To Walk a Narrow Path: Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Three: Choosing
Harry floated in space. There was neither up nor down, nothing to anchor him to the world. He was not in the abyss, nor anywhere else he could remember. It was dark and close, like thick blankets wrapped around his head. Why is it so dark?
“It’s always dark here,” a woman said. Harry opened his eyes. The nothingness resolved into a shadowy plane. A woman in a cloak stood before him, a deep cowl hiding her face.
“Danu,” he said.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said.
It surprised a laugh from him. “I guess,” Harry scratched at the back of his neck. His mind felt…better. Not whole, exactly, but better. He didn’t hurt, either, which should have been his first clue.
“So, am I dead yet?” He asked.
She tilted her head to one side. “Do you wish to die?”
“What?” He blinked.
“If it is your wish, you may go,” one hand folded out of her sleeve. “You have carried the world on your young shoulders far longer than others have dared to try. If you wish peace, it is yours for the taking.”
Harry frowned, toeing a sneaker into the fine gray dust. “Then I’m not dead?”
“You are here to choose.”
He let out a pent up breath. “I think I’ve done enough choosing for one lifetime.” His shoulders slumped. “I’m so tired of having to choose. Every time I seem to screw up. If I’d just let Voldemort win, then Crom Cruach wouldn’t have been woken up. People wouldn’t have had to die. The children…”
“It would have happened, your choice or not,” Danu stepped forward. “It was time for the Horn of Calling to be sounded. It was time, young man. Your choices brought it about, yes, but if it had not been you, then it would have been someone else.”
“That does little to help the guilt.”
“Then do you choose peace, young Dreamer,” she touched his cheek. “To dream away your sorrows and live in peace?”
It sounded so good. To give up the fight, to no longer be the one to struggle against the dark. To be happy for once -
That caught him short. He put a hand to his chest and glanced around. “Where’s Draco?”
“The choice is yours, Dreamer, and no other’s.”
Unbidden, Draco’s words to him in front of the gates to Hel’s hall came back to him. He started to laugh, rusty at first, and then longer and louder.
“Dreamer?”
“Life,” he wiped at his face with both hands, breathless with despair and joy in equal measures. “No choice to it,” he said. “I choose life.”
Her hand touched his face again, a warm palm cupping his cheek. “You are saddened,” she said.
“But loved,” he shrugged. “Where I go, Draco goes. He’d be livid if I tried to get ahead of him now.”
He thought he saw a smile in the shadows of her cowl. “But?”
“How many more times will I have to do this?”
“None,” she gathered him in her arms and held him close. He put his head on her shoulder and sighed, tension leaking away as he imagined his own mother’s embrace. “You have run your course, Dreamer,” she whispered into his ear. “You have returned the Horn of Calling to the world. It has been sounded. The heroes rise. No more battles for you, Dreamer.”
“Oh, thank Merlin,” he had time to mutter before the whole world went black. Just before he slipped away, though, he thought he heard one last gentle laugh from the goddess of all the worlds over.
End Chapter Fifty-Three
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