Chapter Twenty-Nine of 'Ceremonies of Strife'- Darkly Burning

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

Title: Ceremonies of Strife (29/50)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, Dark magic, angst, profanity, sex (slash and het), character deaths (not the main characters).
Summary: Sequel to Soldier’s Welcome. As Harry and Draco head in to their second year of Auror training, they are resolved to try and balance the relationship between them with their personal difficulties. That might be a bit harder than they think when the difficulties include necromancy, Azkaban escapees, unicorn ghosts, the risen dead, a secret order of assassins…and the second war, guided by Nihil.
Author’s Notes: This is the second part of what I’m calling the Running to Paradise Trilogy, focused on Harry and Draco’s Auror training. A reader on AFF called SP777 suggested the idea for this series to me. I’d advise you to read Soldier’s Welcome first before you try to read this one, as this story doesn’t spend a lot of time recapitulating the first one.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Nine—Darkly Burning

Harry could feel the dead the moment they Apparated in.

They had landed in a curving sort of valley, with a small hill on one side of them and a bumpy meadow on the other, not that far from Malfoy Manor. Harry had carefully memorized the Apparition coordinates, even though he was letting Draco take him Side-Along, and the first thing he did when they landed was look around and make sure they were all in the right place, including Politesse and Flash. Draco was complaining to Hermione about her going first—he felt he should have been allowed to make sure that there were no traps “set by his ancestors,” which probably included Lucius—and didn’t notice when Harry stiffened and drew in a deep breath.

Because the second thing Harry did was feel as if he were bound to people who waited beyond the hills, bound by connections as delicate and as strong as floating cobwebs.

He clenched his teeth together and tried to avoid the curious gaze of Ventus, who had come separately and landed right behind them. She strolled forwards, head turning from side to side as if she were evaluating the valley’s merits as a hiding place. Harry did his best to keep from whimpering.

The dead had a cold presence to them that made his back teeth ache, and that drew him like the taste of peppermint. God, how many must there be if he could feel them at such a distance? He was sure they weren’t around the corner.

“We have arrived,” Ventus said, her voice light and almost playful. She swung around to face them, and Harry did his best to conceal his reactions. The last thing he wanted was her demanding to know the reason for his expression so she could “incorporate it into the battle plans” like everything else she’d noticed in the past thirty-six hours. “Are you ready?”

Draco nodded and moved forwards, pushing hair away from the side of his face. Harry recognized it as a gesture he made only when he was nervous, but doubted the others would.

In his concern for Draco, he found the motive and the strength he needed to forget about the dead and necromancy for a little while. He touched Draco’s shoulder, and Draco leaned into him without complaint.

“Ventus, you and Granger will set up the glamours,” Draco said, his voice choked but gaining more power as he spoke. “Weasley, you stand ready with the potions the way that Granger showed you.”

Harry caught Ron’s eye and gave him an apologetic smile. Ron hadn’t been any too thrilled with the idea that he wasn’t to cast the glamours, which he didn’t have enough skill at, or even fight at first, because of his lack of compatible magic, but simply stand around in the first part of the battle.

Ron nodded back, jaw clenched but expression more resigned than it had been, and started pulling the vials out of his pockets and checking to make sure that none of them had cracked. Harry opened his mouth, about to speak some cliché about how Ron had the most important task of all. Well, in a way, it was true. They wouldn’t be able to complete Hermione’s plan for reading Nihil’s mind without those potions, and Harry knew that he wouldn’t have had the patience to look at all of them for cracks.

Draco drew him away before he could talk to Ron, though, and spoke into his ear. Harry shivered at the tickling whisper, for many reasons. “Can you really do this? You know that you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Harry touched Draco’s cheek. Draco’s face was pale and closed, but Harry thought he had learned enough about him by now for that not to matter. Draco still showed his emotions clearly enough in the grip he maintained on Harry’s arm and the way he looked suspiciously around the little valley, as if every tiny clump of grass or heather hid an enemy.

“I wish there was an alternative,” Harry said quietly. “I do. I’m not doing this just to make my part in the battle bigger.”

“I never accused you of that,” Draco snapped, his head jerking around as if he were glad to have an excuse for a row. “Did you think I was? Because I wasn’t.”

“I thought it might be something you were thinking,” Harry said, and sighed at the stubborn look on Draco’s face, pulling him forwards until he could encircle Draco with both arms. Draco stood stiff and unyielding in his embrace, but Harry had expected that and wasn’t upset.

Much.

“I love you,” Harry said. “I love you more than I love necromancy. I love you more than I love saving people.”

“You haven’t always showed that.” Draco lowered his head and ran a finger up Harry’s arm to his shoulder, refusing to meet his eyes.

Harry kissed his cheek. “I know. If there was a way I could make that up to you, other than what I’ve done so far, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But in the meantime…can you let me go ahead with this?”

Draco raised his shoulders and shifted them as if he were about to argue again that it was Harry’s decision and not his. But then he looked up, and his eyes held that fierce blaze Harry had missed in them since yesterday, when Draco’s exultation at retrieving the piece of bone from Pushkin’s lab had finally worn off.

“If you get yourself killed because of this,” Draco said in a voice like a frost snap, “I will never forgive you.”

Harry kissed his forehead this time. “I know.”

Draco’s hands tightened convulsively on Harry’s shoulders before he released him with a little push. “You have to do this, and I know you have to, and you know I hate it, and remaining here any longer won’t change that,” he said. “So go do it.”

Harry gave him a sickly smile and turned away, to the north, in the direction that he thought the combined cold of the dead was coming from. He spent a few minutes waiting, to make sure that he had the incantation word-perfect in his head and to see if the cold would increase or change position. It didn’t, and Harry decided that he was done with waiting.

He raised his wand and began to make the passes, while the incantation rolled through his lips in a tumble of Latin that he didn’t bother listening to. Hermione had translated the words for him, but Harry had discovered that knowing the literal meaning meant he spent too much time worrying if it would work. The incantation’s literal meaning was banal, seemingly not something so powerful that it would reveal the presence of Nihil to Harry.

But as he chanted, he felt the cold pressure on his skin increase, and the tension in his chest and throat redoubled, pressing down like enormous hands. Harry choked the last word of the incantation out, shivering.

The word seemed to take on form in the air before Harry and spun about, blazing with a violent silver light. Then the light turned inside out, and Harry saw the darkness behind it. He remembered, briefly, some words that Dearborn had used in one of his lectures last year. The Dark Arts and the magic that is called Light can never be far from one another. The moment one vanishes, the other is there to take its place.

The darkness spread over the battlefield, a featureless void that didn’t have even a star to lighten it. Harry shivered again and wrapped his arms around himself. He thought that he was the only one who saw the darkness, that the others weren’t affected because they didn’t know exactly what spell he had cast, but he couldn’t take his eyes from that void long enough to check.

The void paused for a moment at the edges of the valley, as if it wondered where it should go next, and shot straight up. Harry craned his neck back, wondering if Nihil was above them. Had he discovered the secret of how to fly, too, like Voldemort that last year?

But the void soared over the hill, and the next moment, Harry couldn’t see anything at all, blinded by a blaze of dark light that cut over the hill and reached back to him, undimmed by the solid object between him and Nihil.

Riding on the darkness came a voice.

So there is someone here who knew me by my other name? How delightful. Come to me, little necromancer, and I will show you the face you know—if I can find it in my collection of masks.

*

Harry stiffened and screamed.

Draco spun around, feeling Politesse brush his legs and growl. Flash was flying around Harry’s head, crooning and reaching down to run his claws through Harry’s hair, as if that would make a difference.

It didn’t. Harry’s lips parted, and he uttered another cry. This one was hoarse and made it sound as if he were gazing into an abyss that he would tumble down into, forever.

Ventus aimed her wand and muttered something. Draco knew it must be a Silencing Charm when Harry’s cries stopped, although the way his throat trembled showed that he was giving another one. Draco glared at her, and she shook her head admonishingly at him in response. “He was giving away our position,” she said. “There’s no way that we can deal with Nihil’s followers if they dash in upon us now.”

“What if he needs help?” Draco asked, teeth gritted as he moved forwards and put his arms comfortingly around Harry’s waist. It was only too obvious, with how stiff he was standing, that Harry neither saw nor felt him.

“Then you’d better figure out how to do it,” Ventus said, and turned to study the place they expected would become their battlefield, totally ignoring the way Weasley and Granger both flocked around Draco, the rattling of Politesse’s tail, and the worried hissing of Flash.

I thought that having someone so devoted to battle on our side would be an advantage, Draco thought, glaring at her back. I don’t know if that’s such a good idea now.

But he put his anger at Ventus, and his irritation at Weasley’s whinging and the way Granger was already trying to cast a spell, from his mind. The important thing was Harry right now, not what Draco would have liked to have happen. Draco had to discover what he was suffering and how to snap him out of it.

“Harry,” he said quietly, and rested his palm on Harry’s cheek. “Can you hear me? Blink, if you can’t speak. I don’t want you lost forever. I love you,” he added, and heard Weasley gag.

But Weasley wasn’t important, wouldn’t ever be important, next to Harry.

Draco fixed his eyes on Harry’s face and kept calling, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. He would conquer this and get his Harry back. And regret that he had let Harry cast the spell at all was only another distraction that he couldn’t afford.

*

Harry drowned in a maelstrom of sickly yellow light, the color of the glamour that Nihil had worn over his face when Harry saw him. All around him was laughter, and pain like icicles stabbing under his ribs, and swimming faces. Harry didn’t know them, but the mere thought that Nihil could be so many different people, that they were up against someone who really could change identities like he could change clothes, made him want to vomit.

The other part of the pain was the darkness that churned behind the golden light, the chill that he understood more deeply than he could have expressed, and which was much stronger than the magical cold Nihil was using to attack him.

He had known that Nihil was a necromancer. He had known that he must have been at it for years to have raised this many dead, and to have grown so good at controlling them.

But he had not known what that meant.

Nihil walked in a shadow-world, bound to but distinct from the world where Harry and Draco and his friends lived, passing in and out of it like an evening wind. It was nothing to him to shake spirits free from their sleep and attach them to rotting bodies, or bodies that he had enchanted to return to a semblance of life. He was as much at home in that dark sea Harry had glimpsed when he saw the spirits of Remus, Sirius, Fred and Tonks as Harry was in the Auror trainee barracks. He did not mind if someone killed him or discovered the truth about one of his identities, because he would pass through death and come out on the other side, transformed and with a new body waiting for him. He was vast, and contained multitudes. He was more than powerful. He was unstoppable.

So Harry became convinced, and he reeled from the knowledge, and Nihil laughed at him, free and merry, and crammed more knowledge into his head.

Is there anything you do not understand, Potter? Would you join me in this darkness? I can feel the yearning in you, you know, and once it has seized a soul, it never lets go. You will be master of the dead if I wish you to be. I have only to call to the taint in you, and it will spread and consume your good intentions.

That was the thing that made Harry want to thrash and scream with denial: the fear that someone could corrupt him and make him into a Dark wizard against his will. At least if he had practiced necromancy long enough to fall for its temptations, it would have been his own fault, his own stupidity. But just as the piece of Voldemort’s soul in him might have been able to influence his actions without Harry knowing it, so Nihil could take and twist him and make him long for the art he had promised Draco he would never practice again.

I could make you kill and enslave him, that Death Eater that you love. A flash of freezing cold seared Harry’s mind—Nihil’s hatred for Death Eaters. I could make you sleep with him in his new body, and you would not know the difference.

And finally, finally, those words roused a roaring fire in Harry that answered the cold.

He would never hurt Draco again if he could help it. He would not abandon him. He would not turn against him.

And he would not practice necromancy.

Harry lashed out, flinging his hatred against Nihil, withering the tendrils of doubt that reached for him, cutting through the darkness, turning the flashing yellow light to the sickly green light he knew and understood well: the radiance of Avada Kedavra. He had lived with that memory for years, of the spell cutting his mother down. He forced Nihil to live with it, too, and of the vision of Voldemort dying that Harry had carried with him ever since the Battle of Hogwarts.

Nihil hissed, writhing, trying to escape. Harry understood something else as he poured his fire on the bastard’s head. Nihil hated to be pinned down to a single emotion, a single form. After spending so long changing whenever and whatever he liked, it was anathema.

Harry crushed him into a corner of his mind, denying him his freedom and his right to move. Nihil went berserk and began fighting free.

And while he did, Harry plunged into the cold sea that Nihil had been trying to drown him in.

He understood that sea now. Nihil had made him understand it without Harry’s permission, and he had hated it, but along with its temptation, he knew its limits, and what it could and could not do, or be made to do. He would wield it as a weapon against Nihil if he could. He would use it to destroy him.

Now, he sliced through it and down, in search of any knowledge Nihil would not want him to have, anything that he could convert into a more permanent weapon.

Nihil was flying up behind him, or below him, or in some other direction or dimension where he couldn’t do a lot of harm. Harry ignored him, because he had sensed a barrier ahead, of the kind that Snape had used to hide knowledge in his mind from Harry’s tentative Legilimency. He laughed in his heart and cut through it with a single sharp nudge of his magic.

The knowledge spilled out like the quivering liquid of Pensieve memories and drenched him.

Harry was in a dark place. A place of endless pain, a place where he had decided that he would rather die than suffer anymore. He couldn’t make the decision, though, because he didn’t have a wand, and he wasn’t a master of wandless magic, and there was nothing he could do or say that would make the Death Eaters kill him. He hurt so much.

A light in the darkness. A face like his own, stooping over him. A hand on his forehead, and a soft voice swearing vengeance.

Then pounding footsteps, and the Death Eaters were all around them, shouting curses, and he strained against his chains hysterically, because he didn’t know what he would do if he lost his one chance of rescue now.

The man with the face like his didn’t point his wand at the opposition, as he had thought he might. He laid one hand on his forehead, instead, and began softly to chant. He recognized his brother’s intentions and pushed violently, upsetting his wand.

“No!” he shouted, while his brother’s lips parted and he stared at him in shock. “I don’t want you to sacrifice yourself just so that I can live! Do you think I would want to live after all they’ve done to me, if you killed yourself to save me?”

His brother started to reply.

A curse stung them, and he screamed aloud, because he recognized it as the beginning of torture, and now he would have to watch his brother share the torture, and there was nothing he could do, as much as he wanted to, he would have to lie here and suffer, and—

The unreleased magic his brother had been chanting circled around them, and tightened like an iron band.

And at the same moment, his own wish welled up in his mind, violently: I want to do something to save us! I want to do something to escape!

The magic hung in the air like a second, breathing presence, and then collided, curse and sacrificial spell and wish altogether. There was a roar louder and deeper than fire, coming as if from within a dragon’s chest.

The magic rolled them, out of the world and into another behind it.

Hands clasped hands. Minds melted and flowed and reformed. There was a dark pool they swam through, but they resurfaced so neatly on the other side of it that he didn’t have time to be afraid. There was a soft sucking sound, as muscles blended and spirits trembled and knew each other and nature transformed.

Then it was gone, and he was rising to his feet, and there were still Death Eaters in front of him, but he didn’t have to be afraid of them, now. He lived their name in a way that none of them actually could.

He met their eyes, and stepped forwards.

They scattered from his path, squealing like the pigs they were. He smiled, and the smile hurt his face. He didn’t know yet what he would see if he glanced into a mirror. Perhaps nothing that anyone else would recognize, perhaps nothing sane.

But he had changed, and the dark coldness that was part of him lapped and ran around his ankles and legs. He had passed through death and come out the other side.

He was no longer Caradoc Dearborn, or Daffyd Dearborn, but a mixture of both.

And he was Harry, seeing and feeling himself as a separate person again, who tore himself free and fled madly for the surface of Nihil’s magic, with that being’s angry cries still echoing behind him.

*

Harry opened his eyes and gasped as if he had been underwater and needed fresh air to enter his lungs at once. He reached up and clutched at Draco with a trembling hand, then turned his head. There was triumphant light in his eyes, but also a trace of red. It took Draco a moment to realize that was nothing more than a blood vessel bursting and dumping blood across his pupil. He hissed and tightened his grasp on Harry’s hand.

“I know who Nihil is,” Harry said. “A blending of Caradoc and Daffyd Dearborn.”

Draco stared at him. He wanted to say something, but in the face of Harry’s information, it seemed as though every center in his brain had shut down except the ones that listened.

“He tried really hard to keep me from finding that out,” Harry said, pushing a hand through his hair as though he wanted to clear it of cobwebs. “He had the information hidden behind a barrier that would have protected it most of the time. But I was too deep in his mind, and he kept drawing me deeper because he wanted to destroy me. That was how I saw what Caradoc suffered, and the way that Dearborn—the man we knew as Dearborn—went to save him. They blended, in the middle of a mixture of magic. There was Death Eater curses, and a spell that Dearborn was going to cast that would have let him take his brother’s place or something, and a wish that they could both survive from Caradoc. And it blended them into one person and took them through death.”

“I’ve heard about things like this,” Granger’s voice broke in, swift and high-pitched. “It’s called wish magic. It means that you can change reality if you desire something enough. But you have to want it with all your heart, and you can never use your magic for anything else again.”

“Caradoc didn’t, did he?” Harry asked her quietly. “Because Caradoc stopped existing. The being that exists now has bits of both brothers, but he’s not just one.”

“Wait a minute,” Draco said, leaning against Harry and trying to decide how he could be so glad to have him back again and yet so eager to hear about something else. “Are you saying that the Dearborn we knew was Nihil?”

Harry glanced at him and nodded. “Yes. He could take on the body of Daffyd Dearborn, but he wasn’t him, not anymore. He hadn’t been since the first war, when he went looking for his brother.”

Draco simply stared, not knowing how to respond. “Then his death—”

“Was no real death,” Harry said. “But I think his Dearborn identity was getting inconvenient for him, and he knew that he had made mistakes in making attacks in the Ministry. He needed a way to get rid of it. If he simply vanished, people would have looked for him, so he faked his death.” He added softly, “And we were stupid, because we thought someone had to be breaking through the wards into the trainee barracks, or coming from inside them. We never considered that someone could get through them just by crossing over from the Ministry, if he had clearance high enough—if he was an Auror.”

Draco shook his head, trying to reconcile the calm, intense man who had mentored him with the creature Harry had said he had been.

“And I don’t think we’ll need the glamours,” Harry said. He turned around, Flash sitting on his shoulder with his tail wrapped around his neck, and smiled grimly at Draco. “He has to know that I found out, and that I’d tell you. He’s coming.”