Chapter Thirty of 'Wondrous Lands and Oceans'- The Darkness in the North
Chapter Twenty-Nine.
Title: Wondrous Lands and Oceans (30/about 30)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, George/Angelina, Bill/Fleur, others possible.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, angst, bloody animal death, bonding.
Summary: The emigration to the wild magic world of Hurricane is complete, but not the settling-in process. Harry and Draco struggle to solidify both their own bond and their bonds with their family and allies-while setting out on journeys of exploration that prove there is more to Hurricane than storms.
Author’s Notes: This is a sequel to Reap the Hurricane; that one should be read first. This story will probably be somewhere between twenty and thirty chapters long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-The Darkness in the North
The crack of the winds in his ears told Harry the truth even before they fastened great jaws around him and tried to lift him off his feet. This wasn’t his magic anymore. This was Bodiless, the Darkness in the North, whatever one wanted to call it, reaching for any power it could to fight the assembled mummidade.
Their getting together for the battle was quick, Harry thought for one numb moment, and then he shook his head. Of course it was quick, when the mummidade were many minds in the same bodies, and all knew each other’s will at once. He had to concentrate on the problem in front of him, instead of risking distraction by his thoughts.
He turned and set his back to Draco and the others, delving into himself and calling up the level of power that he had used to roll the riders up and down the sky. He was going to protect them now. He refused to accept anything less, refused to accept that he might lose someone to this power.
Harry had had strength and wild magic before they came to Hurricane, the only one who did. He commanded it now, and felt it come hesitantly to life inside him, vast and flowing, a well of quicksilver strength that rose and deepened when he commanded it to.
“Now,” he said, voice so deep that he scarcely recognized it himself, and couldn’t have blamed anyone else for running away. He stretched his hands out to the sides, and Draco was there next to him, leaning against him to keep the winds from sweeping them apart. Draco’s eyes burned, although Harry couldn’t know, now, if he realized that from the bond or from turning his head to see.
He nodded to Draco and gestured again, and his winds sprang up, his winds, the ones drawn from the transformed power inside him, not the ones stolen from Hurricane’s skies or Bodiless’s control.
Draco had accused him of letting his wand magic fall away and embracing only his wild magic. What he didn’t seem to remember was that everyone else had wand magic in addition to wild magic. Harry’s inborn strength hadn’t simply abandoned him; it had transformed.
And he could prove it now.
He slammed his magic down around him and Draco in one ring, and encompassed the rest of the camp in the other, the sleeping Teddy and the silver house where Andromeda still sat and the fire around which the rest of them had gathered, solid walls of wind, pressure going the opposite way from the storm’s, holding strong and steady and forbidding the hurricane that wanted to hammer them to tumble or topple them. Harry drove his hands down like pistons, and felt the wind dig beneath the surface of the earth. He willed it not to lift the grass and disturb the patterns of the soil, and it did not. What he willed, happened.
He stared into the sky, into the motionless, lidless eye of their enemy, and waited.
Silence, breathless and distant. Harry heard his own breathing, and that of Draco, so close beside him that his warmth leaked into Harry’s side and inundated his bones. Harry rested his head on his shoulder for a moment. He still gripped his magic in tight, shaking hands that held the air still like the reins on Swoop’s neck, but he had to rest for a second.
It was only a second.
The winds came for them again, and Harry felt them on his hair before he strengthened his barriers both above and below. He could hear someone crying out in fear, although he couldn't turn his head and look to see who it was. He could only push more strength in their direction, and hope that would be enough.
Draco’s hand closed on his elbow. How much longer can you keep this up? he whispered down the bond.
I don’t know, Harry answered. How much longer is the battle going to last?
Since that was something no one could answer, they stood there, waiting.
Then the magic came again. And this time, Harry knew within a breath of the wind’s touching his circling walls that he wasn’t going to be able to resist it.
He also knew that he would try his best, because there were people here who would die otherwise, and for nothing except the extraordinary, stupid fury of Bodiless. So he threw his will into it, calling up winds from himself, that manifested from his fingers and lifted the fringe from his forehead as they exited by way of his scar, that made his whole body tremble from the way they jolted him.
They were coming, and they were-
Up against a greater force. Harry hadn’t forgotten the way that Bodiless had treated him when he flew after Draco, the way it had flung him at the ground and pinned Draco helplessly, the way it had called and given them no choice but to come. He was going to lose, because there was nothing but pure power here.
He turned and flung himself on top of Draco, wrapping his arms around him and perforce wrapping his winds at the same time. Draco yipped with surprise and struggled for a moment. That could have cost Harry his chance to save his bondmate’s life, but he clung stubbornly, and Draco hadn’t trained in physical combat the way Harry had, during the few short Auror lessons he’d ever had. They dropped heavily to the ground with Harry still on top, ducking his head gently down so that his forehead rested against Draco’s hair, and covered him completely.
He would have shielded Teddy and the rest, he reached desperately out hoping he still could, but Draco was the one within reach, and the one that he had the power to give his life for, if he could guard him with his body in the face of that incredible magic, keep his bones from breaking in or soften his landing.
He felt the shimmer of something vast moving over him, the touch on the back of his neck and his hair that was like stroking fingers. He heard Bodiless laughing in his ear. The bond thrummed around them, and Harry had no idea what would happen next. He concentrated on the bond, the thing that tied him and Draco together, and that had let them resist Bodiless the last time they confronted it.
Draco clasped him back, and when the winds picked up and flung them through endless space, at least they went together.
*
Draco could feel that voice in the back of his head more than he could hear it, the voice that called him endlessly and sternly as it demanded that he come, that he surrender, that he be Bodiless’s servant because only that way would he have the freedom and the power that he had dreamed of. He could feel his own subservience, the things in him that had made him a Death Eater, and the things that had made him vow to be free after that, and the cowardice that might prevent him from keeping a promise to himself.
He could feel the bond, too, and the way that Harry wrapped it around them the way he wrapped his arms, and the way that Draco loved him and hated him and longed for him because of that.
They didn’t land. They flew on through howling darkness. Draco thought of the first night he had been on Hurricane, when the storm had snatched him from his unprepared position and used him this way. He wondered where they might land. He wondered what would become of them.
He heard a great sound beneath them, cries and squeals. Draco didn’t know how to turn his head to look. He had forgotten which way was down, even as the noises made it clear. He had forgotten how to move in other ways than forwards, or whichever direction the wind was pulling them now.
He had forgotten, but Harry hadn’t.
Draco felt them turn, pivot, lunge. He didn’t know where they were going. He held, and when Harry asked him, in words that seemed to tumble through his head like falling books, to call his wild magic to his hands and extend his claws, he did it without asking whether or not he should. This was Harry who was asking, his bonded. Of course he was going to do it.
They landed on something yielding, and Harry unrolled from him and stood up. His head was lifted, and Draco saw the expression on his face. He wanted to slap it off. Couldn’t Harry be afraid of anything like a normal person, just for once?
I’m glad that you’re conscious and not caught up in that trap Bodiless tried to set for us, Harry said dryly. Now that you’re back to normal, could you reach up and cut the chains that it’s used?
It took long moments for Draco to realize that there were no mummidade on the ground around them, which there should have been. He tilted his head back, eyes striving with darkness that was clouds and wind and magic, and Bodiless stretched out and lying above them, making everything murky with the way it thrummed.
The mummidade were above them.
A tendril of dark magic was thrust through every single one of their bellies. They dangled in silence, although Draco knew they had been crying out before, in silence, apart from each other. Bodiless had found a way to defeat them that didn’t depend on killing them all.
Draco glanced at the spears that went through their bodies, and then shook his head and swept his claws at the black tendrils that sprang up from the ground.
The first ones, he cut easily; it felt like thin stalks that turned into smoke when brushed by his own wild magic. Then he ran into something that felt like a steel wall, and shook his head, a little dazed.
Meanwhile, the call sprang up in the back of his mind again.
Harry spoke through the bond, whispering tales of the times they’d lain together in the grass over the dreams that Bodiless presented of Draco being all-powerful-under it, of course. This time, even though the winds had brought them all the way to the north and they were much closer to Bodiless, Draco found that he could ignore the voice much more easily than before. He simply cut and severed and cut again, and the stalks quivered and were gone.
Westshadow trotted towards them. At least, Draco thought it was Westshadow, although it was hard to tell in the faint light that was coming through the clouds, because they hadn’t met any other mummidade who used four bodies so far.
This time, two of the bodies came to Harry and Draco, while the other two locked their horns and lowered their heads. Draco’s teeth almost cracked when a bond sprang up between them. It was like the one the mummidade had forged with Open Wings and Swoop, in the same way wine was like water. Rougher around the edges, with the words blazing into his head. He had the impression that the two mummidade with him and Harry were forcing themselves to understand Harry and Draco, and channeling that impression back to the other two bodies, who themselves came up with a message and sent it back to the two bodies near Harry and Draco for translation.
We must all bond, Westshadow said. We tried to do this when we thought we were the only ones on Hurricane.
The only ones? Harry asked, before Draco could.
The only ones who-
There was a blast of imagery there, but from the way it showed mummidade intelligently leaping to the sides to avoid the birds, Draco thought he knew what they meant. The mummidade had thought they were the only species on Hurricane who could think. Now that they knew they weren’t, they were at a loss as to how to save the planet from Bodiless themselves.
We must bring them in, said Westshadow, and flexed all its heads at angles so impossible that watching them made Draco a little sick, and he had to look away. We must bond them, the riders and the humans and the mummidade who are not here.
Draco opened his mouth to ask about the mummidade who were here, but ended up closing it again. If it were possible for mummidade to bond across vast distances, he thought they would have done it already. They seemed to require physical contact between the bodies.
Besides, the populations of riders and humans were smaller anyway.
How can we help when the other ones haven’t come with us? Harry asked, his fingers digging into the shaggy white curls above the golden eyes of the mummid that stood beside him.
That mummid tilted its head back, and Draco could read the answer in the golden eyes, or so he thought, before Westshadow’s voice hissed to life in his head. We use you as the anchors and the focal points. The others will use you as the gate.
Draco shuddered, and not because of the images that the words stirred up in him. The others will be able to use our bond?
They can reach through it, was what Westshadow said, and then it turned its heads up and behind them. The winds were descending again, Draco thought. Bodiless had given up on calling them in their minds, knowing now they would never respond, and had decided to hammer them until they gave up. Will you let them?
Draco nodded. There was no answer but to nod, not when he could feel the glow already springing up in Harry’s half of the bond. Of course they had to let others in, had to give them the thing that Draco had hoped to cherish for himself. There was no way to hold back, no way to have anything private in the face of Harry’s great love for his friends.
I love you, too.
Draco smiled wanly at him, and wondered how in the world he could agree, or disagree, or turn his back on Harry, or make himself clear at all, if the bond hadn’t already made his reluctance and his understanding both clear.
Harry squeezed his hand, and said, Don’t worry about it. They’re going to reach through us, and then I’ll exile them from the bond again.
Draco felt a confused, blurring moment pass through his mind, during which he seemed to be complaining about the fact that other people would use their bond to Harry, and Harry was reassuring him with more grace and swiftness than Draco had thought possible. Then Harry turned around to Westshadow and nodded slightly. “We’re ready.”
I’m not, Draco would have said, but Westshadow moved in, and the alien presence in his mind, more alien even than the bond already established between them, shut him up.
Westshadow swept across them like a cloud across the sun, like a fall of snow, and settled somewhere behind and beyond them. Draco shivered. He could feel a touch on something that felt like a harpstring, a string of blood, and reckoned they were touching Teddy and Andromeda through him, through the biological link they shared. He derived some faint amusement from the revulsion the mummidade had showed when they told them about coming from the bellies and wombs of other humans. They had no choice at the moment but to face their disgust.
Then other voices were in his mind, other consciousnesses. He could feel the pointed, slimy boulder that was Andromeda’s resistance, and the way she fought, and the quiet, spreading pool of wonder that marked Teddy.
Then Weasley and Granger were there, too, through the bonds of friendship that Harry shared with them: Weasley red and loud as pepper, Granger calm and pale like a silvery oval. And after them came the other Weasleys, pulled in by Weasley’s blood bond, and the werewolf’s wife, connected to him through the blood of their child, and the jokester's girlfriend, bound by love. There was even a flash of claws and feathers that made Draco think of Ginny’s bird, connected to her with a different sort of bond.
It was a confused, crowding, jostling sensation. Draco would have liked to back out of it, but he had the feeling that no one else knew how to control their reactions, either. They shifted and yelled in the confines of his mind and Harry’s, and then Westshadow turned them around and pointed them.
Draco opened his eyes and looked up into the storm, using his physical eyes as a distraction from the mental chaos. He started. Overhead hung a perfect line of riders and beasts, their wings beating strongly as they faced down the wind that Bodiless flung at them. In the center of them was Open Wings, his eyes shut and his claws extended. Draco could almost see silvery sparks, with the sharpness of lightning, dripping off the end of them. He wondered how horrible and distracting this was for him, but suspected he would never know. Open Wings would hardly share an experience like that with them.
There was more chaos, and more noise. Then Westshadow stamped with all sixteen hooves at once, leaping in the air and coming down again, and Draco heard it as the beat of a drum. A rhythm began to throb through the multiple bonds, steady as a heartbeat, directing their movements.
Draco couldn’t name the kind of movements. Not flight, not battle, not dancing, not walking, not reaching, but all of those. Andromeda rolled her slime-covered boulder downhill to its beat, and Harry opened his mouth and warbled forth a song of despair and pain and wind, and Granger mapped out strong and weak points in Bodiless’s attack, and Open Wings spoke words in the riders’ language that Draco understood as long as the bond lasted, words that gave him the hatching of eggs and the breaking into the world of new things, still covered with damp, downy feathers.
It flowed back and forth, and Draco had almost got used to it when the rhythm skirled up and assumed a different pace. Draco tilted his head back and opened his eyes again, distantly aware of the way that Harry squeezed his hand, and saw Bodiless overhead.
Bodiless, the Darkness in the North, the most terrifying bloody thing he had ever faced-at that moment, it was all and none of those, and Draco heard himself screaming shrilly. He could hear complaints from the people in his head, the ones who weren’t here physically and wanted to know what was happening from their position in the camp. He ignored them. He focused on the rhythm instead, and the battle that raged back and forth.
They were fighting. Draco knew that, because he could feel the winds pressing against his body, and knew that Bodiless was trying to destroy them. But he didn’t know what came after that, what he was doing exactly, the best way to categorize what he was doing.
Trying to defend ourselves will do nicely.
That was Harry, and with him as an anchor to tie him down, Draco finally managed to avoid the impression that he was whirling off into nothingness. He knew where to go, and he could find a name for what he was doing, based on the wild magic that guided his fingers more than anything else.
Cutting.
He cut and stabbed and punched at the tendrils of Bodiless that came down towards him and tried to spear him, to drag him apart from Harry, to impale his body in the same way it had impaled the bodies of the mummidade. Bodiless snarled in his ear, and once gave a fragment of the call that had so tempted Draco before, but at the moment, it was nothing but a torn scrap of sound struggling against the chaos.
The winds changed, and Draco felt Harry pressed close to his side, staring up at the mass of blackness overhead and snarling with the same defiance that drove Draco. That was comforting, more than comforting, to know that he wasn’t alone. Draco leaned into Harry and snarled in tune, and Bodiless screamed and pulled back.
It was being crushed by Andromeda’s boulder, dissolving in the clear and curious light of Teddy’s eyes. It was poisoned by the way Weasley carried himself, hot and peppery, and mapped and chained by Granger’s knowledge. The werewolf charged and howled and bit, and his wife danced and charmed the parts of Bodiless that tried to gain hold of her mind, making them slip away. Their daughter was a low and soft silver throb, not fully-formed as yet, but asserting her potential to be in spite of all the ways Bodiless would constrain her.
The Weasley patriarch was a stronger anchor than Draco had known he could be, stabbing roots deep into the ground. Bodiless didn’t know how to deal with a tree when there were so few on Hurricane, and those that were were different. His wife whispered and hissed in his branches, a wind of her own devising.
And fainter and further in his mind, as though they were standing farther away, came the sound of wings and wind in wings, and a hot roar like dragonfire pouring through a narrow channel, and a firework that took off in constant crashes and cracks and sparkles trailing a sense of fun behind it, and a calm, balanced presence that spread like Healing salve, and a stick in the mud that, swayed, turned to stone.
Ginny. Charlie. George. Angelina. Percy.
The names weren’t Draco’s idea; Harry was the one who thought them and poured those names through him at the same time, so that Draco had no choice but to accept them and then use them as part of the bond, part of the battle. But he intended to stop referring to the Weasels by those names as soon as he could and use something else, always assuming that Harry would allow him to.
Assuming that any of us survive this battle.
In the howling storm of magic, Draco squeezed Harry’s hand and flung himself back into the fight. Harry was with him, still whirling and dancing in the middle of his wind, and backing Draco’s claws up whenever he could spare the force.
Bodiless was there above them, crushing and flowing power, more of it than Draco had ever known existed, enough to stir some molten longing up in the back of his throat. But there was no way that he could give in to it, he reminded himself. Bodiless wouldn’t share.
Draco required that things like that be shared.
The realization struck and sparked in him with a shock. Before, he had dreamed of having the power all to himself, enough that he would never need to be a slave again, and could demand anything he wanted. But now, with the way that Harry leaned into the bond and the way the others howled around him, stacking up their strength against Bodiless, enduring the repeated assaults, wearing Bodiless down with sheer existence, he couldn’t imagine having it to himself any longer.
Not that I want to share it with everyone, he told Harry. Just you.
Harry laughed, a wild sound, and he sang and Draco cut and Andromeda rolled and Teddy gazed and Ron heated and Hermione chained and Bill howled and Fleur danced and Victoire pulsed and Arthur stood and Molly wound and Ginny flew and Charlie roared and George sparked and Angelina healed and Percy stood, and the mummidade flowed around them leaping and jumping, and the riders hovered and contributed.
And-
And above them, the darkness suddenly tattered, blew apart, frayed, became nothingness.
Passed like a storm.
Draco gasped, and lifted his head to gape at the sunlight.
Chapter Thirty-One.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/530770.html. Comment wherever you like.