lomonaaeren

Chapter Thirty-Five.

Title: Seasons of War (36/40)
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-Six—On the Altar

Draco always felt, later, like he had never seen what Herricks did properly. That would explain why he didn’t understand what he was seeing at first. Of course, his magical eye was also weeping tears of pain, so he thought he could be excused for not understanding and feeling impatience; this was just another of Herricks’s stunts. If he made Nihil scream, that was just a coincidence, probably based on something Harry had done.

But then he focused on the white light that spread rays out from Nihil, stabbing at the ground and the air, and he began to understand, even as a chill wind of fear traveled down his spine.

The white light turned in on itself, folding into a smaller package instead of expanding the way that Draco had been sure it would. It glowed all the while with energy similar to the packet of reality that Ventus had shown him, and it spat and hissed like a cat with a mouse that refused to die.

In the center of it was Nihil, now masked and made bearable by the presence of the white light. Draco stared some more, trying again to see what he was really like with the help of the magical eye, but his vision still blurred with tears, so he concentrated on the white light instead.

It wasn’t white, not when seen through his new eye. Instead, the edges of the steadily shrinking light bore the same half-tame green and gold colors that had surrounded Herricks the last time Draco looked at him, as though the light had taken on Herricks’s magic.

As though the light had become Herricks.

Or the other way around, Draco thought, and his heart started to pound sickeningly as he remembered the sound of Herricks’s spell and where he had heard such spells before. Reading Dark Arts books, yes, but in this case, what they described wasn’t a Dark spell. It was used by proto-Aurors serving the proto-Ministry, to fight Dark wizards who couldn’t be defeated in any other fashion.

The spell’s single word, ara, meant “altar” in Latin. The person who cast it made himself into an altar, and offered his life as a sacrifice.

Herricks wouldn’t be coming out of the light again.

With one part of his mind, Draco was shocked, but another part had to admire the logic that had prompted Herricks to use that particular incantation, not a possibility Draco had heard mentioned by anyone else. Of course, if he was giving up his life, it stood to reason that the life would be used as a weapon against Nihil. And how many times in the last few days had they said that they had to find a way to do that?

A third part of Draco’s mind, separated yet more from the rest, was determined to act as Herricks probably would have wanted, and study the complex magic his life, and life-in-death, had released. He might be able to understand other ways to defeat Nihil if he knew how this magic worked against him.

Ways that didn’t involve someone dying.

Draco cast a spell that would dry his eyes, another to prevent salt water from forming so that more tears wouldn’t blind him, and a general healing charm. Then he focused on Nihil once again, and threw himself into remembering what he saw. If he couldn’t understand it now, he could at least preserve the image so that they could study it later.

*

Harry knew he was lying on his back beneath the illusory snake who was swallowing the edges of the globe of nothingness. He could see that if he just looked around.

But he felt as though he were holding a weighty, possibly pure silver, pair of balance scales that slid down and tipped heavily to one side, but which someone had just reached into and added a balance to on the opposite side.

Harry gasped and tilted his head back, trying to understand. Above him, the snake continued to swallow the globe, this time unhindered by Nihil. Harry turned his head and saw the white light that he knew Herricks’s death had unleashed fading. Nihil would probably be free to attack him again soon.

But he also saw something else.

The air behind Nihil was smoky, hazy, shimmering like a thin curtain. Harry thought he could see another world behind the curtain, one that swayed back and forth, tentative and hasty. Half of the time, he thought, it didn’t really exist. It could come to life or be held back in stillbirth or only occur partially, depending on the choices of everyone around them.

In the world was a balance, but Harry didn’t see it as a pair of balance scales, this time. He saw a great golden serpent, its eyes brilliant, its scales life-giving, entwined about one that was the blue-black color of the void that Draco had brought back to be made into weapons. They were entangled to the point that Harry didn’t think anyone could separate them, and they were wrestling.

Whoever won the combat would determine the fate of the worlds entangled all around them, including Harry’s own.

But then Harry looked, and thought again. (He had time for that, amazingly, although Herricks’s light was almost gone and he knew Nihil would break out again when it was). The snakes were wrestling, yes, but they never separated, or struck at each other with their fangs. They didn’t look as though they would prefer that the other one didn’t exist. It was a bit hard to read a snake’s expression, but Harry reckoned that he’d had more practice at it than most people.

This was the imbalance between the forces of life and death, Harry thought, but it wasn’t the war that Portillo Lopez had told him was happening, or even the unequal balance scales he’d pictured. This was a cooperation. The snakes knew they were out of place, and they were trying to get back into it before something drastic happened.

Harry had assumed without thinking about it that the imbalance meant life and death were at war. But why? That didn’t make sense, not when he did think about it. Life fed death; death ensured that life didn’t overrun the earth. It made more sense for them to be in balance in the sense of cooperating, not fighting one another because two relatively minor wizards had decided to try and become immortal or nonexistent.

He went on staring, fascinated, while his snake swallowed the last of the globe and the white light that Herricks, he now understood, had sacrificed his life to create withered and died as a flower would.

As the way that flowers had to do, Harry understood, or there would be way too many of them growing. But death didn’t devour things the way that Nihil wanted to do, destroying everything so that there was no chance he could come back to life. Of course there was nothing to be gained from destroying what death needed to feed itself in the future.

Aurors understood life and death in a certain way. That didn’t mean it was the only way to understand them.

Harry drifted in the midst of that knowledge for a long moment, feeling oddly exultant. He thought he might be feeling what Hermione did when she discovered some unknown fact for the first time. How true! How simple! How strange that no one else had ever seen it before!

And how nice that he would get to be the one to explain it to everybody!

Then reality came back to life around him with a nasty jolt. The last of the globe of darkness passed into the snake, and Nihil fought his way free of the white light and turned his attention on Harry.

It was worse than before. Harry could feel his body ripping apart, his soul fleeing into the darkness of death rather than withstand what was before him. He brought his hands over his eyes instinctively, even though Nihil’s presence was mostly magical and so Harry knew that he would go on seeing, hearing, and otherwise sensing him.

But when his hand moved, it brought the snake with it, and the golden, glowing reality the snake was infused with.

Nihil said something soundless, something that blurred and rippled in Harry’s head and then moved through his body as though it would rupture his stomach and any other internal organs that it found. Harry gasped in pain.

But it was only pain. And he found he could breathe again when he glanced up. Nihil was gone as though he had never been, and only staring air remained. Buildings smoldered around them, and Harry could see darting shapes drawing nearer that were either War Wizards or Muggle police, and either way they would demand explanations, but for the moment, he felt as if he could survive anything in that vein. Nihil was gone.

Harry doubted that he knew for sure what had caused it, either his snake or Herricks, but he knew that he was grateful. He scrambled to his feet and started winding the snake back into himself, not wanting questions that he literally couldn’t answer if the people approaching were Muggles.

But Ventus cried out in welcome a moment later, and Harry didn’t think she would do that if they were random people who might need to be Obliviated. At least, he was relatively sure that she wouldn’t.

Ventus was darting around the War Wizards like a chicken around her chicks as they came in, asking and answering questions in the same breath. Most of the War Wizards ignored her, or so Harry thought. They were staring at Harry instead, or at the spot where Nihil had stood. They looked unhappy.

Harry finished destroying the snake illusion. He didn’t know what had happened to the reality it was infused with, he realized a moment later. It seemed to have been destroyed in containing the ball of nothingness, or perhaps that was what had allowed him to see the reality of the vision of life and death for an instant. Either way, it was gone.

“Have you permission to be here?” the leader of the War Wizards was asking Draco. He looked grave to the point of constipation.

Harry rolled his eyes and stepped forwards. For one thing, he had facts he needed to tell Draco, and for another, he thought things would go better for the comitatus if the War Wizards saw Harry. His scar could sometimes work miracles.

Harry still didn’t like that, but there was little that he wouldn’t do to save the world.

Or to save Draco, for that matter.

*

Draco lowered his head and spent a moment composing himself, despite the imposing line of War Wizards staring at him. He was not going to say something wrong because he had hurried. That would be the ultimate in stupidity, when they were the ones who had time on their hands. The War Wizards could hardly rush the comitatus through the interview without losing important information of their own, while the comitatus had survived the immediate battle and couldn’t defeat Nihil any faster with their words.

Draco needed to understand what he had seen, to make sense of the vast images and the symbols they represented shifting there, before he made any effort to tell anyone else.

“Trainee Malfoy,” said the War Wizard who had spoken before, or so Draco thought. He hadn’t paid much attention to that one’s identity. “Answer me. Do you have the permission of the Aurors to be here?”

Draco wanted to laugh when he understood the import of the words. It always came back to that, didn’t it, to allowance and authority and the minor webs of power? He couldn’t believe that he had wanted to join the War Wizards, once. Yes, their spells were strong, but what kind of fool ignored the evidence in front of him that earth-shattering magic had been unleashed and instead wanted to know whether Draco was following the Auror hierarchy like a good little trainee?

“Yes,” he said at last, because it cost him nothing to do that. “We have the permission of both Head Auror Robards and his second-in-command, Auror Holder.”

It was obvious the War Wizard hadn’t expected to hear that. He rocked back once on his heels and stared at Draco. Draco stared back, bored and showing it. They had better things to worry about.

Such as the loss of Herricks. Draco was still mostly in shock over that, but he didn’t like to think of how Ventus would be grieving, and the way that Holder or Robards—he was less sure about Holder—would try to turn that loss against him as leader of the comitatus.

The War Wizard cleared his throat. “Did you not hear the announcement we made that we should draw back and disengage from the globe? We have the weapons to contain it, but they were stored elsewhere. We had sent several of our number to fetch them. In the meantime, you put yourselves in danger and quite likely caused the appearance of our enemy.”

Draco concealed his smug smile. Irritating as the situation was, he knew that they wouldn’t have told him even that much a month ago. He had become someone they had to respect, however reluctantly they did it. “But how do you know that they would have returned in time?” he asked. “It’s true that we may have caused Nihil to appear, but that means that he was forced to make an attack where he did not intend to. In the meantime, the ball might have consumed the city before you discovered a weapon capable of destroying it.”

If you did. He left the words unspoken, but the War Wizard confronting him seemed to hear them nonetheless. He narrowed his eyes and turned his head aside to spit on the ground. Draco kept a firm grip on his temper.

“Sir.” Harry’s voice was calm and as respectful as it ever got, but when Draco glanced to the side, he saw those green eyes filled with the fire he knew. “We should make a report. Can we leave, now?”

The War Wizard closed his eyes, and Draco could see the vein working in the man’s forehead. He probably would have liked to keep them there and make them miserable, Draco thought, but they were technically under the command of the Head Auror, and the War Wizards would want to preserve good relations with the Aurors.

“Very well,” he said at last. “You have permission to leave.” He traded sneers with Draco and then turned away.

Draco snorted bitterly and turned his head aside. He wanted to stay and argue, at least with some of his mind. How dare they belittle the people who had saved them? Were they so concerned about prestige and who had done what that they couldn’t appreciate Draco and his comitatus lifting the burden from their shoulders?

And you’re doing the same thing at the moment.

Draco squared his shoulders and faced Ventus. She looked at him with an expression wiped clean of everything, then glanced at the place where Herricks had fallen.

“He died defending people,” she said. “He died attacking, I know, but he would have thought of it as defending.” Her voice was so slow and quiet that Draco couldn’t make out from it what she was feeling any more than from the expression on her face.

That’s something, I suppose, Draco decided. He wouldn’t argue with quiet mourning. He would simply keep an eye on her in case it turned into something dangerous later. “We should return to the camp as quickly as we can,” he said. “To tell them the news of Herricks’s death and—to share the information we have.”

He looked at Harry again. Harry blinked tiredly back at him. Draco put one arm around his shoulders and squeezed lightly, trying to convey how impressed and worried he was without words. There were people around who didn’t need to hear them.

Harry reached up and touched his jaw with a faint smile. Draco was relatively sure that he understood.

*

The person Harry really wanted to see when they got back to the camp was Portillo Lopez. He was sure that she was the only one who would know much about the struggle he had seen. Well, Raverat might, too, but Harry was more sure of seeing her since Raverat seemed to stay in his tent and rarely come out at all nowadays.

But since there was a hierarchy of rules to respect no matter how much they might not have wanted to, they had to go and report to Holder and Robards first. Harry followed Draco to the tent, and stood solidly behind him while Draco described what had happened. When Holder turned and pinned him with an iron gaze, Harry recited the details about the snake illusion and how he had swallowed the reality.

That pleased no one. Harry hadn’t really expected it to.

“You swallowed some of our best weapon?” Holder sat still, but Harry knew her well enough by now to see the tension in the lines of her arms, and the way she twitched as if she would stand up and stalk about the tent. Robards leaned back in his chair and watched her more than the rest of them.

“If I hadn’t, then the globe of nothingness would have gone on expanding,” Harry said. It was best if he remained as calm and inoffensive as possible, so that no one would get the impression that he was angry about this. He was only angry about the delay. He was proud of what he had done.

Although I didn’t do it in time to save Herricks.

Harry shook his head and blinked. He honestly didn’t understand what had motivated Herricks to make that sacrifice, except that he obviously had something greater in him than any of them had known about. Harry wouldn’t do honor to his memory by blaming himself, though. Herricks wouldn’t have wanted that.

Or else he would have wanted it, because he would think it was a sign that Harry was about to take the comitatus from Draco. Harry honestly had no more idea about what his character had really been, anymore.

“You could have done something else than rid the world of a portion of our only weapon,” Holder said, and tightened her fingers on the arms of her chair until Harry thought she would break something.

“It was the only thing I knew to do,” Harry said. “I did see two great snakes struggling behind Nihil that I think represented the forces of life and death in the imbalance, though.”

As he had known she would do, Holder dismissed that and continued to berate him for sacrificing some of the reality Ventus had brought back. Harry doubted that she thought his vision important. Draco, though, was staring at him, and he answered the next few questions Holder asked of him inattentively.

The moment they were outside the tent again, he cornered Harry and snapped, “Why didn’t you mention that before?”

“Because I don’t understand what it means,” Harry said. “I’d wager that you don’t understand everything you saw with your magical eye when you looked at Nihil, either.”

Draco blinked and rocked back on his heels. “How do you know that I was looking at Nihil with my magical eye?” he asked, but he was no good at lying when it was on a subject this important to him.

Or maybe I just know him too well, Harry thought as he answered. “You were staring at him for so long. You couldn’t have avoided noticing what he was doing and what he looked like, even if you weren’t specifically trying to gather information.”

Draco gave him a small smile, and then said, “I need to write down the symbols and show them to someone I’m more certain will understand them.”

“Such as Portillo Lopez,” Harry said, and then smiled blindingly back at Draco when Draco blinked. “Can you suggest a better candidate? Especially since I know that you distrust Raverat.”

“No,” Draco said. “I can’t. Let me create a list, and you create one, and then we can both take them to her.”

Harry glanced around. Ventus had already left, but Hermione and Ron lingered nearby, with Hermione leafing through her book frantically. Harry decided that he might as well do something for her, which Draco didn’t seem inclined to at the moment. “If you find something that you think relates to defeating Nihil, then you’ll come and tell us at once, Hermione, right?” he asked.

“Yes!” Hermione said, and all but ran away, probably going back to their tent to find a table where she could spread the book out and take notes. Ron rolled his eyes at Harry in a gesture that seemed to plead for compassion and then followed her.

Harry turned back to Draco. “Do you think that one of us should find Ventus and make sure that she’s not too torn up over Herricks’s death?” Holder hadn’t reacted much to that news, Harry thought. She’d been far more concerned over the loss of the weapon that she believed that captured reality could become.

“She won’t kill herself or do something drastic because of him,” Draco said. “She’s not that kind of person. I think she’ll practice more intensely at her spells, which can only be to the good.” He looked pointedly at Harry. “In the meantime, we should start making our own contribution to the war effort.”

Harry followed him, frowning. He wished that he could mourn more for Herricks, but the simple fact was that he had mostly known the man as Ventus’s partner, an occasionally good Auror, and someone whom Harry had wished would be less of a bully and arrogant claimant to Draco’s position as the head of the comitatus. Harry was sorry he was gone, but more for Ventus’s sake than simply because he had died.

I can salute him, though. And wonder if I would have the courage to do what he had done.

And whether that was what defeated Nihil, more than the snake illusion that I summoned.

*

“I think you are right.”

Portillo Lopez raised her eyes from the simple notes that Harry had put down about his vision of the two serpents struggling, and they shone. Draco bit his lip. She hadn’t looked that way when she examined his notes on the symbols he had seen shifting around Nihil.

Draco himself didn’t know what they meant. Dead roses, blasted deserts, glass masks, thrones of bone like the ones that Granger had seen more than once…he didn’t understand. But he had written them down because he thought they were important, and Portillo Lopez seemed unable to understand how.

“Not an imbalance in the sense that we understand it,” Portillo Lopez was murmuring, her curved hand scooping out strange gestures in the air. “Or at least, not the same kind of imbalance. Not a struggle, but a dance. The way we perceive things not being the only way. The way that Nihil handled them—and the fact that they appeared with him, as the background that he was acting against, rather than in service of him—it is not as bad as we feared. He has not made himself master of death. He operates in that context like any other necromancer.”

She whipped around suddenly, and laughed, a pure, bright, clear sound. Draco exchanged mystified looks with Harry. He didn’t know what that meant any more than Harry did.

”Yes,” Portillo Lopez said. “That is it. That is the way to defeat Nihil.”