Chapter Thirty of "Ceremonies of Strife"- The King in Yellow

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Nine.

Title: Ceremonies of Strife (30/50)
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 Thirty—The King in Yellow

Draco clenched his fists. He wanted to strike out at someone, but that would accomplish nothing when they needed everyone here to fight Nihil.

Besides, Ventus was watching him with bright eyes and utter confidence, and Harry had despair in his half-smile. Draco couldn’t let Ventus down; he couldn’t show Harry that Nihil was all-powerful and they were going to succumb. But he had no idea, at the moment, what he could do.

Desperation sometimes worked miracles, Draco knew. It worked one now. Bits and pieces slid together in his mind, and then he had a new plan, assembled from a few shards of their old ideas, fastened with new glue.

He turned to Weasley. “Do you still have the hiding places that you mapped out memorized?” he asked him.

Weasley blinked at him, then jerked his head up and down. It wasn’t a nod, not completely, but Draco decided that beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“We’re going to make the glamours,” Draco said. The words thrummed and rolled around his mouth as he spoke them, making him feel how right they were. “But we’re going to use them for a different purpose this time. Instead of attracting Nihil, we’ll confuse him about how many of us are actually on the battlefield.” He nodded to Weasley and Granger. “You hide and wait for my signal. When it comes, start casting the glamours while Harry, Ventus, and I attack.”

“What’s your signal?” Granger asked, eyes narrowed as if she needed all her brain to make sense of Draco’s plan.

“It’ll be unmistakable,” Draco said dryly. “Trust me,” he added, when she sent him a little frown. He took some pleasure in knowing that that was exactly what she had trouble doing.

“What kind of glamours are we going to use?” Weasley demanded. “I can’t do the glamours of the beasts, you know that.”

“Can you do the kind of fears that you had lying in bed at night when you were a child?” Draco asked softly. “The floating bits of darkness that might turn into a monster at any moment, the cold that came along with them?”

Weasley caught his breath and nodded. “But I don’t understand,” he said. “What—I mean, I don’t think Nihil is afraid of those anymore.”

“We’re going to convince him that we have an army of the living dead,” Draco said. “A different kind of dead than he commands. We’re going to confuse him and confront him with his worst fear: that someone can fight him because they’ve discovered exactly the kind of tactics that he uses. Do your best with the darkness, and in the meantime, we’ll do other things that convince him those glamours are the dead.”

Weasley and Granger stared at him in silence. Ventus nodded thoughtfully. “I can see where the plan comes from,” she said, “even if I am not convinced that it will work. But no one goes into battle knowing if their plan will work, not exactly.” She gave Draco a smile that would have done credit to a cat licking cream from its whiskers. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do, including adding to the glamours.”

Draco nodded, but most of his attention was on Harry, who had the most knowledge of necromancy of anyone on the battlefield—well, anyone who was on their side. So much of this deception depended on him.

Perhaps too much. Draco dreaded to see Harry look up at him with betrayal in his eyes.

Harry took a whistling breath and reached up to run his fingers along Flash’s spine. He was shivering continually, and looked ill. Then he turned and glanced over the hill again, the way he had been facing when he cast the spell. He was shuddering now. Draco wondered if the frost that he knew had spread along the walls during that one necromantic ritual Harry had conducted was touching him now.

I’m sorry, Harry, Draco thought, even as a smaller, meaner part of him thought that Harry was probably glad to have an excuse to touch this Dark magic again. But Nihil knows that you know some of this. You’re the only one who could believably command our “living dead.”

“Yeah, all right,” Harry said. He turned and glanced sideways at Draco. “I was going to ask why we didn’t simply Apparate back to the barracks, but—”

Draco nodded silently. Harry hadn’t finished telling his story about Nihil when silent magic had washed over the battlefield. Draco didn’t test it until after Harry stopped talking, but he had recognized it immediately. Anti-Apparition wards. Nihil was taking no chances on their escaping.

Besides, to flee now wasn’t to escape. Nihil knew Harry was here, and he would be able to guess who had been with him. And as Dearborn, he had known most of them, perhaps all.

Dearborn. That was still hard to deal with.

Draco shook the thoughts away. There were certain things that he couldn’t think about right now if he wanted to remain sane, or focused enough on the battle to be of help to Harry and the others. “All right,” he said. “Weasley, Granger. Hide and cast your glamours.” He turned to Harry. “Set up a fake necromantic ritual, or a real one. I think Nihil’s paranoid enough that he might decide you have knowledge he doesn’t. You have to make it look as though you’re commanding the glamours.”

“Ah,” Ventus said cheerfully. “So that’s the reason they all go silent around you and glare at each other as if they’re blaming one another for a hidden problem, Potter. You practice necromancy. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.”

Draco groaned, but there had been no way to hide it from her without going through contortions that would take more time than they could afford right now. He turned to Ventus. “Not a word,” he said. “You and I are going to be launching attacks on Nihil’s army of the living dead, and I want to see what you can do.”

There was no contest, he knew in a minute, not from the way Ventus’s eyes brightened and she stood up as though someone had replaced her spine with a poker. She nodded to Draco. There was more color in her face than he had ever seen before, and she spun her wand with a lazy grace that made Draco think suddenly of Dearborn, of Dearborn as Draco had known him before—this.

“You won’t regret allying with me,” she said.

The words made Draco more confident than he liked to admit.

*

Harry stood on top of the hill which he had cast the spell over, a circle of blood at his feet, and watched Nihil come.

He had been curious at first about why Nihil hadn’t simply attacked the minute Harry left his mind. It would have been his best chance of crushing them, while Harry still reeled from what he had learned and the others were more worried about him than attacks from the outside. But when Harry saw what flowed across the small valley, he understood.

Nihil had wanted to make sure that there was absolutely no chance that Harry or any of his friends would escape, and that meant preparing his largest set of forces.

The dead marched in neat ranks, all of them looking like living people except the ones at the very back, which Harry thought Nihil might have just animated. They were more ghostly, or else they were shambling corpses. Not that it mattered, Harry knew. As long as there was something of them left, they would fight to obey Nihil’s will and destroy whatever he commanded them to destroy.

Harry understood necromancy more than he liked to admit.

He took a deep breath and stared at the ring of blood by his feet. Draco had insisted on cutting his own palm before he and Ventus ran off into battle position, seeming to think that the necromancy wouldn’t be as bad if the ritual didn’t use Harry’s blood. Harry, of course, felt no connection to this as he had to the rituals that he conducted on his own.

Or he thought he didn’t. There was a very faint dark vibration in the back of his mind that he was trying to ignore.

He looked up again and scanned the marching ranks. He couldn’t see a sign of Nihil among them, but he knew that the bastard wouldn’t be far. For one thing, his strength would be needed for an attacking force of this size; it wouldn’t work if he was further away. He had never been that distant from the attackers he sent into the Ministry.

For another, Nihil would want to see them die with his own eyes.

So Harry held up his hand as he saw the first blurs of cold darkness drifting onto the battlefield from Ron and Hermione’s glamours, and made a wide gesture that someone from a distance could mistake as the wave of a knife, and brought his foot down in the center of the circle of the blood. He would have liked to say that he felt Nihil’s eyes on him and felt them widen, but that sensation was like the dark shimmer in the back of his mind: something he shouldn’t pay attention to. It wasn’t reliable.

He knew Nihil would probably sense the deception if he spoke in Latin or English. But he had another option.

He closed his eyes, envisioning a snake, and hissed harshly in Parseltongue. The wind around him seemed to grow colder, and when he opened his eyes, it was to see the entire dead army pause in mid-step, their legs all lifted and held motionless. They were staring up at him.

At the same time, several of the small black blurs that Hermione and Ron had conjured suddenly blended together. Harry stared. Had something happened to them? Or was this a part of the plan that Draco had refined after Harry had separated from the others?

The blurs lost definition as they crowded into one shape: that of a giant snake. Its head lifted, its tongue flickered out, and it appeared to taste the air in front of the crowd of dead soldiers. Then it turned its head, eyes seeking Harry out.

Command me, it told him.

Harry swore shakily, then swallowed and continued. He didn’t know what had happened, but he did know that they needed to continue the illusion, or there was the chance that Nihil would figure out what was happening and overwhelm them.

Kill the dead ones, he told the snake in Parseltongue. Spare the living.

He wondered a moment later if he should have clarified the difference between the dead and living to the snake, but since it turned and slithered straight at the dead army, he reckoned it knew.

The snake’s head darted out and over the man in the lead, who Harry would have thought was a perfectly ordinary wizard if he had passed him in the street. For a moment, Harry’s vision dimmed, as though he was seeing the man through a cloud. Then the man’s head exploded and his body collapsed to the ground, as if someone had sucked all the substance out of it.

The snake touched another dead wizard, and it happened again.

Harry got somewhat distracted, though, by the force of fiery angels that appeared in the air over the battlefield just then.

They were large figures, but undeniably human, made of flames, wielding swords and soaring down on beating wings. Their laughter was delicate and so high-pitched that Harry could barely hear it; it was a whisper of sound against the edges of his senses. The grass burned and boiled beneath their feet, and where their swords touched the dead, they spread burst after burst of searing white fire.

Another laugh, more human, joined theirs. Harry turned his head.

Ventus was running onto the battlefield, spinning sometimes in place to launch more curses at the dead, her head so bright with a reflected corona of power that she rivaled her angels in brilliance. Her curses cracked the ground beneath the dead and ate them in miniature earthquakes. They made the dead thin and fade to ghostly versions of their former selves that, as far as Harry could see when Ventus got near them, could touch and affect nothing. Ventus pointed her wand at one of the shambling corpses, and a swarm of flying giant maggots manifested above it, feasting hungrily on the dead flesh.

Draco was running into the valley from the other side, his voice triumphant as he shouted spell after spell. He produced spectacular effects, too, Harry was the first to admit: bodies that split in half, a tidal wave that drowned several of Nihil’s people, mud that snared the legs of the dead and wouldn’t let them move forwards. Politesse surged beside him, snapping and snarling and stinging.

But Harry understood what Ventus had meant now when she said that she cared about battle and nothing else. One would have to. You couldn’t hold anything of yourself back if you wanted to cast spells like that. Dedication and nothing else fueled them, pure power and pure obsession.

It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

Is that the kind of power Draco wants?

Harry shivered and turned back to the battlefield, watching as the snake, Ventus, and Draco together devastated Nihil’s force, and wondered if Ron and Hermione were about to come out of hiding.

Something far worse happened—something Harry ought to have anticipated, especially when they started doing far better in this battle than they had any right to expect, but which was still a shock.

Nihil came.

*

Draco panted and ducked the reaching arms of the dead, spinning around in a circle that meant his wand came down in a deadly arc. An invisible sword took the arms, and then another stabbed the corpse through the guts and put it out of its misery. It fell, and any appearance that made it similar to the living departed. Its face was slack, and it didn’t bleed.

Draco wondered idly for a moment what death was like for the living dead, what happened that made destroying the corpses effective. Did that shake the spirits free of Nihil’s control? Or was he animating bodies, some of them, and not really the spirits?

That was more than he wanted to know about necromancy, though. He turned and aimed his wand at the next enemy.

Then the battlefield washed with a sickly yellow light, and there was an immense, empty sound above Draco, like someone stretching his jaws in a yawn.

Draco looked up.

Something was visible in the air above him, something it hurt to look at. Draco wasn’t sure that he ever saw its true form. His eyes rejected it violently, and trails of blood crept down the side of his face when he tried to look beyond that, to make himself see something else.

But the yellow light centered on it, and the hollow sound repeated. The unvisible thing began to descend.

Draco knew, with the same stark, primal terror that he would feel in the face of a charging nundu, that he did not want it to touch him.

He fell back, casting every curse he could think of at it, including some he had used in this fight and some he had never thought he would use against another living being. But then again, he didn’t think this was a living being.

Every spell either vanished into the unvisible whirlwind or simply bounced off. Draco had to duck as his own Leg-Breaking Curse came back at him sharpish, and when he rolled upright again, he was closer to the thing than he liked.

He fell back again, and felt pressure and presence near his back. When he looked over his shoulder, Weasley and Granger were standing there. Weasley was bright red, Granger was pale, but they both had their wands pointed past Draco at the thing.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Draco hissed at them. “You could have stayed hidden, and there’s the chance that it wouldn’t have found you.”

“I don’t think Nihil’s that stupid,” Granger said. Her voice was remarkably steady, although the smile she gave him trembled and flickered out after a second only. “Besides. Do you think we’d leave you to face this alone?”

Draco closed his eyes and shook his head. He lacked the words to explain what he thought of Gryffindor courage.

“It’s coming closer.” Weasley spoke as though his stomach was coiled up in his throat, but his voice was calm. Draco had to admit that it was more than he could have handled at the moment.

“I know,” Granger said, and Draco heard her fingers rap against her wand as though she was trying to figure something out. “But I don’t know what to do to stop it,” she admitted a moment later.

So much for that hope, Draco thought, and opened his eyes in time to see Ventus leap past him and stride towards the whirlwind as though she intended to arrest it.

“I know you,” Ventus told the thing. Her head was cocked so she was looking at the thing sideways. Draco would be glad for that. He had seen enough to make him admit that Ventus wasn’t an ordinary witch, but she would have been more than human if she could have looked directly and not flinched. “You are the surrender of death, giving in and giving up. You’re the opposite of fighting.”

The whirlwind didn’t respond in any way. Draco wondered why he had thought it would have. It simply floated closer.

Ventus pointed her wand at it with a disdainful expression and said, “Alternum regnum!”

The whirlwind shuddered, and drifted to a stop for the first time since Draco had seen it appear in the sky. Then it began to move sideways, but more briskly than it had been before, and Draco didn’t think it was going of its own free will. A vicious hissing emerged from it, and bits of the sides projected out, becoming easier to see, like flailing arms. Ventus laughed.

“What did you do?” Draco breathed. He was already thinking that he would need to take up lessons with Ventus when they got back to the Ministry. She had bragged about her skill, yes, and he had thought there might be something to that, but he had never imagined this.

“I’m moving it into an alternate world,” Ventus said, as if that was an everyday occurrence. “Nihil won’t have the same power in another world that he will here, because the circumstances of his existence—if he exists—will be different there. He’ll have to deal with at least a little confusion, and in the meantime, we can come up with a permanent solution for defeating him.”

Draco squeezed her shoulder, not sure how else he should react. “Thank you,” he said.

Ventus gave him a look in which light and laughter blazed. “You never should have underestimated me,” she murmured. “But I forgive you. You hadn’t seen me fight. That is the key to understanding me.”

A loud hissing noise in front of them attracted their attention. The whirlwind had stopped drifting, and once again it was hard to look at. And now it was accelerating towards them, in a way that told Draco all too clearly that Ventus’s spell had failed.

Ventus, undaunted, stood there firing spells at it until Draco dragged her with them, but none of them had any effect. Whether Nihil knew how to fight them or had somehow constructed a defense that made him immune now, Draco didn’t know, but it was obvious they were all going to die.

Politesse was barking and growling near his ankles, making little rushing motions forwards as if he would charge Nihil, but Draco kept him back. He didn’t know what would happen if the dog got close enough, and he didn’t want to lose him.

Even if we’re all going to die in a few minutes.

Then what had happened at the end of the war happened again, and Harry Potter saved them all.

*

Harry had shouted spell after spell when he saw Nihil come on the battlefield in the middle of that thing. Harry had no doubt this was Nihil, and not someone else. The sense of cold and darkness had intensified in the back of his mind when the thing appeared, and it seemed that the Mortal Affinity spell still lingered, because Harry saw the thing shining with a bright obsidian corona.

The sensible thing would have been to rush down the hill and join his friends and Draco so that at least they could die together.

But he couldn’t move from the ring of blood. His feet literally wouldn’t stir. Harry bent down and yanked at them, swearing, and still nothing helped. He looked up and around for the giant snake, wondering if the same magic that had made it was keeping him prisoner here, but he saw no sign of it anymore.

What is going on?

He closed his eyes and opened them, and when he looked again, he could see the black vibration in the back of his mind as if it had moved out into the world and come to life.

It flickered all around him, visible as enormous black chains that manacled his legs to the earth. More, chains stretched to his arms, his head, his shoulders. The magic stared at him, and Harry swallowed. Nihil had somehow turned the necromancy against him. It was keeping him prisoner here.

But the magic reached towards him, then retreated, with much the same speed that Flash, circling around his head, used.

Then Flash landed on his shoulder and crooned into his ear, closing his talon reassuringly near Harry’s collarbone.

Harry licked his lips. Flash, at least, seemed to think everything was all right and he could still do something about this. Flash wasn’t even lashing his tail as he looked towards the floating thing that contained Nihil, or growling the way he had when faced with Nemo’s beasts. He seemed to show only a minor curiosity.

Words roared out of his memory, words that he had read in the necromancy book before Draco burned it.

When a necromantic ritual has begun, it must be completed. There is no force known to wizards that can stop it save the shattering of the circle or the necromancer’s own will not to continue.

Harry opened his eyes and stared at the blood circle around him. He had been able to stop the ritual that Draco interrupted because he had honestly wanted to stop, he was so horrified and ashamed at the thought of Draco seeing him.

But this one…

“Oh, come on!” he said aloud. “This wasn’t a real ritual! We just set this up so that I could pretend to control the glamours and Nihil would think that I was doing necromancy!”

The black magic thrummed around him, refusing to be placated, and Harry remembered the snake. No, it shouldn’t have happened, especially when the glamours were only illusions and not real living dead, but apparently the necromancy was convinced it was real.

Harry turned his gaze on the thing that contained Nihil. He didn’t understand what it was, any more than he was capable or experienced in the theory of necromancy when compared to Nihil. But he remembered what had caused the snake to appear, and he had will and desire to empower himself. Maybe that, combined with the ring of blood, would be enough.

He lifted his hand and extended it towards Nihil. Flash flapped his wings and crooned encouragement.

Harry hissed again in Parseltongue. Be gone, enemy! Vanish!

The black magic leaped over the circle and rippled out over the battlefield. The edge of the tide hit the edge of the thing containing Nihil.

Harry felt the strangest sensation. It was as if he was ripping apart thick, heavy cloth with sharp fingernails. The cloth was reluctant to tear, and it was moldy and covered him with slime as he got rid of it, but it did tear. He had the power.

His power was not greater than Nihil’s, but it was different. Perhaps it was necromancy conducted with Parseltongue fighting necromancy conducted with Latin. Perhaps it was Harry’s strange little ritual fighting Nihil’s well-prepared, usual rituals.

But whatever it was, the thing tore apart, and Harry caught a glimpse of a human-sized figure in the sickly yellow glamour before he vanished.

The yellow light went with him, and the battlefield flooded with the sun.

And a dark shimmer settled permanently into the back of Harry’s mind.