Chapter Fifteen of 'Seasons of War'- Slices of Memory

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Fifteen.

Title: Seasons of War (15/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, torture, sex, angst, profanity, ignores the DH epilogue.
Summary: The war against Nihil enters its final stages, Harry and Draco train as partners, and they may actually survive to become effective Aurors. Maybe.
Author’s Notes: This is the final part of the Running to Paradise Trilogy, sequel to Ceremonies of Strife, and won’t make much sense if you haven’t read the first two stories. I don’t yet know how long this one will be, but based on the others, I’m guessing 45 to 50 chapters.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Fifteen—Slices of Memory

“You have everything you need?”

“That’s the sixth time you’ve asked us that,” Herricks said, a snarl in the back of his voice. “Yes. We do.”

Draco turned his head away from Herricks and continued his survey of the comitatus, who were gathered together in his and Harry’s tent, not deeming it worth his while to respond to Herricks’s accusation. Ventus was the calmest as Herricks was the most tense, and she touched her hand to the butt of her blue-black weapon and smiled when Draco looked at her. Harry stood on the other side of the tent, shoving a few crumpled pieces of parchment in his pocket—the lists of incantations for reading object-memories, Draco reckoned. Granger and Weasley stood close together, their heads bowed and their lips moving. Draco couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, and he didn’t care.

“Come on, then,” Draco said, and clapped his hands. Granger and Weasley jumped and nearly bumped heads, Harry spun around, and Herricks glared. Draco shrugged and made his way out of the tent, peering cautiously through the flap first.

The camp seemed quiet. Most of the trainees had retreated to their tents in exhaustion the moment the instructors had said they could go, and the Aurors themselves were also sleeping or holding private meetings. Draco smiled and turned to gesture at the rest of the comitatus before he cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself.

The others followed suit, and Draco hoped they walked as lightly as possible while they made their way across the grass towards the hills. No one glanced at them, at least, even the rare trainee sitting outside his or her tent to enjoy the weak sunshine. Draco didn’t think they were as silent as they could have been, with Herricks grumbling constantly, but apparently that was easy to mistake for the crush of the grass and the whisper of the wind.

The wards passed over them with a sharp snapping sound, and Draco breathed more easily. He still kept the comitatus moving, however, until the camp was out of sight. All they needed now was for someone to spot them just as they were about to Apparate to the cache.

When he released his own Disillusionment Charm, the others followed suit, and Weasley and Granger started whispering again. Draco rolled his eyes. “Stop it,” he told them. “It’s too late to back out now.”

“You’re our leader, Malfoy, not our god,” Weasley snapped. “We were just making sure that we had the Apparition coordinates correct.”

“If one of you doesn’t, then the one who does should Side-Along Apparate the other,” Draco said coolly, and watched the blush roll over Weasley’s face. Yes, he’d thought he’d be able to guess which of them that was. He looked at Ventus and Herricks. “Do both of you know, or do you need a reminder?”

“We’ll manage,” said Herricks, and gave him a tight little smile. Draco turned away with a shake of his head, only hoping that they wouldn’t regret bringing him into the comitatus, and held out his arm.

Harry joined him, taking his elbow in a firm grip that told Draco he was afraid of being jolted off. Well, why not? That was a reasonable thing to be afraid of, unlike the idea that Draco would mysteriously turn out to be evil, or whatever it was that Herricks was afraid of.

Draco paused one moment more to collect everyone with his eyes. “When we get there, we should be just outside the entrance of the cache,” he said quietly. “Don’t move at first, unless someone or something attacks you immediately. I want to find out what we’re dealing with, and it’s easier to isolate wards when you don’t have distractions.”

“So now we’re distractions,” Herricks muttered.

Draco shook his head and Apparated, concentrating on the strong, confident way Harry held him to avoid the temptation to answer.

They appeared in a tunnel, a place with cracked stone walls and the lingering sour odor that Draco tended to associate with Muggle machines. As the others arrived with sharp cracks behind him, Draco craned his neck back and looked for the telltale glow of active wards. Harry, he knew, would be reaching out carefully and trying to sense the cold presence of any of the living dead Nihil might have left on guard.

Nothing happened, nothing sounded, nothing glowed. Draco nodded in satisfaction and cast one of the charms he had learned from the library at Malfoy Manor that would tell him, or should tell him, of the presence of spells with hostile intent. Those should be traps, though some of them might be dormant wards.

The charm appeared as smoke, which moved ahead of them and then outlined three jagged shapes towards the entrance. Draco dropped to one knee so that he could examine them better. The nearest was only three feet from them, but stood much lower than they were.

“Are we going to fight anyone?” Ventus whispered behind him.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Draco said in a calm, absent voice that he knew would soothe her impatience for the moment. Then he reached out and caressed the air a foot from the trap, waiting to see what would happen. The smoke he had caused to reveal it eddied and shook and danced, but the trap didn’t move. Draco nodded. That told him it was designed to activate only when someone touched it. Most hostile spells would be triggered by someone passing that close to them.

“Herricks, raise a defensive spell,” he said, without looking over his shoulder to see if the idiot would do it or not. “Ventus, forwards. We’re going to destroy this trap.” He did look over his shoulder to catch Harry’s eye. “Harry, can you sense any of the dead?”

Harry said, “No. But I can sense something ahead of us in the cache.” He was leaning forwards on the balls of his feet, Draco saw, and his eyes were narrowed as if he was listening to a sound in a distant room. “It may be no more than signs of Nihil’s presence. He’s so strong that he could be obscuring the other things I’d feel.”

“Nihil is here?” Draco asked, because Herricks was gasping and he thought it prudent to be absolutely clear.

“No, sorry,” Harry said, blushing as if it was reasonable that he wouldn’t have let them know about Nihil actually being here at once. “Just that he once was, and I can feel that. But it’s like a pungent smell. Maybe there really are flowers under the reek of rotten food, but you’d have a hard time smelling them.”

Draco nodded, cast a triumphant glance at Herricks—who at least looked properly irritated, which was a step on the road to being properly ashamed—and waited until a shield shimmered into being around them. Then he nodded to Ventus, who was crouching beside him. “Do what you need to.”

Ventus whistled happily as she aimed her wand under the edge of the shield, where Herricks had left a gap for her, and closed her eyes. Then her wand shook and a spell that looked like ball lightning leaped from it.

Once it was free, the lightning drifted over to the trap more slowly than Draco had expected. He found himself tensing the closer it came, though, and it was a good thing that he was prepared for a spectacular result when they clashed.

A wash of light illuminated the tunnel, harsh and bright and growing stronger. Draco dropped back and squinted under the shelter of his hand, unwilling to give up looking until the very last moment he had to.

The trap, or rather the outline of smoke that marked the trap, was fighting with the lightning, which surrounded it and ate inwards. Fat sparks leaped off and cracked against Herricks’s shield. Ventus was laughing, and had added another spot of lightning to the proceedings. This one attacked from under the trap, and for a moment Draco thought he saw a glimpse of the trap writhing in pain like a living creature.

Then the light burst outwards in a starry dazzle. Draco could hear a shriek, cut short, and felt a brief sensation on his head as though a string had passed over it. Then the darkness returned, accompanied by the sound of Ventus’s laughter.

Draco licked his stinging lips and lowered his hand. The outline of smoke was gone, but the other two traps waited for them, and Draco had to wonder if it would require as much effort to destroy each of them. Not that Ventus looked tired, or at all unwilling to do it again. At a gesture from Herricks, she rose and walked down the tunnel behind the automatically extending edge of his shield.

Draco shot a glance at Harry. He was looking impressed, along with Weasley, while Granger frowned and scribbled at a scroll of parchment that she was—of course—carrying with her. Herricks simply strode on, an expression of fierce concentration on his face.

We might make a winning combination after all, Draco thought, and followed Ventus.

*

Harry hated the way the cache felt. It wasn’t anything visible, but a silent smoke that seemed to creep into every pore, a laughing cold that gripped and froze the vulnerable parts of his brain. He was amazed that the others could walk through it without being affected, but perhaps it only registered for someone who, like him, was “lucky” enough to have practiced necromancy.

Nihil had been here.

Of course, the traps said that, and Draco and Hermione had begun to chant the spells that would give them the memories of the chairs, the walls, the floor, and the broken bits of equipment and books scattered here and there. Herricks was working with the scraps of cloth lying about, since he was good at that, and keeping up moving shields. Ventus prowled around in search of an enemy to smite. Ron took the wooden furniture, his forehead worked into a scowl, as if he was determined to drag the memories out.

Harry still hadn’t mastered the full list of incantations, but more than that, the coldness and the smoke weighed upon him. He didn’t want to speak. He didn’t want to stand still or move, but motion was slightly better. He turned in circles, staring into corners and waiting for a source of the danger to manifest itself.

There was nothing there. Only the sense of Nihil, repeated over and over. Harry knew he must have visited the cache many times. Doubtfully, he decided that that was something Draco might like to know, and moved towards him, ready to speak the next time he came out of a memory trance.

Then something made Harry turn his head. He could have described it as the invisible smoke curling around his neck and wrenching his head sideways, if he wanted to, but he didn’t think he would want to. The longer he thought about what he was experiencing, the more he decided that it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else.

A bit of the stone wall nearby projected outwards. Harry knew that Hermione and Draco had already been over it and located no interesting memory, because they would have exclaimed aloud. But it drew him anyway. He walked over to the projection and lifted his hands, fingers all spread out, to touch the edge of the lip.

He didn’t know what made him spread his fingers out like that, either. He could have said that an unheard voice was whispering to him, but he really didn’t want to do that.

The curled projection quivered and trembled beneath his touch as if made of pudding. Then it melted and ran down the wall, and Harry stumbled forwards as the stone opened in front of him. The others turned around, because Harry thought he had given an embarrassing, strangled cry, but he caught his balance before he could require help.

Behind the wall was a small chamber, more a scoop in the rock than a room, which Harry took in at a glance. Then he gasped, because the invisible smoke practically steamed from the stone here.

There were scorch marks in the stone, oddly plated with black and shining metal. There was a mark like the huge, clawed footprint of a creature that must have been able to score the wall itself. Harry wondered if Nihil had summoned one of the dead races of magical creatures here. According to Portillo Lopez, some necromancers could do that. Or perhaps this was the mark of one of Nemo’s beasts.

And in the center of the chamber was something that Harry’s eyes slid away from. No matter how hard he tried to focus on it, he couldn’t. He had the vague impression that it was shaped like a sphere, but no more than that.

“Does anyone else see that thing?” he demanded, pointing at it with one finger, as best he could when his eyes insisted on going elsewhere. “What is it?”

*

Draco put a hand on Harry’s back and decided that his questions, such as what had made Harry able to discover this chamber when the rest of them were stumbling about like novices, could wait for later. He was too occupied with the thing that did float in the center of the chamber, and what it meant.

It was a ball, or Draco thought it was; he had to squint with one eye in order to see it, and that wasn’t very reliable. A ball that looked black at some times, and other times like it had no color. A ball of pure nothingness.

Draco thought that was what it was, at least. A slice of void. A slice of something that couldn’t be.

Fear coiled through him like a rushing river. He turned away from the nothingness ball for a moment and focused on Harry. “How did you find this place?” he asked gently. He’d seen Harry wandering about in the background when he wasn’t involved in the dull memories of the walls and floor that had seen Death Eaters come and go, but he had assumed that he was simply seeking a material to read that no one else was reading. He hadn’t thought he was on the brink of a discovery like this.

“There’s the sense of Nihil’s presence that I told you about,” Harry whispered. “I can feel it better than anyone else, probably because I’ve practiced necromancy myself. It gets into my eyes and ears and nostrils. It showed me where I needed to touch, and the position that my hands needed to be in when I did it.” He shivered and shut his eyes tightly. “It’s not—I don’t think I’m going mad, Draco. But that’s what happened.”

Draco pressed his hand tightly to the middle of Harry’s back and said nothing. He would keep that confession, which no one else had heard because they were all too busy staring at the ball of nothingness, to himself for the moment. He knew that Harry wasn’t going mad; this wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened since they started fighting Nihil. But Herricks might think so.

“What does this mean, though?” Herricks was turning his head from side to side, scanning the chamber, his eyes fixed on the marks in the stone. “So he brought a bit of space into the world. Or is it a gate that leads elsewhere? Is that the problem, that he might do necromancy in another world and we wouldn’t be able to find him?”

Granger met Draco’s gaze bleakly. He nodded. She had come to the same conclusions and felt the same fear. Harry might, too, but for the moment his head was buried in Draco’s shoulder and he was concentrating on fighting off Nihil’s influence. Granger raised an eyebrow, and Draco nodded again. If she wanted to be the one who explained it, that was a role he would willingly resign to her.

“It means that Nihil has discovered the means to make everything into nothing,” Granger said softly, gesturing at the ball. “That’s what he wants to do, to reduce the world and everything into it to nothing and less than nothing, so that he can forget about his pain. He’s transformed, able to move past and beyond death, but that means that he can’t die and escape, either. He wants to escape.”

Herricks stared at them in horror. Draco was grimly amused to note that at least he could react to that news the proper way.

“One thing I don’t understand, then,” Herricks said, his eyes going back to the ball. “What’s keeping it from spreading out and eating everything around it? I’ve heard children’s stories about what would happen if a bit of the void—like the void we go through when we Apparate—were released in our world, and it always eats everything.”

“Perhaps ordinarily that would happen,” Draco said, taking over the discussion since Granger had looked helpless. She had probably never read the wizarding children’s stories Herricks was talking about, while Draco had, along with most other people their age. “But I think that Nihil can control the nothingness. He doesn’t want to reduce everything to dust and less than dust yet. He probably has people that he wants to suffer first, goals that he wants to accomplish. Or maybe he can’t control it, and this is just the result of a first experiment. Or maybe—” Draco licked his lips. “Maybe this isn’t what we think it is, but some other kind of weapon.”

“There’s only one way to be sure, of course,” Herricks said in a pompous voice. “We have to read the memories of this chamber.”

Draco smirked and gestured at the marks on the wall, which only looked like stone and metal until one leaned close and peered at them. “You want to do that? You’re welcome to, if you can figure out what material this is and what incantation we should use.”

Weasley leaned forwards around them, peering and frowning. “What are they? They look like they might be stone to me. Maybe metal—that part there shines like silver, doesn’t it? Even if they’re the footprints of something, we still ought to be able to read them.”

Draco shook his head. “And would you be willing to do it with that right there?” He nodded towards the ball of nothingness. “Would you be willing to say that anything here is what we might think it is?”

Weasley fell silent, staring. Granger said, “Footprints can’t be read like other objects, either. I read up on that. You have to use a complex incantation, a combination of the material they were made in and the name of the creature that made them.”

“And because we don’t have any idea what creature made these…” Draco let his voice trail off into silence.

“We could at least try,” Herricks said, his face becoming stubborn.

“The way that you at least ‘tried’ closing a shield around me completely while I was casting?” Ventus asked.

Draco had no idea what the reference was to, but Herricks scowled at her and turned his head away, which at least solved that problem. Draco turned his attention back to the problem of discovering what had happened here. “We’d need a spell that we don’t have any idea of,” he said. “I think it’s best if we take along samples instead, so that we can try reading them with books of incantations at our sides—”

“Even that might be dangerous,” Harry said unexpectedly, raising his head. “We don’t know whether pieces of this chamber contain seeds of nothingness that could spread if they were taken elsewhere.” His voice was soft and hoarse, as if he’d been inhaling smoke, and he stepped away from Draco and knelt down so that his fingers were resting inside one of the footprints low on the right wall.

Draco frowned and reached after him, but Granger was in the way, crowding around and craning her neck. Draco retracted his arm and said impatiently, “Well, then, what would you suggest? This is an important clue. We can’t leave it here. And what happens if the nothingness spreads outside of this cache? Why hasn’t it yet?”

“I don’t know the answer to those last two questions,” Harry said. “But for the first one, I might.” His hand was shaking as he took up his wand, Draco saw, but his voice was clear and certain, if soft. “Memoria nihil.”

And then his back arched, and he screamed, a scream that Draco would hear again and again in his nightmares.

*

There were no words for the darkness that surrounded him, eating him away. There were no words for the eyes he opened or the head he turned, or the way that he could see through the stone, always aware of it as a thin mask over the forces of death beyond. There were no words for the way that his mind clawed and scrabbled and sought to take possession of an alien landscape, of perceptions he didn’t have the sense organs to comprehend, of patterns of thought that twisted away just when he was beginning to grasp them. It was like trying to live in a hurricane.

But he clung on, because he had to, with the same will that he had used when he was walking to his death in the Forbidden Forest. He remained there and pressed forwards because it was something that had to be done.

And he saw.

Nemo had raised beasts that could destroy their enemies, beasts with death forced through their veins. But the world had changed since they existed, and they required a much larger amount of magic to live than was now in the atmosphere. Nihil could have invested the magic to keep them alive, but it was too expensive, and so he watched them die.

They flailed and kicked, and their feet struck the wall, and created holes that went through the fragile mask of stone to the death beyond. Nihil had never seen anything like that before. The drowning part that was Harry felt his consciousness sharpen and focus, fixing on this odd, unlikely thing.

The holes opened an inch, a pinprick, and then stopped. There would be no reaching through them unless they were forced.

Nihil possessed the means of forcing.

Harry watched him do it, but he could not say how it happened. What mattered was that Nihil pulled death through those holes into the world, but it didn’t simply manifest as the blue-black flopping things that Draco could bring back, the pieces of the void. Instead, what came with them, animated by the ancient magic of the resurrected beasts, a child of three parents—that magic and death and life—was nothingness.

Nihil stared at it, and one emotion that was not so alien stood out from the whirlwind: longing. He wished to plunge within it, Harry knew, lose himself within it, and die.

But he also knew that it was not as simple as that. As long as there was a world to come back to, a scrap of life to cling to, he would return. He would find a body to control, or something to be reborn within. So he had to destroy everything.

He could only draw as much nothingness as would fill a small ball, the magic of the beasts was so limited. But he knew what to do now. Nemo would raise more of the beasts, and more, until Nihil had all he needed to condemn the world to nonexistence.

The ball of black, the ball mortal eyes couldn’t quite see, he left hidden within this chamber like a promise.

*

Harry came back to himself in so much pain that he was half-shrieking when he tried to breathe. But he clung grimly to what he had discovered, and managed to roll his head over to look at Draco. It was mental pain that he was feeling, not physical, and that helped with the decision to focus through and give his report. He had to give his report in case he died, because this knowledge could not die with him.

“Nihil found that he could reach through to nothingness because of beasts that Nemo animated,” he gasped. “They don’t last very long, and he can’t get very much that way. But he can keep raising them and keep having them die. The thing we have to do is—is destroy Nemo, the way we destroyed Nusquam. He’s the dedicated part of Nihil that has the most experience with raising the beasts. Nihil could still do it on his own, but not as fast or easily.”

He shut his eyes, and whimpered. His brain rocked around his skull, liquefied. He understood what he had done now, and he was amazed and terrified that he hadn’t died.

He couldn’t read the footprints of the beasts themselves, because, as Hermione said, one would need a combined incantation for that, and Harry had no idea what the name of those creatures was. Instead, he had read the memory of the pure nothingness that had come through the footprints and into the world.

His last thought, before the pain seared him like sunrise and he fell unconscious, was that Draco’s idea of reaching out to Nihil through the visions might have been a less risky one after all.