Chapter Thirty-Five of 'Seasons of War'- Racing to the Rescue

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Thirty-Four.

Title: Seasons of War (35/40)
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-Five—Racing to the Rescue

As they came out of the Apparition, Draco looked around. He expected to hear screaming from the Muggles, and the snap and roar of spells from the direction of the War Wizards. The coordinates Ventus had got them had been precise, so Draco thought they couldn’t have arrived too far away from the scene of the battle.

Instead, they stood in the middle of silence. Silence lapped and flowed over them in great waves, and the air on his scars felt almost cool. Draco would have found it reassuring, if not for the burn under his scars, which told him that Nihil, or Nihil’s living dead, was not far away.

And if not for the magic that his eye detected almost at once, heaving in a colorless cloud over the streets.

Draco winced when he looked at that cloud. He would almost have felt better if he couldn’t have seen it at all. It was the same sight-dissolving yellow color Nihil used for some of his glamours. And it extended tendrils in all directions, touching two crumbled buildings around them and another burning one. Draco couldn’t make out what it was doing to them, but he knew it would eventually lead to their destruction.

In the center of the street, rapidly expanding, was the ball of nothingness.

Well. Not ball, not now. It had grown to the size of a globe, perhaps as big as two or three large men, and Draco saw the edge extend further as he watched. He had to look away from it, clapping one hand defensively to his watering eye. It was even worse trying to look at that than it was at the color of Nihil’s magic.

The War Wizards were nowhere in sight. Draco smiled grimly. It seemed that his promise to Holder and Robards to stay out of their way would be easy to keep.

“Spread out,” he told the rest of the comitatus. “Can all of you see the edge of the ball of nothingness? Avoid it as much as you can. We know what will happen if it touches you.” That probably explained the absence of Muggle buildings, he thought, and perhaps even the War Wizards. If they had come too close, or fallen at the feet of the ball, there was nothing to prevent it from swallowing them.

“We need to contain it.” That was Herricks, his wide eyes fixed on the ball with such terror that Draco was surprised his voice sounded calm.

“Of course we do,” Draco said, and allowed some of his real scorn through so that Herricks would hear him and snap out of the fear consuming him. Sure enough, Herricks turned around and glared. Draco smiled in some contentment. Occasionally, it was good to have a rivalry with someone that he commanded. “And our best strategy for it is still—” He turned to Harry.

Harry started to reply, but Weasley interrupted. “You brought me along to strategize, Malfoy, didn’t you?” he asked, his eyes narrowed on the ball in front of them as if it were the only thing that existed in the world. Draco hadn’t seen him stand like that before, without paying attention to Granger in the form of constant little glances to the side.

“Yes,” Draco said, holding back his impatience with a slight effort. If Weasley had something to say about the situation, then he would listen, although he thought, from the flush on Harry’s face and the way his hand edged towards his wand, that he knew perfectly well what had to happen.

Weasley probably does, too. But he likes to show that he matters.

“Then listen to me,” Weasley said, and swept his hand towards the edge of the ball of nothingness. “The War Wizards aren’t visible for a reason. I can’t believe that something stationary just ate them. They would have known better than to keep hammering it with spells once they saw that that tactic wouldn’t work.”

Ventus lifted her head like a warhorse hearing the battle-trumpet, her eyes bright. “He’s right,” she said, when Draco glanced at her. “They would realize that they probably knew a spell that would contain it, but not one of the ones they first tried.”

“Are you going to listen to me or her?” Weasley interrupted, before Draco could show that he understood.

Draco gave Weasley a long, cool glance, until he winced and turned aside as if he were trying to conceal his uneasiness. Draco nodded, a short nod that he hoped Weasley would take the right way. Yes, Draco would listen to him, but he saw no reason why Weasley had to make a bid like that, to take over from Draco and trample on Ventus’s words of wisdom. While Weasley might know the situation, Ventus knew the War Wizards.

“Both,” Draco said. “I’m going to listen to everybody who might help us survive this.” He glanced at Granger to see if she had anything to add, but she was staring at the buildings around them and biting her lip. Draco swept them with one glance to see if there was anything magical in them, but recognized nothing, so he reckoned it was Granger’s innate connections to Muggles that were making her suspicious—or nostalgic, or whatever the reason really was that she was doing that. “So what do you suggest that we do, Weasley?”

“Get out of sight,” Weasley said. “Hide, try to join with the War Wizards, and wait for something to happen.”

Draco turned back to the ball of nothingness before he answered, and saw that it had grown bigger. He shook his head. “We need to contain it,” he said. “Before it eats London, and the Muggles, and us all. I don’t know how far it can spread, but that might not matter. Nihil will try to join it up with other balls, of course.”

“Now, Malfoy!”

Draco blinked at the panicked note in Weasley’s voice, and then saw a boil of colors, bleak and horrid, in the air with his magical eye. The ball of nothingness was shooting a tendril towards them.

Draco dived, wrapping his arms around Harry without thought and rolling them towards one of the buildings that lay half-destroyed on the ground. His mind clattered uselessly inside his head, telling him that it was no use, that of course he was going to die and this was going to fail, because the ball of nothingness could destroy anything it touched, so what was the use of hiding? They could only get out of the way, and if the ball of nothingness could actually see or sense them—as Draco was beginning to think it could, thanks to that cloud of magic if nothing else—then it would only follow their movements.

But when he looked up, it was to see the tendril slamming past overhead, and that everyone else had had the same idea he did: Weasley lay nearby with his arms securely wrapped around Granger and her book, and Herricks had tackled Ventus. Ventus looked more annoyed than anyone else did, and was struggling to get up, her wand aimed at the dark corridor that the nothingness had carved through the air.

“I can destroy it,” she said. “Let me go into that other world and get some more of the reality—”

“You were right, Weasley,” said Draco, and then turned to Harry. “I want you to call up a snake illusion and use it to contain some of the reality we brought along.” The wooden box still rested in Ventus’s pocket, and Draco didn’t think any had been spilled, or she would have been surrounded by a golden glow. “Now.”

*

Harry wanted to protest that he didn’t know how to form a snake illusion for the purpose of containing reality. It wasn’t as though anyone had ever done this before, had they? And he had counted on at least having some War Wizards around him who could teach him spells that might modify or strengthen his snake illusion.

But he knew what Draco meant. They couldn’t wait until the nothingness devoured the Muggles and the world around them, wringing their hands because they didn’t understand it. They would have to take some risks.

Harry began to grin when he thought about it that way. I can do that. I can do that more than happily.

He reached up and closed his eyes, envisioning his purpose, the nothingness contained and wrapped in reality, more than any specific snake. That was the way he had always done it. He hadn’t called on a cobra with a spread hood to protect him from Nihil’s rain of fire the other night; he had just thought about being safe, and the cobra had come along.

His fingers tingled and grew cool. Harry opened his eyes and then stared when he saw the slender silver body that extended away from his hand. It looked a little like the snakes that had bitten into the side of the void to hold him up when Nihil was attacking, but it had glittering blue patterns on its back that Harry certainly hadn’t seen or imagined before.

The snake turned back towards him once, its tongue flickering out from between pale jaws that rather resembled, Harry thought before he could stop himself, the way Voldemort’s mouth had looked. Then it turned away and surged straight towards Ventus, who was arguing with Herricks.

“I can fight,” Harry heard her saying. “We don’t know that we can’t defeat Nihil, and even if we can’t that’s no reason to sit about—”

The snake went on extending, and latched its teeth into the box in her pocket. Harry grunted. He could feel the impression when it struck, as if he’d thrown a rope with a hook on it and caught the hook over the top of a wall. The line between them grew taut, the snake’s body thrumming, and Harry thought he picked up an echo of the throbbing that ran through his collarbone.

That’s it, he thought in some amazement, as the snake bit down and steadied, and the reality began to leak into it. I felt the throbbing in the first place because of the imbalance between life and death. I’m feeling it from the box because the extra reality has its own presence in the world, and makes the balance start to shift back again.

The snake reared its head from the box, fangs shining. Ventus had fallen silent and was watching it with wide, curious eyes. Herricks stood there, too, frozen, but when he caught Harry’s gaze, he gave a nervous sort of bow, as though he assumed Harry was a god who needed to be obeyed.

Harry sighed in irritation. He hoped that Herricks wouldn’t start that nonsense again about how Harry instead of Draco should be the leader of the comitatus.

But those thoughts were unimportant compared to the throbbing that traveled up the snake into his arm. The snake ate the reality, and Harry saw its jaws and then its midsection bulge around it. Draco hissed beside him as though he thought that there was something wrong with the sight. Harry shook his head, hoping that that would reassure him. He was incapable of speaking right now.

Because the snake had eaten the reality, it was, in a way, as if Harry had. He already knew that his connection with this illusion ran deeper than his connection with the others had.

Warmth opened in his belly. He could feel a slow, languid haze creeping into his mind, too. It was odd. He lost his fear of Nihil and his fear of the ball of nothingness and his fear of not being able to do anything at the same moment, for what felt like the first time in months. He was surveying the world from a lazy distance, ready to be interested in anything he wanted, create anything he wanted.

Fight anything he wanted.

He looked up at the ball of nothingness, at the corridor of dark above them and the steadily expanding globe that looked as though it would land on them soon. He could see it moving, now, where he hadn’t before, creeping across the ground like a cloud across the sun. Harry gave a lazy smile and shifted so that he was aiming the snake and his arm both up at the edge of the ball.

He wouldn’t permit this. He was going to contain it, and eat it, and surround it with enough glittering reality that it would dissolve.

He reached out, or he lay there and the snake reached out for him. It was hard to tell the difference between them anymore. The warmth continued to stir through him, and he had the strong impression that he could stamp his feet and birth a new universe, if he wanted to. The muttering people around him might not believe it; Draco had a doubtful expression on his face that made Harry want to roll his eyes. And Ventus was staring at him, and Herricks looked terrified.

They only looked that way because they couldn’t feel what he did, Harry thought. Unfortunately, he could think of no other way of showing them what he felt than by consuming the edge of the globe of nothingness.

And perhaps the whole thing.

The snake reeled out from him, streaming across the sky like a silver banner. Its fangs closed on the edge of the blackness, and it shook its head hard enough that shimmers ran up Harry’s arm. His body ached, and he spat out something from his mouth that writhed briefly on the ground.

Well, if he could feel the pleasure and the warmth from eating reality through the snake, he reckoned it was only fair that he feel the disgusting taste of the poison it was swallowing and containing, too.

The snake rose higher and higher, jaws parting and jutting forwards, as though it was drawing more substance from his magic, or his soul, or wherever it grew from, to become stronger. Harry didn’t mind. He continued to feel as though he could give of himself to whatever needed it. Bring Draco’s father back to life? Yes, he could do that. Bring the world peace from all wars? He could do that if he wanted to. Bring Nihil down and restore Draco’s lost eye? Yes, as soon as he thought about it.

The blackness passed into the snake, and seemed to struggle for a moment, as if it had a life and will of its own. But that was Nihil’s fault that it didn’t, Harry thought smugly. He had pulled pieces of the void into this world, and the void had no will. It could do nothing but expand. It couldn’t evade danger. Even the piece of the globe that had extended towards them, Harry thought now, had done so either because Nihil had told it to or because it had sensed living flesh and wanted to consume them. It was mindless.

After all, consciousness and pain, suffering and the drive to change, were all part of life, not death.

A silent shriek appeared in Harry’s ears. He didn’t know where it came from, but since it coincided with an increase in the thrumming in his bones, he knew it was probably from there. Nihil had found out what he was doing and was coming, or increasing his attack, or feeding more force to the ball of nothingness. Harry truly didn’t know, but he knew that he didn’t intend to lie around and wait for Nihil to act.

He envisioned the snake spreading the golden reality inside it all around the ball of nothingness, engulfing it faster than it could by slowly swallowing it.

And suddenly the snake was much bigger, a silver serpent that reared into the sky like a ladder, and Harry was a lot more tired. That explains where the snake comes from, at least, he thought vaguely, hoping that he would have the chance to explain the theory to someone else later. It draws its strength from me.

The snake had folded its fangs back and was all but spitting gold on the ball of nothingness, bright as a dragon’s flames. It seemed to be growing dark, but Harry had no idea if it actually was. Perhaps that came from Nihil’s impending arrival, or the ball of nothingness making the world around it less real somehow.

He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. What mattered was that his trap was working the way it was supposed to, and the snake was eating the ball of nothingness.

Then the air in front of him ripped open at the same point as the thrumming increased so that the bones shook in his skin, and Nihil came.

*

Draco had listened carefully to Harry’s description of fighting Nihil in the camp at night. He had thought he had understood what it entailed; in fact, he had been sure he did, and hadn’t expected to feel frightened when he faced the creature—thing—mastermind—himself.

But he did.

Nihil didn’t look like the ball of nothingness, the way Draco had thought he might. He didn’t look like the yellow cloud of magic that Draco could see drifting in the air with his magical eye. Draco reckoned, with the part of his mind that wasn’t cowering away and screaming in horror about the new arrival, that that was because he had disguised himself in a glamour before when he wanted to appear to mortals. This was the way he really was, naked, unshielded, and without even the dream-like atmosphere that Harry had talked about to make him less than he was.

Less real. Less hurtful. Less likely to make Draco want to claw his own eyes out and then cut off his ears, so that he couldn’t hear anymore.

Shrieks traveled with Nihil. So did smells. Draco could feel those sensations crawling over his face, drowning him. It was like being buried alive in vomit. His body was alive with so much visceral disgust, so much rejection of this thing and the death it brought with it, that he couldn’t even stand up and fight.

This is the rejection of life for death, Draco thought, somewhere within the one part of his mind that remained rock-steady and rock-calm, unmoved by the acts that his body wanted him to commit. They are opposites. They are also entwined within the worlds, but not in our world. We can’t think that way. We’re in human bodies, and we can only think with human brains.

Draco battled it, hard, because this might be his one chance to see what Nihil looked like by using his magical eye, and he wanted to know that information so that he could use it.

His eye showed a flaring of tatters, black holes worse than the one in the center of Nemo’s aura, sliding mud that reformed into nothingness so dense that Draco’s skin felt as if it was blistering from the looking. He stared, though, until his eye closed of itself and a cloud of warm steam arose in front of his face. Reaching up, Draco recoiled. His eyelid over the magical eye bore a large burn.

Nihil lashed out at Harry’s snake. Draco knew what had happened only from the way the snake shuddered and hissed. He couldn’t see the weapon Nihil had struck with or the method he had used. And that bothered him, but when he tried to open his magical eye again, radiating pain ran through his face. He didn’t think he should try using that eye again right now.

A glance to the side showed that Granger was leafing frantically through her book. Weasley stood over her, protecting her, although Nihil hadn’t yet glanced in their direction. Ventus prowled around the perimeter of Nihil’s body, as far as one could call it that, keen eyes saying that she was looking for a place and way to attack.

A question darted into Draco’s mind like a bolt of lightning.

Where is Herricks?

He turned around quickly, but he didn’t see him. A ball of cold settled into the pit of his stomach. He wondered if Herricks had betrayed them all along, if he had somehow managed to circumvent the oath that everyone swore and which should have held him—

And then Draco shuddered in irritation and dismissed the notion. Nihil was here. If Herricks had meant to betray them, it seemed that he wouldn’t have much more to do that could damage them.

Except hurt Harry.

Draco surged to his feet and walked as close to Harry as he dared, holding his wand out. No, he could do nothing about the private battle between Nihil and Harry for the moment, but he could keep him safe in the event that Herricks tried to determine the end of the struggle by casting a mortal curse at Harry from hiding.

No matter where he turned, he didn’t see him, but Draco kept looking. This, unlike the confrontation with Nihil, was something he felt he could handle.

*

Harry was holding his own, but he didn’t know how much longer that could continue.

It helped that he had seen Nihil unshielded once before, and that this time, he had a weapon, or was filled with a weapon, that could consume Nihil. Enfold him. Hold him at bay. But the blows that Nihil launched at him felt as strong as the ones that he had used the other night, and that position had not endured long.

Harry gritted his teeth and held on. So far, the ball of nothingness was continually fading, and the snake didn’t appear to dim or grow smaller as it went on. Harry had no idea how much reality the snake had taken from the box in Ventus’s robes, or how much was needed to make a ball of nothingness that size harmless, but he would keep on holding on until something changed.

He saw Draco from the corner of his eye, and he saw someone else drawing near. Ventus? Harry didn’t think so. He didn’t think she could possibly be that close to Nihil without attacking, and Ron and Hermione would have come to his aid by now if they were coming. Nihil might be holding them paralyzed in place by the sight of him.

Nihil flicked out a long, ghastly tendril—trying to look at it was like trying to look death in the eye—and tore a slash down the snake’s side.

The snake roared and hissed, and a pain like nothing he had ever known swelled through Harry. He cried out and felt Draco stirring restlessly beside him, wanting to do something and unable to do it. Harry gave him a pained smile that he hoped Draco understood. That was the way Harry had felt before Draco got the magical eye.

The person he had seen out of the corner of his eye moved again, and then Herricks was dashing straight at Nihil, his wand raised and a manic courage burning in his eyes that Harry had never seen or suspected him of. As he stared, Herricks raised his wand higher and higher, and then screamed out, in a voice that should have made Nihil look around if he had any self-preservation instinct at all, “Ara!”

Harry didn’t recognize the spell, or the white light that it caused to blaze around Herricks’s limbs.

Or the way he jumped forwards, a moment later, flying into and vanishing into Nihil as if he had gone a much longer distance than the jump implied.

He only knew that, a moment after that, Nihil screamed.