lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of the story.

Chapter Fourteen—The Future Path

“Is it true that you turned Flint into a Squib?”

“No, I turned him into a human.”

“But he’s dying now, right?”

“No, he’s alive, but he doesn’t have his magic anymore.”

Harry kept his voice light as he answered the questions that had peppered him since they’d got back to Hogwarts. These were mostly people who had been helping rebuild the school but Harry hadn’t interacted with regularly, some Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs and a few Slytherins or Gryffindors from younger years. All of them stared at him as if they didn’t know quite whether to believe him.

Then Hermione showed up, marching down the corridor outside the Room of Requirement where Harry and Theo had been helping to repair the wall, and the latest cluster of young Gryffindors yelped and scattered.

“I didn’t know Granger was that frightening to people in her own House,” Theo muttered as he straightened up and moved to Harry’s side.

“I reckon there are lots of things you don’t know about Hermione.”

Theo rolled his eyes at Harry in the moment before Hermione came up and halted in front of them, looking a little frazzled.

“Harry, is it really true that Flint turned into a Squib?”

Harry nodded solemnly. “I didn’t want to turn him into one, but his magic and his body and his health were connected. Dying or staying a troll or losing his magic were the only real choices.”

“What did the Wizengamot say?”

Harry shrugged. “Flint swore an oath that he wouldn’t try to get me in legal trouble after this, and neither would any other members of his family. That was all I really cared about. And I warned him what would probably happen if I pulled my magic back from him. They didn’t even know for sure what would happen, since it was sort of unexplored magical theory territory. But Flint chose to do it anyway.”

Hermione stared at him, then shook her head. “I wouldn’t necessarily want to be transformed into a magical creature, but I would choose it over losing my magic! Some of the purebloods are really weird.”

“Granger.”

Theo’s voice had gone polite and flat. Harry frowned at him sideways. There was no reason for him to sound like that when talking to Hermione, and if he persisted in talking like that, then he and Harry would have to have words.

“Yes, Nott?” Hermione sounded as though she were going to draw her wand any second. Harry turned and frowned at her in turn, although he had to admit Hermione had more reason to sound like that than Theo did.

“It’s not polite to refer to the Blood of Avalon as magical creatures. That term is used to make us sound like animals, unworthy of consideration on the same level that humans are. Capable of being bought and sold.” Theo’s voice was soft and relaxed, but his claws pricked into Harry’s shoulders, making him wince in discomfort. Theo promptly pulled his hands back. “Please don’t use the term again.”

“Oh,” Hermione said, her eyes wide. “Yes, of course it would be. Sorry. I won’t use it again.” She looked apologetically at Harry. “I really didn’t mean to make you sound less than human, Harry. I’m just used to the term.”

Harry didn’t shake his head, because that might make her think he was rejecting her apology, but he did manage a small smile. “Thanks, Hermione.”

She nodded at them and said, “Well, Professor McGonagall wanted my help repairing some damage to the kitchens,” and set off at the same brisk marching pace she’d used to come up to them. When she was around the corner, Harry turned and raised his eyebrows at Theo.

“She’s one of the few humans who would actually appreciate the correction and cease using the term,” Theo said.

“I didn’t know you cared one way or the other what the humans did.”

Theo smiled, and his eyes flared with the gold that Harry was used to seeing when he was most relaxed. “I care about some of them. The ones who would try to make life difficult for us, for example. And the ones who are friends with you.” He reached up and brushed Harry’s hair back from his forehead. “They should be protected.”

“You wouldn’t care if Ron and Hermione disappeared tomorrow,” Harry said, voice fonder than he’d meant it to be.

“I would care because of the impact on you. Yes, I wouldn’t generally do more than shrug at the death of Gryffindors, but you value them.” Theo stepped forwards, crowding Harry against the scorched tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. “And I intend to spend the rest of my life with you, so what matters to you matters to me.”

Harry smiled at him helplessly, lifting his hands to Theo’s cheeks. “And I intend to spend the rest of my life with you, but I feel like I know so little about you,” he whispered. “Will you tell me, Theo? About the people who matter to you?”

“You saw my memories. You know there isn’t anyone who matters the way you do.”

“That doesn’t mean there’s no one.”

Theo lowered his eyes for a moment. Then he nodded. “Someday, I’ll tell you. For now, let’s finish the work and get lunch from the elves. I don’t want to eat in the Great Hall, and I have something to show you.”

*

Harry was just as glad that whatever Theo had to show him was in the Forest. Walking through the deep green shadows, the smell of summer in his nostrils, relaxed a part of him he hadn’t realized was tense.

Sidhe were creatures of the forest shadows, Harry had read in a book yesterday. He lifted his head and took another deep breath of cool air.

“Here.”

Harry stepped past what seemed to be a woven gate of branches, and halted, blinking. In front of him was a golden pool, so bright that his first instinct was to wonder who had dumped a cauldron of Felix Felicis here, and why.

“What is this, Theo?”

“A place I found in the first few days after I transformed, when I was thinking about what to do if you never let me be with you.” Theo settled back on his haunches on the pool’s shore and reached out a hand. A shadow, more than a reflection, moved above the liquid and then dropped towards the surface. “Let me show you.”

Harry settled down next to Theo and watched with intense interest as the surface of the pool rippled, reacting before Theo even touched it. His hand grew claws, and it was the claws that came to rest on that surface.

The gold sparked and moved, light gathering around Theo’s fingers. Harry tensed, but reminded himself that Theo had touched this pool before, and nothing had happened. He wouldn’t have done anything that would endanger him.

Theo bent over and breathed across the surface of the pool. It danced impatiently, and then coalesced into a shining image.

Harry’s breath caught as he stared at a satyr standing in the middle of a brilliantly green field that might have been somewhere in Avalon. He had thought Theo was wild, but this being was far more so. His golden eyes gleamed as though they were going to lift out of the pool and hit Harry like thrown weapons. His shoulders and face and legs bristled with great curls of shaggy dark fur.

“Who is that?” Harry whispered.

“I believe it’s one of my ancestors.”

Harry blinked and shot him a startled glance. It wasn’t a bad guess, but… “Why would you think that, instead of some other satyr who isn’t related to you?”

“Watch.” Theo bent and breathed across the pool’s surface again.

Harry saw the same satyr, or at least he looked the same, dancing in a ballroom with a tall woman who had long brown hair and an expression of fixed sadness on her face. It was even more startling to see such a free being in such a confined place. At the end of the dance, the woman bowed to the satyr, but didn’t leave, instead apparently talking to him. The pool didn’t give them sound, though.

“Do you know that woman?”

“I should. That’s Ladella Nott, one of the founders of my line. Her portrait hangs outside my father’s study, although she’s rarely in it.”

Harry nodded. “What do you think this pool is? I doubt it was just waiting here to show us our Avalon ancestors.”

Theo shook his head with a smile. “No. Watch what happens when I do this, Harry.” He pulled back his left sleeve—vanishing his claws for a moment—and turned his left forearm so that it faced the pool.

Harry leaped back as the surface turned black. And then it turned a sickly green, and formed the Dark Mark as Harry had seen it looming in the sky after the Quidditch World Cup.

“You think this is…”

“The leftover residue of the Dark Marks that you purged from us and cured us of dying from? Yes, I do.”

That hadn’t been quite what Harry was going to say, but he reckoned it worked well enough. He licked his lips. “Why did it settle here? Why would it show you these things?”

“I can tell you tales, my lord. I don’t know if they would be the truth.”

Harry leaned a little nearer, not minding the title right now. Theo was watching him with eyes so bright and free that Harry half-expected him to melt into the forest like a tale himself. “Then tell me the stories you know, satyr.”

A shudder ran through Theo, and it occurred to Harry that they might play some games later, if Theo appreciated being called that. But Theo sat straight upright and murmured, “The Blood of Avalon knew they were being driven out of the world. They went because they would not stay in a place with humans who hated instead of welcoming them. But they took pity on the children who would continue to be born for a time with large doses of their blood and no way of expressing it. They said that light would come to them when they needed it.”

“Light?”

“Liquid light. Like the fountain said to play before the throne of the highest Sidhe in Avalon.”

Harry looked at the golden pool with more wonder than before. “Do you think it would show me anything? If it’s formed from the remnants of the Dark Mark? I didn’t have one.”

“You are Sidhe, and you were intimately involved in the creation of this pool even though you don’t have the Dark Mark. I think you only have to ask, my lord.”

Harry leaned closer to the pool, holding out his hand and breathing across the surface the way Theo had done. For a moment, the air between him and the pool seemed to stretch taut, and he felt a humming charge in his bones.

Then it flared like the sun, and Theo cried out. Harry found himself able to stare straight into the flare without looking away, and he felt a smile creeping down his mouth.

The golden light rose and danced, forming a three-dimensional figure instead of an image. Harry caught his breath. This being was far taller than Harry himself, taller even than Voldemort, with silver-feather hair that shone like true mental and the kinds of angles to his face that Harry could only feel beneath his skin at a touch.

But his eyes, when he turned them on Harry, were not greener than Harry’s own.

He spoke in a voice that seemed to cut through the air like pure light, and which made all the hairs on Harry’s arms and legs stand up. “Greetings, young one,” he said, and Harry knew it wasn’t in English, although he couldn’t have named the language that caused the forest shadows to glow. “Have you awakened your blood at last?”

“Yes,” Harry said, experiencing a momentary dizzy surge, since it seemed like all these people he didn’t even know had been waiting for him to do that. “What was your name?”

The Sidhe laughed, and made a sound like light cutting through water. “But if you wanted to refer to me in a way that you can pronounce with a mostly human mouth, you could call me Eilenanian.”

“Eilenanian,” Harry said, trying to fit his mouth around the word. The Sidhe smiled at him. “And you’re—what, not displeased to have a human child?”

“You are not human, child. And why would I be?”

“I just thought that some of the Blood of Avalon were probably pretty touchy, and people have talked about how the Sidhe hunted and ate humans.”

“We are never just one thing. Especially not us, who lived so long and saw the years pass by like drops of water running down into a lake. Is the lake to be always the same when so many sources are feeding it?”

That was something Harry didn’t feel himself competent to answer, so he gave Eilenanian a faint smile and asked, “And which of my ancestors were you? Was it just before the Blood were shut away in Avalon?”

“It was some centuries before that. But I am only one. Other Sidhe returned to fill the wellspring with water.” Eilenanian tilted his head so slowly that light seemed to slide off his cheeks and crash to the ground across five minutes’ time. “What will you do to pass on the blood to your own children?”

“I—don’t know I’ll have them. Since I’m with Theo.”

“There are ways and ways,” Eilenanian said, and his voice rang in a fashion that Harry thought was the good side of smugness. “If you do not plan on children now, that is well enough. You will live and live.”

“Am I—immortal?” Harry shivered a little at the thought of being the same as Voldemort, in any way or form.

“No,” Eilenanian said, peering at Harry as though he didn’t know where Harry had got that idea from. “Not when you are human mixed with the blood of the Sidhe, rather than pure Sidhe. But you are capable of living and living.”

“To how long?”

“The Sidhe do not see death.”

Harry sighed a little. It would be nice for someone who was giving him advice not to be cryptic, he thought, but then again, he’d had plenty of practice at accepting odd advice with Dumbledore. “All right.”

“We do see other things.”

“Such as?”

“Joy.”

Eilenanian bowed to him, and vanished in a whirlwind of light. Harry stared at where he had been, and shook his head.

“Harry.”

Theo’s voice was soft and shaken. Harry turned to face him and found Theo reaching out for him with distressed eyes and trembling hands. Harry leaned close and let his face rest against Theo’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “What did it look like to you?”

“I saw the figure of the Sidhe.” Awe tinged Theo’s voice and then vanished. “And then you disappeared into the light. I thought…”

“Yes?”

“I thought you had perhaps gone back to Avalon, or the new world you—opened, and that you wouldn’t return to me.”

Harry grasped the back of Theo’s neck and lifted his head, pressing an urgent kiss to his lover’s lips. Theo shuddered in his arms, leaning closer, and Harry kissed him into dazed silence for a long moment before pulling back. “I would never do that to you, Theo. I promise. I’ll always come back to you. Do you hear me? Always.”

Theo shuddered one more time and then leaned against him. His breath came in quick little pants too dry to be called sobs. Harry held him and waited for what seemed to be an outbreak of terror to pass.

“You are my mate,” Theo whispered at last. His claws closed on Harry’s sides, digging into his skin and making blood flow for a moment before the wounds sealed shut. “You know what that means?”

“Your dedication and devotion? Theo, I only hope I can return those things.”

Theo rose to his knees and leaned close, so that he seemed to be looming over Harry for all that they were both on the forest floor. “If you knew how much I need you…if you knew how much I love you…” He kissed Harry again and then reached for his robes. “Can we, here? Would you mind?”

It might have seemed wrong, here where others could come across them, but Harry still remembered the light that had surrounded Eilenanian, his ancestor. How he was part Sidhe, and part of the light, and partially a predator. Making love surrounded by the cool green forest shadows so recently filled with light seemed like the correct thing to do.

He leaned up and kissed Theo in answer, guiding his clawed hands lower.

“I love you too,” he whispered as Theo entered him a few minutes later, his magic easing the way, and Harry’s own body shifting and adjusting in response.

Theo paused and looked down at him. His eyes shone, golden and more than human. Harry’s own blood surged to meet him, and light like shattered diamonds began to shine through his skin.

“My lord. Harry.”

Harry smiled and ran a hand along Theo’s knee, then turned his head and kissed Theo’s hand as he reached down.

As they rocked together, light spreading around them and stirring up echoes of that other radiance, Harry found his mind spiraling higher, spreading further. For a moment, he was connected to all the Blood of Avalon around him: those newcomers pouring through the gate, those he had changed, and the past ones he had seen in the pool of light.

And to a trembling glow that might be children of the future yet to come.

Then Theo shuddered above him, and Harry dived back down into his body, and enjoyed the pleasure with this man, this satyr, he had claimed for his lover and his mate, and let his world be drowned in Theo’s eyes.

The End.