[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Pythonicus, gen, PG-13, 6/7, sequel to Potens
Part Five.
Part One.
Title: Pythonicus (6/7)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Mentions of Lily/James and Lucius/Narcissa, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Time travel, AU, present tense, Unspeakable Harry Potter, violence, gore, brief torture
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 5300
Summary: Sequel to “Princeps” and “Potens.” Harry has gained the loyalty of many of the young Slytherins, and others he never expected. Now he attempts to find and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes and protect and teach his students while avoiding Time’s plans-and his followers’-to make him into a Lord.
Author’s Notes: This should have three parts, and is part of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” series of fics, as well as a sequel to the first two parts of the series, “Princeps,” and Potens. The title is a Latin word meaning “prophetic” or “magical.”
Yes, to everyone who guessed that this would have seven parts, you were right. Stupid talking and fighting characters.
Part Six
Harry opens his bedroom door and stops at the sight of the person in the sitting room. The person stares back. Neither of them says a word. Harry has never seen this man face-to-face before, but he knows who he has to be.
Then Harry turns to the second person in his sitting room and asks, “What is your father doing here, Regulus?”
Regulus beams at him. “I know that you need someone who can help you go after the Dark Lord’s artifact. My father is powerful, and our family owes you debts because you rescued me and helped protect me and Sirius. So he’s going to help you go and retrieve that artifact, or destroy it. Whichever you need to do.”
“One could argue that I also took your father’s sons away from him,” Harry says in a low voice, his eyes on Orion Black. He looks as if he needs a stiff drink and to leave, in roughly that order. “Your mother would certainly say that. What did you really do?”
“I told him that Sirius and I would both change our last names to Salvare if he didn’t help you. Andromeda and Narcissa changed their names when they got married, and Bellatrix will do the same thing if she ever gets married. Or she’ll die in prison in the war, probably. That means no one from the most recent generation with the name ‘Black’ will be left.”
Harry turns to stare at him. “You said that? You’re serious?”
“No, of course not,” Regulus says, in such a puzzled, hurt tone that Harry is taken in for a minute. “I’m not my brother.”
Harry closes his eyes and rubs his hand over his forehead. Regulus is being too fifteen for him right now.
Orion Black softly clears his throat. Harry opens his eyes and looks at the man, who’s mostly silvery-haired rather than dark-haired and looks more like Sirius in the face. “I did in fact agree with him that we owe you debts. The Dark Lord would have killed Regulus, and Albus Dumbledore would have enslaved Sirius.”
Harry refrains from saying that he doesn’t think Dumbledore is going to brand Order of the Phoenix members any more than Harry is going to brand his oathsworn. Right now, the deception serves him. “And because of that, you’re willing to risk your life?”
Orion shakes his head, his grey eyes dull and apprehensive. “Because the Dark Lord tried to kill my younger son. And because both of them have thrived being sworn to you. It showed in the letters they wrote to me, and it showed when Regulus Flooed me last night.”
Harry sighs. “You should know that if I accept your help, there’s a good chance that you could die from this. Voldemort values that artifact about almost anything else at this point, and he’ll have powerful protections around it.”
Orion gives him a shaky smile, although he flinches when Harry speaks Voldemort’s name. “I am aware of some of those protections. He said that anyone who goes to the island will have to pass wards that require a Death Eater’s presence.”
Harry blinks at him. Keeping his movements large, smooth, and broad so that Harry won’t react as if he’s reaching for his wand, Orion tugs his left sleeve up, and reveals the Dark Mark.
Harry can’t remember if Sirius and Regulus’s father was Marked in the first timeline, but he supposes it doesn’t matter. What does is that he can bypass those protections with Orion’s presence.
He nods. “I accept your help. I’m also going to ask a few other people.”
“The more help we can have, the better. From what the Dark Lord said, the traps are…extensive.”
Harry draws his wand, and Orion tenses, although he doesn’t run. Regulus just looks bright-eyed.
“I need to ward the Dark Mark so that Voldemort can’t reach you through it,” Harry explains. “He could try to kill or cripple you with the pain otherwise, and as terrible a parent as you’ve been, I don’t want Sirius and Regulus to lose their father.”
Orion flinches a little more, but extends his left arm. Regulus doesn’t leave, and Harry doesn’t ask him to. He settles on the couch next to Orion, and begins to hiss out the litany of commands to the snake in the Mark that he used when he cut the connection Lucius’s Mark had to Voldemort.
By the end of the process, his headache fills his world, and he sits back on the couch and pants for a moment. Orion studies him as he folds his left sleeve over the Mark, but he says nothing about it. “How many other people will go with us?” he asks.
“I’ll ask for at least two.” Harry doesn’t intend to say that he’ll ask Dumbledore for a few experienced Order members. No need for Orion to worry about where their “help” will come from. “And then I have some colleagues to visit.”
*
“You’ll trust the Order members to go with you, and trust them if they offer you some unsolicited advice?”
Harry snorts and removes a clingy Fawkes from his shoulder to put him back on his perch. Fawkes croons dejectedly, but stays in place. Harry goes and flops down in the chair in front of Albus’s desk. “Yes, although you have to be aware that one of the people accompanying us will be a Death Eater. That means that they’ll need to keep advice about him to themselves.”
“A Death Eater you can trust?”
Albus is clearly skeptical, but Harry only raises his eyebrows. “Yes. As a Parselmouth myself, I can take control of the serpent that appears in the Mark when necessary.”
Albus blinks. “You might advertise that. There would be more than one Death Eater who might join you for the promise of such freedom.”
Harry shrugs. “Voldemort will die pretty soon, and then I’ll free the people who ask for it. But there’s no point in announcing it right now and having him turn on his people or try to make sure that he’s controlling them with the Imperius or the like.”
“I suppose not.” Albus considers it. Then he says, “I can give you the services of two brothers, Gideon and Fabian Prewett. They’re used to functioning as a team, and they have some Auror training. They’ll do what you ask of them.”
Harry swallows. “Thank you, sir.” Silently, he vows not to get Ron’s uncles killed by Death Eaters, no matter how much Time would like the symmetry.
“Are you sure you should be going soon?” Albus is staring at him in open concern. “You don’t look well at all, Henry.”
Harry ignores Fawkes’s croon and the softer buzz under it that he suspects is coming from the Elder Wand and its whiny neediness. “We won’t go today, sir. And I’m going to pick up some tricks before then to even the odds.”
*
Harry reads through the parchment that the Unspeakable to greet him this time produced, frowning deeply. “I appreciate the effort that went into this spell,” he says slowly. “But it doesn’t look like it would be much good in battle. It requires long preparation, and too much of the main ingredient from someone to leave them battle-ready afterwards.”
“For someone it would be too much, but not from some many,” says the Unspeakable who greeted him this time, as anonymous as ever in a grey cloak and masked glamour. They’re in the middle of the Silver Room, which is used in developing new spells. Harry doesn’t understand why the silver surroundings are conducive to that particular field, but then, he spent most of his years with the Unspeakables in the Time Chamber.
Harry flicks his eyebrows up. “I see.” And that does make sense of a notation at the end of the spell that recommended the precise number of people the caster should have around them. Harry rolls the parchment up and stores it in a scroll case on his belt. “How much do I owe you for the development of the spell?”
“Use it in battle, Mr. Salvare. That will pay us for the use.”
Harry smiles. He suspected that would be the answer. The Unspeakables rarely get to see their more theoretical spells tested in the field, not like Aurors, and this one is more theoretical than others. Among other things, it requires a Parselmouth. “Thank you. And the one that I did pay you to develop?”
“Here.”
The Unspeakable makes a complicated gesture with their hands, and a silvery baffle of light that blocks the sight of new magical developments from anyone who doesn’t work in the Silver Room draws back. Harry looks down at the device with deep curiosity. It reminds him of the Mirror of Erised, in miniature. It’s a small reflective glass surrounded by a golden frame with two small legs. The glass swings back and forth in the frame, just as Harry specified.
“You have an advanced theoretical mind, Mr. Salvare,” the Unspeakable says as they hand the small mirror to him. “We could use you again in the Department of Mysteries.”
Harry stares. He expected an invitation, but not one so blatant. Most of the time, Unspeakables allow time travelers, who are after all mostly their own people, to go their own way and do what they want.
But as much as someone can whose face is masked from sight, the Unspeakable radiates welcome.
Harry nods. “I’ll consider it.” Truly, he doesn’t know what he’ll do after Voldemort is defeated. He’ll probably remain in the position of Defense professor for a few more years to protect his students and ensure that some of them are settled on paths that benefit them, but after that, will anyone need him as much? He can’t think they will.
“And one more thing you should see, Mr. Salvare.” The Unspeakable turns and leaves the Silver Room, Harry trailing behind.
He suspects where they’re going, and sighs a little as his fears are confirmed and they walk into the Hall of Prophecy. The Unspeakable takes him straight to what Harry thinks, at first, is a different prophecy. But then he realizes it’s merely the original orb that’s grown bigger, and he can make out some of the writing on it now, words floating near the surface.
…thrice defied him…
Well, Harry has, at least if defiance counts as times Voldemort and other people both knew about it. The duel, saving Regulus from being kidnapped, and being kidnapped himself.
“Thank you for giving us a chance to research this.” The Unspeakable clasps their hands together. “In matters of prophecy that relate to time travelers, flesh triumphs over circumstance.”
Harry blinks. “What?”
“Ah, of course.” The Unspeakable leans forwards a little. “You worked in the Hall of Prophecy, but in different-ways.”
Harry nods. He doesn’t know if perhaps the Unspeakables in this time have taken measures to ensure that their prophecy records are safer than they were in the future, but then, he doesn’t expect it to concern him much.
“The debate,” the Unspeakable continues in a tone of relish, “was between those who thought that Time would continue to prefer the time traveler to fulfill a prophecy-favor the same flesh-or whether it would prefer someone who could fulfill the original prophecy whether or not they were the time traveler-favor the same circumstances. There might have been another child born in the time you left who could have done what you did.”
Harry nods, not remotely surprised. If he’s special, it’s because of the way Voldemort chose him and the wizarding world revered him, and he adapted to fit those circumstances. Someone else could become the “savior,” too, if they had to. “And you discovered that flesh triumphs over circumstances.”
“Yes. Time prefers that you fulfill a new prophecy rather than someone else fulfilling the old one.”
Harry looks at the prophecy and shakes his head. “I won’t play it for you.” He doesn’t want the prophecy to influence his circumstances and make them self-fulfilling as they were for Voldemort with Trelawney’s first prophecy.
The Unspeakable sighs, but they don’t seem surprised. “Very well. But I hope you will let us know how both the spell and your mirror do in battle.”
Harry smiles and crafts a protective bubble to go around the mirror, just to make absolutely sure that it won’t be damaged in the Apparition. “I’ll provide you the memories.”
*
“We have to work with a Death Eater?”
Gideon’s voice is low, controlled, but angry. Harry took Orion Black to the meeting with the Prewett twins in Albus’s office, because he saw no point in delaying the issue.
Gideon and Fabian are both tall men with violently red hair and no trace of Fred’s and George’s humor. Fabian has a scar on his cheek, but he isn’t the one who’s objecting to Orion’s presence, at least verbally. He hangs back near Albus’s desk and twirls his wand between his fingers instead, eyeing both Harry and Orion with intense skepticism.
“Yes,” Harry says, ignoring Gideon’s tone. It’s easy enough after ignoring Voldemort’s taunts and some of the things his students think it’s appropriate to say in classes. “Voldemort has a ward around the island so that no one except those with a Dark Mark can get in. But I’ve changed Orion’s Dark Mark so that he can’t be hurt by it. It still has the connection to Voldemort’s magic, though. He won’t notice any difference.”
Fabian straightens up when he hears that, and stares at Harry with something too intense to be called respect. Then he exchanges a glance with his brother, and nods. “Very well. We’re coming with you.”
Harry resists the temptation to snap, I hope so, and just nods to the Prewett brothers. He glances at Orion. Orion looks back at him and shrugs.
“At least they’re purebloods,” he says.
Harry settles for a long, long sigh.
*
Apparating to the island is the easy part. Harry gives the coordinates to the Prewetts, and they make the jump easily. Orion follows them, and Harry-
Lands on a shore of rock and sand that immediately crumbles beneath his feet, responding, as Harry realizes after a moment of incredulous flailing, to the feeling of his specific, individual magic.
Sometimes he’s smart, Harry thinks crossly, catching his feet at the bottom of the beach, and then casting a Lightening Charm on himself when the beach starts to crumble again. He floats up and away when he pushes off from the sand, and hovers in midair as he watches the stone and sand reassemble. When it’s most inconvenient.
“Was the ward an alarm?” Fabian asks. He has his wand out, staring around at the grey, rainy beach, where waters are swirling and churning beneath a cloudy sky. “Will he know that you’re here?”
“No,” Harry says. “It was only designed to keep me from Apparating in or easily approaching the island.” He conjures a rope and twists it around his ankle, then tosses the other end to Orion. “Here, tow me, or I won’t be able to move easily without ending the spell.”
Orion catches the rope with only a blink of surprise, but Harry has the Prewett brothers focused on him suspiciously again. “How did you know that it wasn’t an alarm?” Gideon asks. “And how did you manage to use the Lightening Charm so quickly.”
“I used to be an Unspeakable,” Harry says, which makes a convenient answer to everything, especially because it’s true. “And my students come up with the same kinds of silly tricks.”
That at least makes the Prewett brothers relax. They glance around, and Fabian asks, “So where is this artifact that we need to destroy?”
Harry takes a moment to orient on the diary. There’s an unmistakable pulse of Dark magic from the center of the island, an area that seems to be uphill and then down in the middle of what might be a hollow between the small hillocks. “To the northeast.”
They turn and trek in that direction, Orion towing Harry along on the rope. It makes Harry feel ridiculous, rather like a giant balloon, but at least they’re doing what they need to do. It’s only when they reach the top of the hill that Fabian and Gideon reel back with their hands across their faces.
“What is it?” Harry asks. He glances around, but he can’t see whatever ward or trap might have affected them.
“There’s a choking-screen of some kind.” Fabian sounds like he’s on the verge of vomiting. “Like running into a cloud of skunk scent.”
Harry nods. He must be above it. “Is this the Death Eater ward, Mr. Black?”
“I think so.” Orion bares his Mark and moves slowly forwards, waving his arm around. Harry can’t see or sense the ending of a ward, but the Prewett brothers straighten up and remove their hands from their faces a minute later, which he supposes is the best he’s going to get. “There. That should end it.”
“He’s very arrogant,” Gideon mutters as they trek forwards again, their wands out and covering as many angles as they can.
“Always a fault of his,” Harry mutters.
But his heartbeat ratchets up when he sees a hollow in the middle of the sandy hollow between the hills, containing the diary out in the open. Voldemort isn’t that arrogant. He would never leave the diary without protection, even if it was just from the elements in the kind of box that contained the ring.
“Stay back,” Harry says, and the Prewett brothers obey the snap of command in his voice, scrambling a little way up the hill they just descended. Orion freezes in place, but Harry thinks he can probably feel the waves of power coming from the diary better than any of them.
“What is it?” Gideon whispers, his wand trained on the diary now.
“Is there a Riddle family grimoire?” Fabian adds.
Harry sighs a little. So Albus told them Voldemort’s real name, but not the history of his family. That’s so typical of him that Harry can’t even get angry. “No. The Riddle family was a Muggle one. This is the artifact that we came looking for. Keep in mind that it’s resistant to destruction by everything but basilisk venom and Fiendfyre.”
“We heard you can wield Fiendfyre.” Fabian glances away from the diary to give Harry one of those judgmental looks he seems to be prone to. “Are you going to?”
“Yes, once we ascertain that there aren’t any other traps. Voldemort would never have left it just lying out like this in the open if there weren’t.”
Harry draws his wand, and in that instant, the diary stirs and snaps open.
There’s no chance to resist it. The long cone of sepia light that unfolds from the diary’s pages seizes all of them, and then draws them violently into its pages.
*
Harry lands roughly in the middle of a Hogwarts corridor, or at least it looks like one. The stones are brown and heavily outlined in black. He scrambles up, feeling the floor give beneath his feet the way it does in dreams, and severs the rope holding onto his ankle. It’s going to be a hindrance in battle.
The others materialize beside him, the Prewett brothers looking washed-out with brown hair instead of ginger, and Orion looking monochromatic. “What is this?” Fabian asks, his voice thin and high as he and his brother spin around and around, keeping their backs pressed against each other’s.
“We’re inside the diary,” Harry says grimly. Voldemort must have fed the diary some of his own power, or perhaps a victim, for it to be this active. “It’s a Horcrux.”
“A Horcrux.” Orion is gasping with horror, and although it’s hard to tell because of the way the spirit of the diary has washed out the colors, Harry thinks he’s gone pale with it, too. “I never would have…I never would have followed him if I’d known. That crosses an important line.”
Harry keeps his thoughts about how the torture and murder of innocents should have been enough of a line to himself, and just nods. The Prewett brothers have stopped turning in circles and are looking at him.
“What’s a Horcrux?” Gideon asks.
“An object with a piece of a soul attached, which means that the person who made it can’t die as long as the object exists.” Harry reaches into his robe pocket, searching for the little bubble that contains the mirror the Unspeakables gave him. It’s still intact, and he thinks he can use it in the diary. In a strange way, perhaps, but he can use it.
“We have to destroy it, then.” Gideon raises his wand and looks around as if searching for the best place to strike.
Harry opens his mouth to answer, but the corridor warps viciously around them, bending and twisting like a snake that wants to throw them off its back. Harry braces himself as the others cry out. He knows that Tom Riddle controls every sight and sensation they’ll experience in the diary. And that means that he’ll probably disorient them with tactics like this and then strike from behind.
Harry turns around, and sees a black liquid like the one that came out when he defeated the diary in his world seeping out of the walls.
Harry swishes his wand and casts Fiendfyre at it.
The flames are without color in the diary, and form only sickly-looking grey gargoyles instead of their usual beasts. But the black liquid recoils from the fire with a piercing scream, and Harry gets control of it with a vicious hauling on the reins of his magic.
Which makes a pounding pain leap through his temples.
Harry scowls. This magical concussion sucks.
He did it, though. The black liquid withdraws into the walls, and there’s a long pause that Harry can only describe as “waiting.” Then the black liquid appears again, but this time, it swirls around with the grey light and forms into the shape of a young, handsome Tom Riddle, much as he appeared when he took form in the Chamber of Secrets in Harry’s first world.
“Ah, gentlemen.” Riddle glances from face to face, as if fixing them in his memory or getting ready to chide them. Then he turns to Harry and freezes, staring at him.
Harry gives Riddle a grim smile. He has no idea what Riddle’s sensing, if it’s that he’s the one who used the Fiendfyre or that he’s a Parselmouth or even that he used to be a Horcrux. In the end, it doesn’t matter much. What does is that he can destroy Riddle, and from the way Riddle backs up a step, he might know that.
But then Riddle stops retreating, and sets his shoulders proudly. “What is this about?” he asks. “You have invaded my home, you have tried to injure me, and I should simply accept that and let you go?” His voice is injured.
“You’re a bloody Horcrux,” Gideon says.
“We don’t owe you any apologies,” Fabian adds.
Riddle’s eyes are so wide that they look like spilled puddles of ink. He glances around and ends up staring at Harry again. “What is it about you?” he demands. “Did you tell them what I was? Why are you different?”
Harry studies him for a second. It’s possible that he can enrage him the way he would the real Voldemort, and then he’ll expose himself with dangerous lashing out. “I am your enemy,” he says in Parseltongue, and Riddle falls further back from him at the sound of the snake language. “I destroyed you in one world, and then I came to this one to do the same thing.”
“You-you are kin to me if you can speak this language,” Riddle says, his mind obviously racing as his voice falters. “Why would my own family turn on me?”
Harry gives a thin laugh. “That appeal doesn’t mean much, coming from someone who slaughtered and sacrificed the only living family he had left.”
Riddle springs silently at Harry. He’s unwinding and dissolving even as he comes, turning into the oily black liquid again. He whips thin tendrils around Harry’s throat and flows to cover his mouth and nostrils.
Harry curves his fingers inwards and punctures the bubble that holds the little mirror.
The mirror immediately flares with brilliant light, the only color in the whole monotonous world of the diary. It turns and directs that beam of light up at the oily liquid Riddle has become. The black liquid screams and breaks apart, flowing frantically back into the walls and stones.
Harry catches the mirror by the legs and puts it on the floor. The golden frame is already turning grey, and the diary around them is peeling back in delicate swaths of brown and black and white, revealing the scribbled letters that make up reality here, and the world of the island beyond, faint as a memory.
They don’t have much time. Only until that golden frame turns completely grey.
Harry gathers up Orion and Gideon and Fabian with his eyes. “Can all of you cast Fiendfyre?” he asks.
Orion nods. Gideon grimaces. “We’ve never done it. We try to avoid Dark Arts as much as possible.”
“Then guard this mirror,” Harry says, nodding to the tiny thing. “This is the only thing guaranteeing us a way out of here. Mr. Black and I will use the curse.” He turns so that his back is to Orion’s, and the twins adopt the same posture.
The black liquid is already forming in the walls again, sometimes mingling with floating letters. Some of it looks red, and Harry imagines that he’s looking at the blood of whoever it was that Voldemort fed to the diary.
“Now,” Harry tells Orion, and they raise their wands and call the fire at the same time.
Again there’s a piercing scream as the flames lift and curl, lifeless-looking though they are. Harry ignores the way a crown of pain is tightening around his head, and the way his blood is pounding harder and harder through his veins. He shapes the grey fire into snakes and drives their heads and fangs again and again into the black liquid.
Another attack of some kind, which looks like a pseudo-basilisk, comes surging down the corridor towards the Prewetts, but they take care of it with stinging whip-like curses that impress Harry.
And which aren’t the bright color they probably should be. The little mirror trembles on the floor, on the verge of running out. Three-quarters of its frame has already turned to lead.
Harry turns and aims the grey fire straight at the little mirror.
He hopes he’s guessed right about the theoretical spells that bind the mirror, and what they’re going to do to his weak fire now. The Unspeakables built the mirror to his specifications, yes, but that doesn’t mean that something like it has ever existed before or that it’ll work now. Harry never anticipated battling inside the diary.
The Fiendfyre strikes the mirror’s glass and glances up and away from it. For a moment, it remains a grey stream with only a few heads.
And then it turns a brilliant gold, and rears up into a massive hydra with eight heads, singing with cruel joy.
Riddle screams again around them. Harry turns in a circle and sweeps the walls with his Fiendfyre. They crumble and wisp away, and Harry and Orion and the Prewett twins are standing on the ground of the island again, with the diary turning into a smoking ruin behind them and the mirror toppling over onto the sand, a powerless sculpture of lead and cracked glass.
And the Fiendfyre is still raging.
It rears above Harry, twisting back and forth, growing more and more heads and necks, crackling down at him. The ground of the island is whispering away to ash beneath it. Harry breathes harshly, struggling to control it.
The mirror was made to change whatever it shone on or which struck it into its opposite. Based on alchemy, it would only last as long as it took the frame to change from gold to lead, but that was enough to change the diary from reality to unreality.
And to change the weak Fiendfyre to a raging demon that Harry’s not sure he can control.
Harry feels blood trickling from one nostril as he forces himself up from his knees, where he didn’t even notice he’d fallen. He stares at the Fiendfyre, and determination rears up in him. He knows that he can’t call on his comrades’ magic, not when it exhausted him so badly last time. He would pass out, and the Fiendfyre would consume everything it could, including his companions. Orion isn’t strong enough to hold it, and the Prewetts have no experience with the curse.
That means that Harry is going to have to conquer this fire the way he conquers the Imperius Curse: with sure, indomitable will.
He stands, and he stares at the fire, and he says in Parseltongue, “No.”
The Fiendfyre exults, dancing back and forth. Now it’s many snakes, with many bodies, and too many rapidly-multiplying heads to count. The heads are already stretching out to hungrily eye the mainland. Harry can tell from their low hissing, which imitates Parseltongue when they’re in this form, that they’re looking forwards to devouring Muggle homes and people.
“No,” Harry says again, and makes it a command, a reality. “Die down.”
He doesn’t reach for his wand. There’s nothing about it that would help him. He speaks in Parseltongue, and the snakes turn and look down at him haughtily. They have eyes, technically, but those eyes are nothing but pure flame.
“Die down.”
The snakes give an angry hiss that changes into a scream as they feel his will clamp down on them. They writhe back and forth, trying to fling off the invisible iron bands, and Harry holds them more and more fiercely, tightens them and moves them in.
He wants them to die down. He wants them to fade.
He wants it so intensely that white light blots out his vision. But not before he sees one of the snakes simply disappear in a pop of sparks.
Harry smiles, and moves a step forwards. He can hear the others calling out, but he can’t understand them over the roaring of the fire and the press of his will.
“Die.”
The snakes wail, and then many of them grow smaller, all at once, as though Harry’s wanting has stolen the top layer of flames from them. Harry knows that his mouth is probably locked in a crazed rictus, but he’s walking towards them again, and they’re backing away from him, and he feels the sweet burn of victory in his breast.
“Die.”
The snakes gather themselves together into a single tornado of fire and crash down towards him.
Harry raises his arms above his head, not to shield, but to direct the force of his will up through his muscles and his fingers and his tendons and his bones-utter rejection of everything the Fiendfyre wants to do at the moment.
“Die.”
The snapping, gaping mouths are inches away from him, and the fangs are lances of white fire that start to pierce his arm-
Just as they die. Harry stares at the smoke that is all that remains in the mess of superheated air, and he smiles.
His will has prevailed.
Then it’s gone, and Harry crashes to his knees again. He can hear the alarmed shouts now, feel the hands on his shoulders shaking him, but he’s unable to pay attention. There’s a soft noise echoing in his ears that he has to listen to instead.
It sounds like something tearing apart inside his brain tissue.
Healer Hawken is going to be displeased, Harry thinks a moment before pain and darkness eat him like the Fiendfyre.
Part Seven.