Chapter Thirty-Two of 'Seasons of War'- On Strings of Bone

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Thirty-One.

Title: Seasons of War (32/40)
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 Thirty-Two—On Strings of Bone

“What exactly are we going to do about Nemo?”

Gregory launched the question at Draco like a dart as she stepped into the middle of their tent. Draco started. He hadn’t noticed her coming in, probably because he was involved in the book of tactics essays that Ketchum had given him. It was still unforgivable that he hadn’t noticed, he thought as he laid the tome down, and the ability of his eye to see the wild purple and green magic that coruscated around her didn’t make up for the lapse.

“How much information have you got out of him?” he asked.

Gregory shook her head. “I don’t believe he’s numb to the torture, but there’s a point past which he simply starts babbling whatever he thinks will make me leave him alone,” she said with professional disgust. Draco nodded. That had been Granger’s one objection against torture which actually sounded valid to him. “I frighten him too much. All he has to do now is see me, and he closes his eyes. And I believe that what he knows is limited. While Nihil might not be willing to destroy him, he must realize by now where he is and what we’ve learned from him.”

Draco nodded, leaning back in his chair. “But I wonder why he’s not willing to destroy him,” he murmured. “He’s certainly done it to other servants of his without hesitation. It would be good if we could find out.”

“There might be a way.” Gregory was wearing a shark’s grin. Draco waited for her to finish the sentence, but she simply stood by his chair, waiting. Draco gave in finally and asked.

“Well? What is it?”

“If we take him apart,” Gregory said. “Break him down to the essentials. We already know that most of the others Nihil took over or created weren’t really bodies. They were empty sacks filled with the grief magic or Nihil’s will. We didn’t get the chance to do the same with Nusquam, not truly, since she was already dead by the time we thought to try. Nemo might be our only chance.”

Draco could see why she had come to him. He didn’t think there was any other member of the comitatus, or the Aurors who supported them, who would have considered such a thing instead of crying out in horror. He leaned back and thought it over carefully. Gregory stood as motionless as a statue beside him.

“I don’t think we can do it,” he said at last. “Nihil would destroy Nemo when he found out that we were destroying him, rather than allow us to discover any secrets. Maybe that’s the reason he hasn’t done so already, because he still thinks that we haven’t learned anything very important.”

Gregory scowled. Draco knew she had a personal grudge against Nihil, who, when he was still posing as Daffyd Dearborn, had framed her and forced her into temporary exile from the Aurors. “What do you suggest, then?”

The perfect solution occurred to Draco, and he climbed to his feet, his face covered with a small smile. “Let me see to him.” He tapped the skin beneath his magical eye.

Gregory didn’t look as happy about that as she had been about the prospect of torture, but she nodded and led the way.

*

“I want to know when we’ll go into battle again.”

Harry shook his head. Ventus had been more silent than usual in Lowell and Weston’s class, and hadn’t spoken at all in Ketchum’s, although she usually asked questions that would force him to clarify minor matters. His class was mostly about defense, and Harry knew she was bad at that. But today, she simply stood there with her eyes on the ground, and now she was staring at Harry as though he could do something about her question.

“I’m not the battle leader of the comitatus,” he pointed out. “Why don’t you ask the man who is?”

“I did go to your tent first,” Ventus said, tossing her head forwards, as though it was a minor matter to have run from the outskirts of camp where Ketchum trained them all the way to the center and then back again, to join the more slowly walking Harry. “He’s not there.” She fixed her stare on Harry again.

Harry halted, wondering where Draco could be, but then he shrugged and kept walking. After all, Draco had business of his own, and homework for the classes, and the deep pondering that he seemed intent on doing over the vision in the Mirror of Secifircas, as if it were incumbent on him to come up with the answer to the problem of Nihil and the balls of nothingness. “Well, then wait until he comes back.”

“I want to act now.”

Harry looked at her again. Ventus had a tight set to her face that made Harry cautious. Her skin looked as if it was pulled taut over her cheekbones, for that matter, and her hands clutched and swished her wand with unnecessary emphasis. Harry narrowed his eyes in concern and touched her arm, making her stop and stare at him.

“Are you all right?” he asked. He wondered if she was having disturbing dreams the way Hermione had, or a row with Herricks.

Ventus laughed. A few people walking by stopped to stare, and then hurried on as Ventus met their eyes with some scorn. “Yes, of course I am. But I want to fight. It feels like there’s a fire burning in me that I need fodder for. If it goes out—” She pinched her fingers together like someone snuffing a candle.

Harry grunted. He recognized the sensation. It was the way he had felt right after Draco lost his eye, the emotion that had driven him to confront Holder and bargain for an alliance instead of antagonism.

He wasn’t sure what to suggest, though, except the obvious. “We need to solve the problem of what to do about Nihil before we can decide when and where and how we’re going to fight him,” he said as gently as he could.

Ventus pulled herself to attention and stared up at him. “Of course,” she said. “I should have thought of that. I should have thought of that.” And she turned and marched away from Harry, her head up and her hands clenched into fists at her sides. Her stride was eager, though, so Harry thought she was happy instead of frustrated.

“Ventus?” he called after her. “What are you doing?”

Ventus bobbed her head at him. “Going to solve the problem, of course!” she responded, and then vanished. More people shook their heads and hurried on. Harry snorted. He appreciated Ventus for the way she had supported Draco into leadership when Ron and Hermione and even Draco himself were uncertain that he had any skills in that direction, but the rest of the time, she lacked certain safeguards.

“Mental, mate,” was the way Ron summed it up when Harry went to join him for dinner. Draco still hadn’t reappeared, and Hermione was doing lessons with Raverat at the moment, trying to learn the delicate mental operations that were as much as anyone knew about being a Seer.

Harry nodded and applied himself to the thick, blazing beef soup that the Aurors had provided for them.

*

Draco walked around the bound and sitting Nemo. Nemo stared at him with hatred, but it was a weary hatred, Draco thought. He looked close to breaking, either from the torture or the fact that his creator hadn’t rescued him yet.

When he first walked into the tent, Draco had caught a glimpse of the colors that swarmed around Nemo, but he hadn’t understood them. He had needed these longer looks to be sure of what he was seeing and how the pieces fit together. Now, after a few hours of study and several acerbic comments from Gregory, he thought he did know.

“Well?” Gregory asked, the way that Draco had when she wanted him to ask what she’d thought of for Nemo’s torture.

Draco raised a hand for silence and took a step back, focusing his magical eye while he shut the normal one. He had noticed that doing that made the magic he was seeing spring more fully into being, enhanced its colors, and isolated the sometimes strange shapes that he was trying to comprehend.

The colors here scythed back and forth, and then settled down. They shone red and black, and in the middle of them, there was a central, calm balancing point where Draco could see only a hole, rather than a color. Or perhaps not. He concentrated harder, and a sullen black spark shone out of the hole, too.

“Magically, he’s not human,” he said. “You and Harry and anyone else I’ve looked at have colors that dance all around them. They never slow down, although some of them move less wildly than others.” He was starting to think that the movement of the magic he saw had something to do with personality—Harry’s magic and Gregory’s were wilder than the controlled power he and Portillo Lopez shared—but he didn’t see any reason to say that right now and either bore or insult Gregory. “But he has a hole in the middle. I think it shows the nothingness that created him.”

Nemo turned his head and stared at that. But he turned it away again when Draco tried to make eye contact with him.

“What does that mean, then?” Gregory was tapping her foot against the floor. “Can we use it?”

“I’ll have to see,” Draco said. He didn’t want to confess all his plans in front of their prisoner, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted Gregory knowing all about them, either. Gregory was too prone to think that she had a better idea and implement it without consulting anyone else. “But I think so, yes.”

He said that more to worry Nemo than for any other reason. Nemo shuddered once, but he kept his head bowed, and Draco was satisfied that they wouldn’t have got much out of him even if he had let Gregory go ahead with her torture plans. He moved towards the flap of the tent, and Gregory joined him after pausing briefly to check the wards and confining spells around Nemo.

“That magical eye of yours is good for something after all, Malfoy.” Gregory gave the air in front of her a fierce grin, and then jerked her head at Draco. “You should come to my lessons sometime soon. You have to build your battle prowess up again.”

And she was gone, striding away with her cloak swirling behind her. Draco rolled his eyes and turned for the tent. He hoped that Harry was back so that he could eat.

Of course he wasn’t, and Draco ended up eating alone, a cold meal of bread and cheese, since he couldn’t be bothered to cook and didn’t want to go to the common tents. That was all right. He thought he would have found the conversation a distraction, anyway. His mind was busy with the hole that he had seen in the center of Nemo’s aura and what it could mean.

The place where the different pieces of the grief magic came together? The empty place in the center of reality which Nihil left behind when he scooped out the magic to make his creations in the first place? And what were they going to do about it if it was a hole? Or if it was a nothingness, rather than something in itself? Draco didn’t yet know. He thought they could use it to damage Nihil.

Perhaps. He wished irritably that the vision in the Mirror of Secifircas had shown them something about that, too.

The tent flap tugged back, and Harry came in. Draco looked up and nodded at him. His mouth and mind were both full, and he didn’t feel much like starting a conversation right now.

“Ventus was looking for you,” Harry said, sitting down in the center of the tent and turning his face towards the fire. Draco glanced swiftly at him, but it was hard to tell from his voice and his expression in profile what he was feeling. “She wanted to know when the battle would start. I told her that we couldn’t be certain of that until we knew how to fight Nihil, and she bounced off saying that she would figure out a way.”

Draco laughed, causing crumbs of bread and cheese to spray against the opposite wall of the tent. He shook his head and immediately banished them with a flick of his wand. He never did things like that.

Harry seemed to realize that, too, but after one glance and one quick curl of his lip, he demurely returned his gaze to his lap.

“Her and everyone else in our little alliance,” Draco murmured, as he put down the last bite of his sandwich. He would rather not eat it; watching his own mess had rather killed his appetite. “I wouldn’t look for the answer to come from that direction.”

Harry hooked his shoulder up in a little shrug, to indicate that he neither agreed nor disagreed. “I don’t know. She looked the way I feel when I know that I’m not going to be able to rest unless I do something productive—the night I hunted down Holder, for example. So long as she doesn’t endanger the rest of us, maybe she’ll really find something.”

“I have no faith in her judgment,” Draco said, and leaned back in his chair, stretching his feet out ahead of him. He was more eager to tell Harry what he had found in Nemo’s aura than listen to stories about Ventus.

“She was the one who first judged that you would be a fine leader,” Harry said, quirking his lips at Draco. “So does not trusting her include that side of her judgment?”

Draco crumpled up his napkin and threw it at Harry. Harry ducked it, laughing, and ended up on his back in the middle of the tent, grinning at Draco. Draco took a moment to absorb the sight of him, and then sighed. He would have to disturb Harry’s amusement. If nothing else, Harry would be unsure of what to make of the hole in Nemo.

“I went with Gregory to look at Nemo’s magic,” he said. “We should kill him or get rid of him soon, but I wanted to see what my magical eye would make of his magic and his power before that happened.”

Harry sat up immediately, his face becoming gratifyingly sober. “And what did your eye tell you?”

Draco sighed. “That there’s a hole there, or perhaps a place where the magic simply ceases to exist. I wonder if Nusquam had something like the same thing? But of course, it’s impossible to know that now.”

“Could we reach into that hole and pull something out of it?” Harry asked. “Use it as a back door into the void where Nihil lives?”

“Exists,” Draco corrected. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain that Nihil didn’t live in any traditional sense of the word, no matter how many times he could resurrect himself. “And I don’t know. That would depend on what it is, whether it’s dangerous to touch, whether magic exists there or ceases to exist… I don’t know.”

Harry nodded his understanding. “Well, perhaps Ventus will find something.”

Draco looked around, but he didn’t have another napkin to throw.

*

Harry woke in the night to a thrumming that traveled all the way through his bones. He sat up and stared around, but he wasn’t sure what it was, only that it was there, indisputably there, hammering at him and making him wince. He glanced to the side, to see if it was an earthquake, but Draco lay sleeping peacefully in the bed beside him, and no objects shook.

He slid slowly out of bed, placing one hand on his wand. No one appeared at the entrance to his tent, and no one was making a sound in the camp that he could hear. Of course, no one else appeared to be feeling that thrumming in their bones, either, which made Harry start to worry about all the unheard sounds.

He reached over and shook Draco, but Draco only sighed and mumbled, opened his magical eye, said, "Go back to sleep, Harry," and went back to sleep himself.

Harry stared at him for a second. That wasn't supposed to happen, was it? He had woken Draco because he had thought that Draco would want to know that something was strange rather than Harry going adventuring by himself. Draco should be interested and concerned, not more invested in sleep.

Well, Harry might not have made the worrying aspect of the situation sufficiently clear. He shook Draco harder, and this time Draco flopped and snored and didn't even open his eyes.

Harry shook again, clamping his hands on Draco's shoulders and putting some strength into it. And still nothing happened, other than Draco's mouth opening and a slow line of drool sliding down his chin.

Harry swallowed and stood. The thrumming in his bones was worse now, bearing down, acting as if it would grind the marrow to pieces. Yes, he did believe that reality had shifted again or Nihil was about to attack the camp or—something. But he seemed to be the only one who could sense it or stay awake during it.

He stepped out of the tent and cast a spell that flared a slender beam of light straight ahead, reaching much further but also casting much less radiance than a Lumos Charm. Harry used it to sweep the guard positions that he knew were near the tent. The guards were slumped asleep at their posts, chins resting on their chests the same way as had happened with Draco.

Harry shuddered with what he didn’t even try to pretend was an emotion other than fear and wheeled to run back inside. He had to shelter Draco from any storm, attack, or earthquake that hit them.

Then someone near him hissed, and Harry nearly took her head off with an ill-placed Blasting Curse. Portillo Lopez formed out of the darkness, staring at him in a way that suggested she would have come back from the dead and haunted him about the Blasting Curse if he had managed to succeed.

“What is it?” Harry whispered. “What’s happening? Why are we the only ones awake?”

A pale face loomed at Portillo Lopez’s shoulder, and Raverat’s voice said, “I’m awake, too. But no one else, I think, unless there’s a member of the Order in camp that I don’t know about. Maryam?”

Portillo Lopez shook her head, keeping her nose uplifted as if she would scent the danger coming towards her rather than feel it. “This is Nihil’s work,” she said. “He has finally noticed that the forces of life and death are out of balance, or perhaps he has finally learned how to use them. Sleep and death are closely related, in some ways. It makes sense that he would strike through sleep.” She touched the middle of her back, where Harry thought one of her marks swearing her to her Order rested. “Our vows protect us.”

“What about me, then?” Harry demanded. “Does my scar do something?”

“The scars on your soul,” Raverat whispered, “from your encounter with Nihil. We told you that your magic had been affected and changed by that.”

Harry grimaced. This was the kind of distinction he could have done without, despite the opportunity it gave him to protect Draco and others. The thrumming in his bones kept him awake, but told him nothing. “What do we have to do to defeat him?”

“We cannot be certain until we see the shape of his attack,” said Portillo Lopez, reaching out one hand. Raverat clasped it. To Harry’s astonishment, she extended the other to him, and then stared at Harry until he took it. “But we can ready a defense that we can aim in any one of several different directions once we gain enough information.”

Harry licked lips that had gone dry. “I don’t know the same things you do. And what about Draco?”

“He will remain asleep, no matter what you do,” Portillo Lopez said. “And you waste time and lives by running to him, when we need you to help us defend the camp.” She closed her eyes and seemed to balance on a tightwire, from the expression she adopted. Raverat was looking much the same way.

“Tell me what to do,” Harry demanded in a whisper, but they didn’t listen to him. When he tried to pull his hand away, Portillo Lopez clamped her fingers down. Her grip was as strong and icy as that of any of the corpses Nihil could summon. Harry grimaced and stood still instead, trying to listen and divine the nature of the threat that way. He still couldn’t hear anything, and he wondered why Portillo Lopez and Raverat were whispering.

Perhaps because Nihil can hear us, he thought then, and winced.

The thrumming grew worse, to a pitch that made Harry’s teeth chatter. He thought Portillo Lopez would snap at him about that, but she didn’t. She remained still, and so did Raverat, other than her grip on Harry’s hand growing firmer.

Then she cried aloud, “Leonard, it’s up through the circle, up through the center!” and slammed her arm down. Harry’s hand was pulled with hers by force, and he yelped, a sound that no one paid any attention to. Both Portillo Lopez and Raverat were chanting as though their lives depended on it, and of course Harry couldn’t help, because of course he didn’t have any idea what they were doing or how he could be involved in it.

But the thrumming was still there, shaking his teeth, and he discovered that he had to close his eyes. And a separate line of the thrumming ran up his arm from Portillo Lopez’s hand, making Harry wonder for one instant if she was really in the service of Nihil instead of opposed to him. Draco, with his ability to see magic, would know.

The thrumming burst apart.

Harry found himself in the center of an enormous ring of black and red, the red raining down from above as flames, the black opening beneath him as a void. He did the first thing that came to mind and snatched at the sides of the abyss, trying to draw them back together so that he would have somewhere to stand.

Living snakes shot out of his arms, brilliant silver-white serpents that grabbed the sides of the void and held it steady. Harry glanced up at the falling flames, and another snake curled out of his forehead, a cobra with wide-spread hood that shielded him like an umbrella against the deadly rain.

Harry licked his lips. This was good, right? He knew that his not-really-necromancy, the magic that Portillo Lopez seemed to think he could use against Nihil, was based on illusions of snakes. So he must be doing something right.

But the air in front of him congealed, and nothingness came to life there. It turned to face him, and Harry screamed, because it felt like tar flowing in at his eyelids, hooks tearing his brain, earth smothering his mouth.

This, he knew for the one instant he still had clarity of thought, was Nihil’s true face.

Then Nihil hit him, and Harry found himself trying desperately to stay alive.