Chapter Thirty-Seven of 'Ceremonies of Strife'- A World in Chaos
Chapter Thirty-Six.
Title: Ceremonies of Strife (37/50)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, Dark magic, angst, profanity, sex (slash and het), character deaths (not the main characters).
Summary: Sequel to Soldier’s Welcome. As Harry and Draco head in to their second year of Auror training, they are resolved to try and balance the relationship between them with their personal difficulties. That might be a bit harder than they think when the difficulties include necromancy, Azkaban escapees, unicorn ghosts, the risen dead, a secret order of assassins…and the second war, guided by Nihil.
Author’s Notes: This is the second part of what I’m calling the Running to Paradise Trilogy, focused on Harry and Draco’s Auror training. A reader on AFF called SP777 suggested the idea for this series to me. I’d advise you to read Soldier’s Welcome first before you try to read this one, as this story doesn’t spend a lot of time recapitulating the first one.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Seven-A World in Chaos
“Why would unicorn ghosts come to you in the first place?” Ventus asked. “It’s not as though you’ve hunted unicorns.” She paused, then added, “I think.”
Harry rolled his eyes. He had assumed that one nice side-effect of Ventus’s intense focus on battle meant that she wouldn’t ask questions about other things. But when the excursions they took provided her with no chance to use her offensive magic, it seemed that she wasn’t above peppering her speech with assumptions and speculations that made her sound like a two-year-old.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Hermione said, in a voice of strained patience that Harry understood well. “Why they would come to him in the first place. They didn’t give him any solid information.”
“That was a terrible pun, Granger,” Draco said.
“What?” Hermione said, and then Harry could practically feel her scowl as she figured it out. “Yes, Malfoy, funny.”
Ron, walking along at Harry’s side, gave him a sympathetic glance. Harry just shook his head back in exasperation and hoped that the unicorn ghosts hadn’t decided to be as shy as their living cousins. They were making so much noise as they walked through the Forbidden Forest that the ghosts could hear them coming in plenty of time to hide.
Something shifted in the gloom in front of them, something that had long, slender legs and a pale coat. Harry paused and raised his wand, which had a Lumos Charm on the very tip, higher. If they had found a unicorn ghost, he didn’t want to stumble into it, and if it was a live unicorn, he wanted to leave it the chance to get away. One thing he remembered about unicorns from his time at Hogwarts-almost the only thing-was that they could become fierce if they were cornered, especially mares with foals.
The others had fallen silent, thank Merlin. But Harry’s wand revealed nothing except a crushed-down bed of grass in the middle of the path where a unicorn might have been resting. Harry wasn’t sure if the things he had seen were even real. He sighed in disgust and lowered his wand again.
Ventus started to say something, but Harry turned around and glared at her. “Can you be quiet for once?” he whispered harshly.
Ventus looked at him with wide eyes. Harry didn’t know if she was surprised or offended, and he didn’t think that he wanted to know. By the time she drew breath to answer, he had turned around and was pushing on.
Twigs still snapped under their feet. Branches still rustled as they pushed past them. There were still soft curses from Draco when the briars caught his robes, or mutters from Hermione about how they were on a fool’s mission. But they were quieter than they had been. Harry reckoned that he’d have to take what he could get.
Another flash of movement in front of him, another movement of the wand and a revelation of nothing there. Harry closed his eyes, feeling an enormous frustration clogging his head and throat. He wanted to break out in childish shouting and stamping. They had come here specifically searching for unicorn ghosts, and Merlin knew if they would ever find them.
Then Hermione cried out, and Draco hissed, and even Ventus made a kind of startled sound. Harry heard Ron squeak, as though he wanted to shout but fear had closed his throat.
Harry opened his eyes.
In front of them were several shimmering ranks of transparent unicorns. This close, Harry could see that their eyes were a fierce, cold blue, the way he imagined stars would look if they could come close to earth without burning it up. He shivered in spite of himself, although the chill he had been expecting from them didn’t come. Maybe using necromancy had made him immune to it in some way.
The dark shimmer in the back of his head was-vibrating was the only word Harry could come up with for it, sending tremors through his bones that distorted his vision like static on a Muggle telly. Harry relaxed. At least he thought he could trust the shimmer’s intuition that these were real ghosts and not illusions or some trick of Nihil’s.
He waited for the unicorns to speak or make some kind of gesture inviting them to speak, but nothing happened. So Harry cleared his throat and said the first thing that came into his head.
“Why are you haunting Nihil?”
The nearest unicorn moved slowly forwards, transparent horn lowered and pointed at his heart. Harry stood still. He knew that the unicorn couldn’t stab him the way one of its living cousins would, at least. And the damage it would inflict in other ways was less for a necromancer. He was certain of it.
At least, he thought he was. It took more courage than he had believed he had to stand there while the horn slipped past the cloth over his chest and then into his chest.
Draco snarled something and started forwards. Harry reached out and put a hand on his arm.
The world had grown distant around him. The corners of his vision were dim. The sounds that echoed from Draco and the others-even Hermione was edging forwards, swinging her wand, as if fighting the unicorns would do any good-seemed to come from underwater. He could feel that he was touching Draco’s arm, but it was like touching a block of wood with another block of wood, not living flesh with living flesh.
Meanwhile, the unicorns suddenly shone and solidified, becoming so visible that Harry winced. They seemed to shed faint rays of white light that hurt his eyes. And the chill around them hurt his lungs. He licked his lips, settled more firmly into himself, and then said, “I don’t think they’ll hurt me.”
We might.
Harry felt the words break like a Disillusionment Charm over his head and then sink into his body in the same disturbing way. He grimaced and forced himself to keep standing still. He wondered if his own words had been audible to the others; they certainly hadn’t heard the unicorns, if the blank look Draco, in particular, was giving them was any indication.
“What makes the difference for you?” Harry asked. “I haven’t come to hurt you. I don’t want to enslave you, the way that other necromancers might. I only want to ask you questions.”
You asked one question that says you are allied with him, or how would you have learned that we have been in sight of him?
Harry shivered. The hatred with which the unicorn talked about Nihil was so immense that it formed a weight of its own, separate from the words, in Harry’s bones and skin. He wanted to take a shower.
“A friend of mine, who Nihil captured, told me about you,” Harry said levelly. “But I’m not allied with him. I fought him. He’s afraid of me, to the point that he tried to stop me from using necromancy. Isn’t there a way that you can see that I’m telling the truth? You’re ghosts. I can speak to the dead, or necromancers can. Can’t you see?”
The unicorn shifted forwards still more. Harry closed his eyes and opened his mouth slightly, then realized what the sight of him screaming and unable to speak would do to Draco. He shut it again.
There is a battle here. The unicorn said it slowly, as if it didn’t want to acknowledge that Harry might be right. There are traces of the magic you worked. But you are part of the change that is moving through the world.
Harry thought he could ignore the icy sensation of a spear passing through the walls of his heart itself for the sake of new information. “A change? What do you mean? I haven’t been conscious of something like that.”
So many changes, the spirit said, and if it could have expressed sadness, Harry thought it would have. There was only a minor shift in the chill, though, and that soundless voice didn’t truly give away its emotions. We slept quietly once. But there were shifts, and then the feeding woke us, and then the balance was disturbed by the passing of one who had tried to live forever, and then this immortal arose.
Harry frowned, trying to work that out. “The feeding was Voldemort,” he said at last. “Wasn’t it? He came and fed on your blood, and that must have woken you up. And then he died after he had tried to live forever. But I don’t see why Nihil would be connected to that. He hates Voldemort.”
The unicorn ghost stamped a hoof and pressed its horn further in. Harry moaned with pain, and felt Draco clutch at him. Harry did his best to lean against Draco reassuringly while never taking his eyes from the unicorn. He didn’t think that he would be able to break free of it at the moment in order to speak to Draco.
Death has a balance, the unicorn said, its words striking Harry like hammer blows on his ears. It ties the living world and the place where ghosts are, and it shifts back and forth like the tide. If one wizard makes experiments in how to live forever, it does not disrupt the balance. But there were many experiments in a short time that slew those who never should have died and killed others. And then this. This immortal is a new creature. He is not alive. He cannot die. He is many while still being able to exist in a single, central point. We have woken, and we will not be at peace until he is gone.
“I don’t understand,” Harry said at last, when he thought he could speak instead of just stand there with his teeth chattering. “I killed Voldemort. Should I not have done that? What can I do about Nihil?”
Start the tide flowing in its proper balance again, the unicorn said. Act as the moon. Nihil is a moon too powerful. You must be a larger one.
“What?” Harry started to ask again, but the unicorn slipped its horn free of his heart and turned away, trotting into the woods. Harry blinked, and the massed ranks of unicorns vanished as though they were a candle flame someone had blown out. They were left alone in the dark Forbidden Forest with the leaves rubbing above them and something that sounded disturbingly like laughter in the distance.
“Well?” Draco demanded, his hand tightening painfully on Harry’s arm, now that he could feel things like that again. “Was it worth you giving me a heart attack from panic, to learn what you did?”
Harry nodded, turning to him. “I think so. But we need to go somewhere and discuss it. Can we, please?” He was shivering now, and he raised a hand and rubbed on his chest over his heart, where the horn had touched him. “I’m so cold.”
*
Stupid, Gryffindor idiot.
Unfortunately, Draco’s thoughts couldn’t simply sustain themselves for long, because Draco was reminded too quickly that Harry had used necromancy when he spoke with the unicorns and when he fought Nihil, and that wasn’t something a mindlessly noble Gryffindor would ever do.
Draco scowled and sipped his tea.
The Headmistress had welcomed them, with a few frowns at Draco as if she didn’t understand what he was doing there, and a few speculative glances at Ventus as an unknown quantity. She had seated them in a small, comfortable room that Draco didn’t remember seeing before; he didn’t think it was either her office or the Gryffindor Head of House’s rooms, but he hadn’t ever seen the latter. Fires burned in two hearths, and the walls were covered with restrained portraits of dignified witches and wizards who watched them and whispered behind their hands. The décor was wood and bronze, the chairs and the couches done in sober brown upholstery. Draco had to admit that it wasn’t impossible for Gryffindors to have taste.
Now McGonagall sat on a couch between Harry and Ventus, her eyes fixed on the fire nearest them and her own sips calm and regulated. Draco could read her better than she thought, however. She was as eager to ask questions as Draco was to keep her from learning anything about what they had found tonight.
“A pleasant and unexpected visit,” she said, when the silence had grown deep enough that Draco planned on breaking it if she didn’t. “But I do wonder why you wanted my permission to look in the Forbidden Forest, much less to do it at night.” She turned her head and looked at Harry, of course taking him for their leader.
Harry grimaced a little and rubbed his chest over his heart. He had been doing that ever since the unicorn had stabbed him. Draco put a hand on his leg so that Harry would know he was there if support was needed, and Harry glanced sideways at him and smiled before he focused on McGonagall.
“I discovered something tonight I wish I hadn’t known,” he said. “The unicorns that Voldemort killed when he was living in the Forbidden Forest and feeding on their blood are around as ghosts.”
McGonagall caught her breath, but didn’t look entirely surprised. “Hagrid has been talking about unicorns lately,” she murmured. “And he seemed to think there was something strange about them.” She paused, as if she expected Harry to take up the thread of the conversation, and frowned and continued when he didn’t. “What can we do to make sure that they return to their rest?”
Harry shook his head. Draco hated the weary expression on his face. He was willing to fight for Harry, bleed for him, defend him, curse for him, but what could he do about this? It seemed that Harry was doomed to deal with most of his necromancy problems alone. “I don’t know. They’ve told me where they came from, but I don’t think they communicate in the same way as we do.”
Draco snorted bitterly, remembering the agonized expression on Harry’s face when the unicorn had pierced him with its horn. That’s an understatement.
“We must do something, of course,” McGonagall said, as though that was decided. “We cannot have the ghosts haunting the Forest, frightening the students and the other creatures who live there.” She shut her eyes and seemed to commune with someone invisible, the way Draco had sometimes seen Dumbledore do.
Draco couldn’t help himself. “You’re worried about them frightening the things that live in the Forbidden Forest? Are we talking about the same place?”
McGonagall opened her eyes and gave him a severe look. “The creatures that live there can deal with many things that are natural, and many that are magical,” she said. “But I have never heard of unicorn spirits wandering about. I imagine that things have changed there, and yes, they may be frightened. And that could lead to a greater than normal number of injuries should some of our students venture there-as, indeed, some do every year, despite stringent rules.” She looked at Harry with fond exasperation.
Draco suddenly and intensely missed Professor Snape, and wished that he was still alive and teaching at Hogwarts. He would have made Draco feel welcome with nothing more than a few words, and his presence, even if he was harsh about the idiocy of Draco’s involving himself with a Gryffindor, would have been a good counter to McGonagall’s liking for Harry.
And I’m being ridiculous, acting as though we’re still students at Hogwarts and things haven’t changed, he thought, and did his best to put his irritation aside. “All right, I understand,” he said. “But why would you think that you could help? They seem to have fixated on Harry.”
“There’s no need to be rude, Malfoy,” Granger said in shocked tones. Draco thought she was just as affected by being back at Hogwarts as any of them, and apparently, being rude to a professor was anathema.
McGonagall nodded, agreeing with Granger’s inappropriate reverence for her. “There is not. I will offer you help in every way that I can, even if this is something that Mr. Potter must do for himself-which I haven’t seen any evidence of yet.” She turned towards Harry. “Do you know why they spoke to you in particular?”
Harry hesitated. Draco willed him to remember the lies they had come up with before they returned to the school. Of course, he probably wasn’t hesitating out of a lack of memory, but because he didn’t know how to make the lie convincing.
“I hate to say it,” Harry muttered at last, and his voice was reluctant enough to make anyone believe him, “but I think I still have a connection to Voldemort somehow. Through my scar, or the fact that I defeated him. I thought the unicorns were angry at first because I had watched one of them die and didn’t do anything to stop it, but now…I don’t know. They said something about the tides of life and death being out of balance.” That much information, Draco had decided they could safely reveal. Granger had wanted to say more, of course, but even she had reluctantly agreed that it wouldn’t be possible to do that without explaining Harry’s necromancy to McGonagall somehow.
“Does this have anything to do with the war that we have been hearing about, and the attacks of the living dead?” McGonagall’s hands had tightened on her teacup.
“Maybe,” Harry said, and at this point he was lying through his teeth, so Draco was impressed to see that his face remained calm while he did it. Impressed, and suspicious. How many times has he lied to me like that? “But why would the spirits of the unicorns alone wake up and not the spirits of any other murdered creatures? Or the people who died here at the Battle of Hogwarts? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Repeat what you said about balance,” McGonagall said. Draco would have mocked her for not paying attention before, but from her pale face, he thought something must have just now occurred to her.
Harry said, a confused expression on his face, “They said that life and death were out of balance. Shifting tides going back and forth. And that someone needed to act as the moon to draw the tides back into alignment? Or something? I’m sorry, Headmistress. I’m not very good at riddles.”
McGonagall gave him a brief, acid glance for that, which Draco didn’t understand. Surely Harry was right and he wasn’t very good at riddles. Then she closed her eyes and murmured, “I read something like this, years ago. It was in one of the books in the Hogwarts Library. Be still and let me think.”
They were still and let her think, though Draco rolled his eyes a bit about the ridiculousness of it all. Harry caught his gaze and smiled wryly, instead of scolding him as Draco would have expected. Granger, on the other hand, looked righteously shocked enough for the both of them.
There was so much silence that Draco considered clearing his throat just to break it, when McGonagall snapped her eyes open and sucked in her breath. She looked so shocked and grieved that Draco stared at her.
“Yes, I remember now,” she said. “I’ll have Madam Pince bring me the book just to make sure I’m not wrong, but I remember.” Her hand shook as she reached out and picked up her teacup again. Draco narrowed his eyes. This could be more serious than I thought.
McGonagall sipped several times, then lowered the teacup and went on, “The metaphor of tides confused me. I had read something similar, but not exactly the same. The writer used the metaphor of scales instead.”
Draco wanted to snort. He thought he would have spotted the similarity immediately. But he kept his mouth closed, because Harry was leaning forwards, intent, and Draco didn’t want to ruin what could be a moment of revelation for him.
“There are some magical theorists who believe in a balance of magical forces,” McGonagall said. “They argue that the Dark Arts and Healing magic being out of balance, for example, would bring ruin crashing down on everyone. There’s quite an esoteric system of working out which magic is the opposite of which and how much of each should exist in the world before the balance changes.” She managed a smile. “I was quite fascinated by it myself, when I was young.”
“It’s a stupid theory,” Ventus remarked. “How can there ever be too much offensive magic in the world, and how can defensive magic ever balance some of the more powerful spells the War Wizards know?”
McGonagall stared at her askance, but Draco could almost hear her decision to put aside those strange words for now. She turned back to Harry. “Some theorists go further than that, and argue that other forces need to be in balance, as well. Life and death. Day and night.”
“Good and evil,” said Harry, who looked pleased that he could make a contribution.
But McGonagall shook her head. “Those theorists are careful to emphasize that they don’t think moral qualities are in balance, and they try to disentangle the qualities we’ve assigned to the forces of nature. For them, darkness and death are not evil. That is only the human perception of them.”
Harry folded his arms and scowled, exactly the way he did when Davidson corrected his grammar on one of his essays. Draco laid a hand on his shoulder and smiled at him to ease the sting.
“But those are only theories,” he said to McGonagall, since he had done some of the same reading and was obviously the only one competent enough to discuss this with her. “They can’t actually affect the balance of the world. No one has ever proven it.”
McGonagall sighed. “No. But then, the feeling most of the theorists have is that we can’t see the balance shifting because no one has ever shifted it. It would take so much magic that it wouldn’t be worth trying simply to do it.”
“But someone else, doing something else-” Weasley, of all people. Draco had been pleased that they wouldn’t be troubled by his inane chatter during a conversation like this one, and sneered at him.
McGonagall nodded. “Yes. Perhaps the balance between life and death has shifted because of large-scale necromancy, which closely followed a war started by a wizard who wanted to be immortal. Things like this have never happened before. Necromancers tend to be quiet for the most part, or stopped before they get this far.”
Harry caught Draco’s eye, and Draco was sure he knew what Harry would have said if they were free to tell the whole truth to McGonagall. And they’re usually human, too.
“So how do we put the balance of the world back again?” asked Granger. Her hands were clasped in her lap, and she looked appealingly back and forth from McGonagall to Harry, as if she assumed that one of them would give her the answer.
“I don’t know,” McGonagall said. “Some of the theorists were under the impression that making a sufficiently large display of magic in the other direction would be enough to shift the balance. But how does one display life?”
“Organize a large orgy and use the resulting births,” Ventus said calmly.
Once again, McGonagall stared at her, and then visibly put most of that comment aside. “The children would not be born in time,” she said primly, only her tight lips betraying her disapproval of the suggestion. “And in the meantime, the dead would keep rising and tilting the balance further and further. Even if a solution like that was strong enough at the time of-conception-it would doubtless not be so by the time that the births came about. We need a short-term solution.”
“And what do other theorists say?” Draco asked. He had noticed that she hadn’t mentioned all of the theorists.
McGonagall drew a deep breath. “That the balance of the world cannot be shifted back, once it has begun to alter. That the change will continue, even if the ones who changed it died the next day. And soon, it will begin to accelerate.”
Harry, Draco saw, had closed his eyes and was once again rubbing the skin over his heart.
His other hand was rubbing his scar.
Draco reached over and snatched his hand, driven by the impulse to interrupt his isolation. Harry looked at him in surprise, and Draco clenched his fingers down and stared hard at him.
He isn’t going to be alone if he has to save the world this time, Draco thought. Never again.
They might have no hope. But that was no reason to sacrifice one person and then huddle behind his body when he fell.
After a moment, Harry understood and smiled.
It was a fragile expression. But Draco would take what he could get.
Chapter Thirty-Eight.
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