had been. He didn’t know where it had come from. But he knew one thing. It had destroyed Master Regulus’s locket, which Kreacher had failed to do for years, and fulfilled the last orders Master Regulus had laid on Kreacher.
That meant it deserved something from him.
Before nightfall, Kreacher had built a small black altar in a corner of the kitchen and lit the black candles Mistress had once used for her rituals, and which Kreacher had found in a corner of the attic. He cast himself on the floor in front of the altar and tried to recreate, as much as he could with a small, single voice, the chant he had heard when the creature crawled into the house.
He would worship it, and perhaps it would come back someday and tell him its desires.
*
He came back together again in the dungeon classroom, in the place where he had summoned the beast.
Harry knelt on the floor, shaking and swaying. He could feel black blood dripping from the scar on his forehead, where the creature he had summoned had consumed the—Horcrux. The word sat in his brain like one he had always known, scattered among the scars of horrors unimaginable and the sounds of songs so beautiful that he wanted to weep.
He had spent all summer brooding on the prophecy. How was he supposed to fulfill it? How was he supposed to kill Voldemort when he was so much younger and weaker and had no training? And how was he supposed to keep any more people from dying like Sirius had died?
He had had a little hope that Dumbledore would tell him the truth, but then he had come back to school for his sixth year and discovered that the Headmaster was still keeping secrets. Now he knew what kind of secrets. About the Horcruxes.
Harry supposed Dumbledore had sort of had a reason. He wouldn’t want to make Harry despair about carrying around a part of his mortal enemy’s soul.
But now Harry had darker things to carry. The memory of Voldemort was nothing against the memory of eating Voldemort.
Harry had come to the Room of Requirement and demanded the quickest and most powerful way to destroy Voldemort, no matter what the cost to himself. The Room had obliged with books that had instructions for calling out to the Great Ones and setting up an altar.
Harry would need to worship them for the rest of his life.
A giggle slipped from between his lips, and he stood up slowly. But it was all right. It was all right. He had destroyed Voldemort, he had fulfilled the prophecy, and he would keep anyone from dying like Sirius had died.
Then Harry frowned. It was true that Voldemort or Nagini would never kill anyone again, but it had actually been Bellatrix who’d killed Sirius. What had he done to prevent someone from dying at the wand of a Death Eater?
Well, he would have to do some more, that was all.
Ia, ia, sang the voice in the back of his mind, and Harry smiled.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen
Content Notes: AU, violence, gore, angst, dark humor, Cthulhu mythos, character death, insanity
Rating: R (for violence)
Wordcount: 4100
Summary: Turns out that there are worse things than Voldemort. Like what Harry summons to defeat him. And the thing Harry becomes in the process of defeating him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season,” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Joefromlegal requested Harry becoming a Cthulhu cultist to defeat Voldemort.
The Creature That Crawled Chaotically Out of Space and Sat on the Doorstep
“Harry, what are you doing?”
Hermione didn’t know what to think as she stepped into the small room in the dungeons that Harry had apparently converted into some kind of workspace. The floor was scrawled with glyphs, but not ones she recognized. And having taken Ancient Runes for four years, Hermione was pretty sure she recognized most of them.
Harry was standing in the middle of a circle made by a channel carved into the floor, and filled with bubbling water. He was swaying back and forth, arms extended, eyes closed as he—sang. Or sort of sang. It was a croaking sound that seemed to have incorporated the bubbling of the water into it.
“Harry!”
Hermione wanted to know what Harry was doing, and why he hadn’t trusted her with the secret of it, and where he had learned the glyphs. But something that wasn’t Harry opened his eyes and looked at her. His eyes seemed to spin with white spirals in the green, he had no pupils, and a voice spoke from his lips that said, “Leave.”
Hermione had been a Gryffindor for six years. But that didn’t make her stupid.
She turned and ran, aiming for Professor Dumbledore’s office. He would know what to do.
*
Albus frowned as he knocked on the door of the dungeon classroom Miss Granger had told him about. It seemed strange to him that Harry would feel the need to summon some kind of creature, which was her description of the ritual indicated. Were not their lessons about Voldemort’s Horcruxes going well? Sooner or later, Harry would realize that he was one and then he needed to go gracefully to his death at Tom’s hands.
And, well, Albus had ideas on how Harry might be able to return alive. It was possible that Tom’s Killing Curse would kill the soul-shard inside of Harry and not Harry himself.
But it was only a possibility, which was why Albus hadn’t shared it with Harry. Best not to get the dear boy’s hopes up and make his commitment to the sacrifice less than perfect.
It abruptly occurred to Albus that he was still standing in the middle of the corridor, and no one had answered his knock. He repeated it, hearing an odd shuffling noise inside the classroom.
“Harry?”
The door swung slowly open. Albus stepped inside.
He saw Harry, standing inside the water-filled circle carved into the middle of the floor. He saw the glyphs. Albus frowned. He didn’t recognize them, either, and having studied Ancient Runes for more than a hundred years, that was most unusual.
Harry turned towards him and opened his eyes, smiling. He had no odd spirals in the middle of them. But he looked wild and distant, unfocused. Albus felt his pulse beating hard in his throat.
“Headmaster,” Harry said, and nodded. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”
“What does that mean, Harry?”
“I mean, I know that the curse on your hand is killing you,” Harry said calmly. “But you don’t have to worry that you’re going to leave Voldemort undefeated. I summoned the ultimate power to defeat him.” He reached out and trailed his hand along the air, which thickened and turned darker the more rapidly as Albus stared. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
The thing that formed there—
It was wavering, gargantuan, formed of some kind of ancient darkness that snapped and flowed together in different shapes, with so many tentacles and wavering features that Albus felt as though his mind was bending under the pressure of looking at it. He raised his hand and locked it across his face, crying out as he backed away so fast that his foot hit the threshold and he tripped, barely catching himself on the wall.
His mind was still trying to part, like a string stretched too long. He rubbed his eyes and took another step away.
“Now,” Harry said, from the midst of a silence that was so deep it was the same as a roar, “we are going to hunt Voldemort.”
There was a flowing, squelching sound that traveled past Albus, and then it was gone.
Albus leaned against the wall, trembling. He lifted his blackened hand and wasn’t surprised to see that the darkness had paled. He had faced a greater darkness than the curse on Voldemort’s ring would ever be able to muster.
And he wanted to weep, now, that he had not done a good enough job of convincing Harry that he all he had to do was face Voldemort and allow himself to be hit by a Killing Curse. That he had allowed the Boy-Who-Lived to cling so hard to life.
It seemed he had doomed the world, instead of saving it.
*
There was a wavering in the air around him. Lord Voldemort broke off his perusal of an ancient scroll from deep inside the Malfoy libraries that proved the superiority of purebloods over all other life-forms and stood.
“Nagini, do you hear that?”
Nagini lifted her head and flicked out her tongue. “I sense the approach of something, Master…”
That Nagini did not know what it was concerned him further. With her capabilities enhanced by the Horcrux inside her, she could usually tell the nature of Dark magic and the like better than he could. Lord Voldemort drew his wand and moved towards the front of the Manor.
He glanced out a window on the way, and stopped. Where he would usually see either an enchanted view of mountains under stars or the real view of the grounds in winter, now he was seeing…
Ocean waves?
Lord Voldemort watched mesmerized as great waves rose and dashed against the Manor in silence. They were lit by a swollen, gibbous moon of shining white that loomed in the sky as if it were much closer to Earth than the true moon above them. His hand tightened on the wand, and he turned to face the Manor’s front doors.
“Lucius!” he called.
No one answered.
The doors of the Manor were open, but not as if they had been torn open, more as if they had been arranged so by the house-elves to honor an invited guest. Lord Voldemort took a few steps closer on silent bare feet.
But sounds were beginning to break the silence, sounds that echoed along the marble walls and bounced in Lord Voldemort’s head like snickering children, bringing unfortunate memories of the orphanage to mind.
Ia, ia, ia…
The maddening syllable repeated over and over again. Lord Voldemort moved another few steps nearer the doors, his wand trained on them.
He stepped on something. He bent down with a splayed hand, not taking his eyes from the doors and the darkness beyond them, and his fingers brushed a squirming, pulpy mass. Lord Voldemort jerked his hand back with an exclamation of disgust, and lowered his gaze after all.
Lucius Malfoy was dead on the floor, his skull broken open and his wand embedded in his brain. His hands clutched the eyes that he had apparently torn from his head. In the blood beside him, someone had scrawled with a broken fingernail, HE IS COMING.
Lord Voldemort turned his attention back to the doors. He told himself that he feared neither man nor beast, but a prickling terror ran up his spine that reminded him of the moment he had first fully understood that death existed.
Something moved in the doorway. It poked into the house and retreated, gibbering.
Lord Voldemort sneered at it, and at his own fear. The Malfoy wards must be keeping it out, and perhaps the body of Lucius sprawled on the floor was even an illusion. He moved closer to the doors, and whipped his wand down. “Show yourself!” he demanded.
The motion came again, and this time, the creature crawled fully into the light.
Lord Voldemort screamed, even the insanity that had shielded his mind so far and kept him focused on his purpose during his years as a wraith snapping before the sight of what crouched on the doorstep. His thoughts fled and he collapsed, and the creature moved slowly forwards, crunching and slurping as it turned his body to liquid.
Nagini coiled and struck in defense of her master, but the Horcrux in her was no match for what had come from beyond the stars.
Ia, ia, ia sang the walls.
*
Severus stood with his wand raised on the Astronomy Tower. Less than a month ago, he and Albus had planned that Albus’s end would most likely come here, and Severus would have to be the one to kill him.
They had planned that, and now…
Now, nothing was going according to plan.
A small figure walked up the stairs and paused near the parapets. The wild hair told Severus that it was Potter, and he felt the old familiar hatred stir in him, but he shoved it down. He had no choice, if what Albus had said was true and they had to combat a creature from beyond the Darkest realms of the Dark Arts that had taken up residence in Potter’s body.
“Where have you been?” Severus demanded. He had to lull the creature, make it think Severus was unaware of its identity until Severus got close enough to strike.
“Beyond.”
The voice made the stones of the Tower thrum with something beyond the stars. Severus controlled his shudder and moved another step closer, gliding, not hurrying. “That is not an acceptable answer.”
“Very well. I went to Malfoy Manor and ate Lord Voldemort.”
Severus narrowed his eyes. “You did not.”
“Very well. I also ate his snake.”
Severus shook his head. Potter had probably gone mad when the creature consumed him. At least that would make Severus’s task easier. He had sworn to protect Potter, long ago, but this thing was not Potter.
He raised his wand to cast the Killing Curse. Perhaps Potter had some mysterious protection, still, from whatever spell Lily had cast, but this creature would not.
The thing tilted its head, and green eyes looked up at him, piercing into his brain, dragging memories forwards that Severus would have given anything not to see again. He collapsed, one hand rising to his eyes. He did not scream.
“Ah,” said the creature in a thoughtful voice. “I sensed the shard of more than one soul when I ate the snake. It did not occur to me to look within my host to find a shard as well.” There was a grinding sound.
Severus raised his head, groping for his wand, wondering hazily if the creature was forcing open the stones of the Tower to disappear down some secret passage. What he saw made him fall back, vomiting.
The creature was turning Potter’s skull like a door, reaching into some molten mass of darkness that beat within his head like a heart. One tentacle grasped and lifted high a screaming, dripping mass. The toothed maw that gaped to receive it was the maw of some great sea creature; it was not human, had never been human.
By the time Severus recovered from his vomiting fit and staggered to his feet, he was alone on the Astronomy Tower.
*
Minerva drew her wand and walked slowly towards the noise around the corner. They were on the seventh floor—she had Severus and Filius behind her—and up ahead was nothing but a blank stretch of corridor with a tapestry of a foolish wizard trying to teach trolls to dance.
Or so Minerva would have said, until Albus had confirmed that this was the entrance to the Room of Requirement.
Whatever Harry Potter had become, it was imperative that they prevent him from learning the secrets of the room. He might be able to conjure anything he wanted, including a weapon that would kill everyone in Hogwarts.
Minerva glanced over her shoulder. Filius nodded determinedly back to her. Severus, lurking at the back, tightened his grip on his wand. At least that meant he would probably stay with them. He would be humiliated by what the creature had done to him, and want to get his own back.
Minerva grimaced as she stepped around the corner. I wish I could count on him more than that, but he is who he is.
The door to the Room of Requirement stood open, as Albus had feared it would. From beyond it came the crashing noises. Minerva moved forwards under the cover of that sound, although she knew the creature that had come to inhabit Harry’s body probably had other methods of detecting her.
She was a little startled to see the edge of what looked like a room full of rubbish. What would the creature want in there?
On the other hand, perhaps the room had simply granted it the hiding place of a weapon rather than the actual weapon. The creature might not have known enough to make the wording more specific.
Minerva began to thread her way through piles of discarded robes, cabinets of headless curios, stacks of torn books, and what looked like a truly astonishing number of half-smashed magical mirrors. She could hear Filius casting, although he did it silently, so she wasn’t sure what the spells were. Perhaps some to guard against the shards of glass on the floor.
They moved on, silently, and came around the corner.
The creature was a flowing mass of darkness imposed over the top of Harry’s body. It had two undulating arms that looked like tentacles studded with mouths, and they flailed and grasped and flung apart every object they came in contact with. At the moment, they were almost to a cabinet with a bust on top. And suddenly they were standing upright and quivering, aiming at the bust.
Minerva dared not hope the thing hadn’t sensed them. She still gathered Severus and Filius with her eyes and cast on a murmured count of three.
Her most powerful Transfiguration slammed into the creature, trying to force the tentacles back into the shape of arms. Her hope was to restrain the creature so that it could be pinioned in one place and an exorcism performed. Perhaps that would inflict the least amount of damage on Harry, and they would be able to restore his sanity.
Her Transfiguration splashed aside from the creature like water and landed harmlessly on the floor. The tentacles went on reaching up, and grabbed the diadem that was hanging from the crown of the bust.
There was a soundless scream. Minerva staggered back, deafened by the despair in that wail, clapping her hands over her ears. She was yelling even as she did so, trying to get away from the stunned shock and convince herself to return to the battle. The scream had probably been Harry’s.
The creature threw the diadem into its maw, and munched on it.
There was more screaming. Minerva winced to imagine what the diadem was probably doing to poor Harry’s teeth and how much healing he would need, and took down her hands from her ears to cast again.
The creature gave every sign of ignoring what she had done. Instead, it turned and flowed towards the doors.
Minerva closed her eyes in sheer self-defense, having heard Severus’s and Albus’s accounts. The creature brushed her with coolness and sound like distant chanting voices and a smell of ocean.
Then it was past, and there was nothing left in the room with them but the sound of slightly hysterical giggling. Minerva turned around, dread pulsing in her heart.
Filius beamed at her, said, “It was grey!”, and then fainted face-down.
Minerva and Severus gathered him up without speaking. They would take him to the hospital wing and hope that he could recover from the close encounter with whatever that—thing had been.
*
There was an official investigation. In Griphook’s experience, there was always an official investigation when something went wrong, in this case an intruder breaking into Gringotts and trying to attack the vaults.
And succeeding. Griphook knew that five years ago, someone had broken into the bank, taken nothing, and managed to escape, but this one had been successful.
He stood stolidly before Director Ragnok, ignoring the sounds of shifting behind him, which for his people were as loud as screams. Griphook was the only person who had seen the creature and who was currently conscious and sane, making him the only choice for witness. On the stone benches grouped around the room, a hundred goblins leaned forwards.
“Tell me,” the director said.
Griphook nodded and took a deep breath, not because he planned to lie to his supervisor, but because there was only so much about the attack that one could put into words.
“I’d just got back from bringing a customer down to his vault,” he said. “Mr. Runcorn. I started to hear odd rumblings, and turned around to stare into the tunnels, thinking there was an avalanche there. I think it was the only thing that saved my sanity, because it meant I didn’t look at the thing directly when it burst through the doors.”
“You think it was a Creature From Beyond the Stars?”
“Yes, sir,” Griphook said. The murmuring started up again. Goblins had wards up against Creatures From Beyond the Stars.
For Griphook to admit that he thought the thing had been one of those meant he was accusing expert goblin wardmasters of failure.
Director Ragnok’s eyes were grim. “Go on, please, Goblin Griphook.”
Griphook inclined his head. “I heard screaming. And I heard voices chanting a song that my mother once sang to me when I was a child.”
He could feel some of the others sitting up and taking notice. Griphook’s mother, Gnarot of the Silversmith clan, had been a renowned wardmaster herself.
“A song,” Director Ragnok said.
“Yes. A song that the Creatures From Beyond the Stars sing when they draw near. She taught it to me so that I could recognize if I was dealing with one of their cultists. She never expected a creature itself to show up, I don’t think.”
That made a few of them mutter and shift some more, but Griphook knew his rights, and continued to stand in front of his director. There was no proof that his mother had faced down a Creature From Beyond the Stars herself, or had dealings with them. This was still the presumption of people who had never known his mother.
Griphook had. She would have drawn a knife across his throat and her own before she dealt with one of the Creatures From Beyond the Stars. She had studied them only to have more success in warding against them.
Director Ragnok coughed, drawing Griphook’s attention back to him. “And then what happened, Goblin Griphook?”
“I hid,” Griphook said. There was no shame in admitting that when the opponent was a creature from beyond the bounds of reality, able to shape the reality in the area around itself. “But I know it was aiming for the vaults. And after some time, I heard the song again, and the creature passed me. I assume it got what it came for.”
“Why did it not consume you?” someone in the audience blurted out.
Griphook sneered at them. “I knew better than to look directly at it.”
“So we have to fight this thing blind?” asked what sounded like a different person.
Griphook stepped back and stood with his arms folded. He would let others tell this young idiot that fighting a Creature From Beyond the Stars was sheerest folly. All they could do was treat the goblins it had injured in its passage and hope they would recover, and replace the dragon it had apparently killed.
And the door of the Lestrange vault that it had apparently melted to slag. Griphook knew there would be no question of replacing anything the creature had stolen. Gringotts vaults were warded and secured in many ways, but their contracts made no promises about defending their clients’ possessions from the Masters of Reality.
Ia, ia, sang a voice in the distant parts of Griphook’s mind.
He slammed the door of his thoughts swiftly shut on it.
*
When the thing was gone, Kreacher crept slowly out of the corner where he had retreated and stood there trembling, staring at the hook where Master Regulus’s locket had hung so long.
The only thing left was a black mark on the floor. It wasn’t a stain. It wasn’t a burn. It was a thing.
Kreacher swallowed and spent a moment grasping at the air with empty hands. He had no task now. He had had a task all these years. He had failed at the task. But now he had no task.
He wandered through the house for long moments, and he stood in front of the cabinet that had contained the locket for a while. He stood in front of the tapestry and stared at the date of Master Regulus’s death on it. He stood in front of the portrait of his Mistress and stared at her face, which had gone silent after the thing had crawled back. Her hair had turned an odd yellow color.
Somehow, Kreacher did not think she would speak again.
He wandered back to his corner and stood staring at the hook again. Then a thought came together in his mind, and he nodded slowly.
He didn’t know what the thing had been. He didn’t know where it had come from. But he knew one thing. It had destroyed Master Regulus’s locket, which Kreacher had failed to do for years, and fulfilled the last orders Master Regulus had laid on Kreacher.
That meant it deserved something from him.
Before nightfall, Kreacher had built a small black altar in a corner of the kitchen and lit the black candles Mistress had once used for her rituals, and which Kreacher had found in a corner of the attic. He cast himself on the floor in front of the altar and tried to recreate, as much as he could with a small, single voice, the chant he had heard when the creature crawled into the house.
He would worship it, and perhaps it would come back someday and tell him its desires.
*
He came back together again in the dungeon classroom, in the place where he had summoned the beast.
Harry knelt on the floor, shaking and swaying. He could feel black blood dripping from the scar on his forehead, where the creature he had summoned had consumed the—Horcrux. The word sat in his brain like one he had always known, scattered among the scars of horrors unimaginable and the sounds of songs so beautiful that he wanted to weep.
He had spent all summer brooding on the prophecy. How was he supposed to fulfill it? How was he supposed to kill Voldemort when he was so much younger and weaker and had no training? And how was he supposed to keep any more people from dying like Sirius had died?
He had had a little hope that Dumbledore would tell him the truth, but then he had come back to school for his sixth year and discovered that the Headmaster was still keeping secrets. Now he knew what kind of secrets. About the Horcruxes.
Harry supposed Dumbledore had sort of had a reason. He wouldn’t want to make Harry despair about carrying around a part of his mortal enemy’s soul.
But now Harry had darker things to carry. The memory of Voldemort was nothing against the memory of eating Voldemort.
Harry had come to the Room of Requirement and demanded the quickest and most powerful way to destroy Voldemort, no matter what the cost to himself. The Room had obliged with books that had instructions for calling out to the Great Ones and setting up an altar.
Harry would need to worship them for the rest of his life.
A giggle slipped from between his lips, and he stood up slowly. But it was all right. It was all right. He had destroyed Voldemort, he had fulfilled the prophecy, and he would keep anyone from dying like Sirius had died.
Then Harry frowned. It was true that Voldemort or Nagini would never kill anyone again, but it had actually been Bellatrix who’d killed Sirius. What had he done to prevent someone from dying at the wand of a Death Eater?
Well, he would have to do some more, that was all.
Ia, ia, sang the voice in the back of his mind, and Harry smiled.
The End.
