I know I said I wouldn't start any new stories until I had finished one, but this plot bunny wouldn't stop bouncing around in my brain. That said, I don't own Harry Potter, even if I wished to.


Harry frowned, juggling at least eighty different calculations, constructing five runic circles while maintaining his hold on four thousand others, and chewing on his toast. He tried to mumble something to Hermione, who was standing nearby but not too close, but she just rolled her eyes as he only sprayed toast crumbs over a circle. She would have Vanished the crumbs, but as Harry had told her a week ago, if she did that the entire British Isles would probably be vaporized by the magical backlash. She would have been skeptical of Harry raising that much magic at one point in her life, but after five years of being on the run with only a ragtag bunch of misfits to accompany them, she and Ron had become intimately familiar with just how much magic Harry could command. So she watched as Harry casually created a runic circle to annihilate the bread crumbs before returning to his work.

"I repeat, do you want or need any water? Also, should you really be eating now?" Hermione frowned disapprovingly at Harry. The man hadn't slept once in the past ten days, and if not for his inherent magic itself supporting him he would have collapsed five days ago. Maybe. Probably not. Maybe three days ago. Anyways, the point was that Harry would probably have killed himself making these runic circles if not for his own vast magic. Maybe. These days, especially the last ten, Hermione hadn't been sure what exactly Harry was capable of. Not since they were the last remaining sane wizards on the planet.

"No 'Mione. I'm sure I'm fine. Or I will be. Or I have been. Merlin that gets confusing." He grinned at her, just as he always had in their school days, and she couldn't help but smile back, even as the five circles Harry was working on snapped into place, then shrunk and joined the multitude at Harry's waist, encapsulating the man in a vast circle of his own, four thousand, five hundred and ninety- three miniature circles around him. Harry grinned wider as the entire ramshackle hut they were in rattled. "Looks like Tom finally caught on to our hints. You think he was happy with that box I stuffed him in?"

"Honesty Harry, with how blasé you are with this whole situation I'd think you weren't in immediate fear for our lives." Ron tossed his comment across the room, seemingly unbothered by having been deposited on the floor by the sudden lurching sensation.

If possible, Harry's grin seemed to grow, until it looked slightly deranged. If she was honest with herself, Hermione couldn't blame Harry for that. "Maybe I am blasé, Ronnykins. Maybe I'm leading us all to our deaths!" Ron and Hermione flinched slightly at the moniker for Ron that the Twins had favored spilling so casually from Harry's mouth. The man looked pale and stricken as he took in their faces. "Merlin Ron, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it."

"I know you didn't Harry, you were always closer to them than we were." Ron, who had looked cool and confident, as confident as you could look in a hut under attack by the last insane wizard left alive, now looked like death warmed over. Hermione shook a little as she saw the desperate longing in Ron's gaze. The war had touched all three of them, and it had taken a little something from each of them as it left.


Harry shouted over his shoulder, but his words were snatched by the wind, and he couldn't tell if anyone had heard him. It didn't matter, anyways. Good ol' Voldy had found them, again, still somehow tracking Harry, and Harry alone. With the rest of the world nothing but ash and dust, Voldemort seemed single mindedly focused on erasing Harry from the map, and Harry wasn't quite keen on that yet, especially if it left his friends without a buffer between them and Voldy.

Not that they weren't competent, of course, but few wizards were capable of dueling Voldemort to a halt in the old days, and those days were long gone now. Voldemort had somehow found and bound a phoenix to him. The only respite Harry and his friends got were when Voldemort was torturing the phoenix, using its tears to heal his body and coax his soul shards back from the dead. This, of course, meant that Tom Riddle became drastically stronger with each soul shard, as instead of hiding them and being immortal, Voldy reintegrated the shards into his soul, vastly increasing the amount of power he had on tap.

Needless to say, Neville had not expected to face the full fury of the last of the Slytherins alone one day. Hermione had wanted to erect a headstone, or even a little stick, anything to remark Neville's passing, but Harry knew better. He could still taste the tang of Voldemort's power around the spot where Nev had died. To get too close would mean death. The worst part was that, even now, Harry wasn't facing the "full" might of Voldemort. Tom could have been so much more if he hadn't torn his soul in half at sixteen. That had forever stunted his magical growth, cutting off his magical puberties at the extremely young age of twenty seven. Normally, for those like Harry, Voldemort, and Dumbledore, their magic underwent what really ended up being a gigantic growth spurt, and had been jokingly termed puberty. In fact, all wizards and witches went through the process at least once, which is why the name stuck. Except for those who had more power at their disposal, the puberties kept coming, more and more, until right before the wizard or witch's death, they were considered all but a God.

That had been why Dumbledore had been so successful against Grindelwald. The Dark Lord may have been powerful, but he was never going to be as powerful as Dumbledore. Albus had apparently turned an entire hill into glass at one point in the duel, shattered it into shards, ignited the whole lot of them and then sent a tornado of molten shards of glass at Grindelwald.

It was a miracle that the Dark Lord had survived that battle.

And here Harry was, wand flickering as he called up dozens of circles to protect himself and anything behind him, which could be one friend or twenty. He didn't know anymore, and as much as he didn't want to know anymore, he had to. The bifurcated corpse of George Weasley, and Ron's broken expression over it, however, did not elicit the response that Voldemort wanted in Harry.

Harry roared, and every stone within a thousand feet turned into dragons. Considering the gale Voldemort had sent their way, there was not many left. Mostly boulders. That made the sudden appearance of twenty full grown Hungarian Horntails all the more frightening. The column of flame that torched the ground where Voldemort stood was hugely satisfying. He turned back to Ron, just in time to see the red head about to kill himself.

"Ron! No-!"


"Ron, don't you fucking give up on me now. I've been up for ten days making this sodding ring of runic circles, don't you fucking dare to kill yourself now, do you hear me?" Harry's glare seemed to cut through Ron's trip down memory lane, and the sudden feeling of standing next to a brewing thunderstorm helped speed Ron's return to sanity. The sudden smell of ozone, the results and signs of Harry's magic being pulled into physical being, shocked Hermine and Ron out of their trance and into full attention. For Harry to manifest his magic…He had done that once before. Only once. And the entire planet had quaked with his rage.

This was not an overestimation of Harry's power. Being one of the very few people graced with more than two or three magical puberties, Harry had a grasp of magic so intuitive that he could actually hold over five thousand simultaneous runic circles in place, each with different outcomes and results, without sweating.

This is of course, amazing, as in general, seven fully trained Celtic druids generally balked at the thought of activating more than one runic circle at a time. Actually, it was impossible, but Harry didn't let little words and laws of magic bind him. Which, in general, they did not for wizards of his class, which had nothing to do with society, and everything to do with magic. His magical power made him a Mage, and his destiny made him a Lord. On top of that, he was a Child of Prophesy. All of this combined with being a half-blood, which generally meant a bit of the inbreeding from pure-bloods could be mitigated, Harry had enough magic that by the time he was twelve he could face a Basilisk without being crushed by the King of Snake's death aura.

And now, he was indeed holding up four thousand nine hundred runic circles, almost without blinking. Yes, he had to do the arithmantic calculations in his head, but he was still capable of that. Honestly, time travel would be a blessing. It would, theoretically of course, let his present mind and magic meld with his eleven year old form. The resulting magical burst would be catastrophic for anything nearby, if not for something he and his friends had discovered. Past a certain point, muggles couldn't feel magic. Oh if someone cast a tripping hex they'd be able to feel the tug coming from nowhere. But a magical explosion that releases a beam of escaped energy high enough that it reaches space? Not a flicker. The earthquakes set off by that insane amount of energy released nearby, they would notice all right, but the actual merging of souls? That was beyond muggles.

Harry sighed, and then winced as all three heard his outer set of wards come crashing down. "Well, looks like time is running out, Ron, 'Mione." He twirled his wand, and the last hundred circles slotted nearly into place, each shining like a small light bulb. He turned, slowly, to face his two oldest friends left alive. Well, the only two people left alive he cared for. Well alright, there really was only himself, Hermione, Ron, and Tom left alive of humanity.

"I thought of something." He started hesitantly, and when he wasn't shot down instantly, he asked them if they would consent to having their memories transferred to their little bodies. Hermione seemed reluctant, and Ron seemed, hungry, somehow. Harry then realized it was the hunger of seeing his family, especially the Twins, again, alive and well, that made Ron look like Sirius had after escaping Azkaban. Not the same emotion, but the look of raw, naked hunger made the sane part of Harry's mind want to curl up and cry for hours. The insane part, of course, merely winced. He wasn't that far gone. Harry wasn't even as far gone as Hermione. She was, amazingly, even worse than Ron. The war, especially these last few months, had twisted Harry's sanity, but it had taken most of Ron's and left only shreds of Hermione's.

Hermione, after about ten days of sitting still, screamed. The sound was like nails on chalkboard, and Harry never got used to the suddenness of it. It was always enough to snap Ron out of his funk, generally as it was fueled by Hermione watching Ron sink into his demon's waiting arms, and merely surrendering to her own. Harry lazily waved his wand in Hermione's direction, and she was instantly Silenced. He merely tipped his head at her, and the smell of ozone was back. Each time Hermione snapped, it had taken weeks before she calmed down again. None of them had the time.

Funnily enough, the threat of imminent death seemed to break Hermione from the clutches of her demons, whatever they were. Harry could read her mind, but the way she had asked him not to told him the demons were her own mind defenses, turning on her. A gift of Tom's, no doubt. As they were now, Ron, slipping into a sea of madness, Hermione, already there and struggling to not drown, and himself, Harry, holding on if only to see the three of them smiling and happy once more, none of them were ready for combat. 'Mione and Ron, he knew, would jump in front of Killing Curses in a heartbeat, even if he conjured marble to protect himself, They wanted a way out. Anything to end the pain.

And that would break him, he knew. And then, he would probably do what he had sworn to never do again, and tap all of the ley lines in the planet. The last time that had happened, well. There was a reason the Earth had no habitation besides the four of them any longer. Harry giggled in a corner of his own mind, picturing the Earth as it sailed ever closer to the Sun. His rage had knocked the planet out of orbit, and it was steadily accelerating as it hurtled toward the Sun, and annihilation. They were already past Venus, and approaching Mercury. The heat had killed some things, but it was mostly the lack of water. Well, maybe it was all the heat. Magical animals had held out for longer than the rest, but without a steady ley line network like the one they had had for centuries, which he had disrupted, the magical animals died off soon as well. Oh well, lightly flambéed dragon steak had tasted great for a day or two.

Oh, right, there the tosser was again, knocking on their front door, so to speak. Harry twitched as the second set of wards fell, and Voldemort attacked the inner, and last wall of wards. Time to finish up quickly then. "I won't bring you guys back if I'm as insane as I am now. I don't need to deal with Voldemort and my two suicidal and psychotic best friends." He knew it was callous of him, but he gave them the choice. They both nodded, and he pulled out an exact copy of tier memories. Well, not a copy, he just pulled their memories out of their brains.

Hermione and Ron dropped to the ground, as dead as they had ever hoped to be. Harry sincerely hoped the ritual would work as he had intended, as he didn't want to go through life not only half insane, but also without his best friends. He called up twenty thousand other runic circles at once, only showing the strain now as twenty-five thousand simultaneous and continuous circles drained his magic. If not for the extremely crude rituals he had done to expand his magic, Harry would have been long dead form the magical expenditure.

As he felt the last wards collapse, he smiled bitter sweetly at the dead bodies of his friends, wishing he could die beside them. But no, he had sworn a vow using Magick that he would kill Voldemort. If he needed an extra decade or so, who could complain?

Harry let the control he had on the inner ring of carefully constructed runes go, watching as hundreds of hours' worth of effort crashed into him, and he felt his body slowly disappearing. Just before the magical font erased him, however, Harry released control of the Cataclysm circles. He had used the strongest circle he knew of that led to only destruction and nothing else. And he had woven and created twenty thousand of them. One would be sufficient to make a volcano erupt. All of them? Channeled as an explosion? The Earth was wiped out by an eruption of magic so huge all of its ley lines had to be called on to support, until they too were shredded by the magic, making the explosion larger by five orders of magnitude as each line detonated.

Harry had a brief moment to enjoy this, and also the sight of Voldemort's last expression being of extreme confusion and shock, before the magic took hold of him and transported him far, far away in time.


Wow, that got away from me at the start. It was never going to be this dark, it sounded so nice in my head. Oh well, I like it.

Sorry that it's so exposition heavy :/