So this happened. This was written over the course of just a few days. It's one of about a half-dozen (entirely different) scratched at HP/Silm crosses I have going, though not by any means the longest or most-developed. It may or may not be expanded further - I like it, so if there's interest I may invest more time into developing a full-length story from it. I'm definitely up for any comments or discussion!
Silmarillion knowledge certainly will help for context (even in this short piece), but given that 'all has been forgotten,' if you're unfamiliar Harry & co are in the same boat you are.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not mine. Silmarillion/the extended LotR universe is not mine. HP is also not female, but 50% of my ideas are, so if that's a problem, suck it.
Dagorath
Opening: Retrospective
Harry remembers the day the world went to hell.
It was not the kind of day one typically associated with apocalypses: a bright, unseasonably warm day as autumn wound down into winter, with a cloudless pure blue sky and just enough breeze to rustle the bare limbs of the trees. A perfect day for a lazy game of Quidditch out in the Weasley's paddock, and picnicking in the leaf-strewn grass, and improvising a gnome-tossing game - celebrating, in small ways, the end of the war crimes trials that seemed to drag on forever.
They all had the day off. Kingsley had kicked Harry out from the Auror office (there was still paperwork to finish), George and Ron had closed the shop, and Hermione and Ginny took sabbatical from Hogwarts for the weekend.
Then the sun turned blood red.
Harry remembers dropping her half-eaten apple in shock. The sour tang of it on her tongue, as she and the others craned their necks skyward. It should have been eye-searing bright on such a clear day, but somehow the vibrance of it had dulled. From bright yellow, to an angry scarlet, to a brown-black like tar, and then the dark circle of the sun fell out of the sky beyond the western horizon.
They looked at each other.
Strangely, there was no thought that something so absurd had to be an illusion. She knew, and saw reflected in her friends' eyes, the utter certainty of wrongness.
What in the bloody hell just happened?
Of course, that was only the beginning.
The next doom came from the Muggle world. Both men of science and men of faith were rocked by the impossibility of the sun falling from the sky. The end of the world, said the faithful, and the scientists were too busy wondering how the earth hadn't already frozen to try and quell the panic. Accusations began to fly, and the next things to fall were bombs.
Winter came - nuclear winter under the pale light of the moon.
Harry remembers the acrid smell of the smoke, so thick the Bubble-Head charm couldn't filter it all, when she chain-Apparated from Surrey's rubble to Privet Drive. Number Four was completely gone, by happenstance (she wondered) ground zero to one of the blasts, but Uncle Vernon's car was nearby, thrown by the shockwave. A locator spell proved fruitless, but a summoning spell for her Aunt pelted her with ash and flecks of bone.
She collapsed into the dust. Never in her wildest dreams, in her cruelest nightmares…
"Potter? Harry Potter, is that you?"
She remembers half-turning. The voice was familiar, if hoarse from smoke inhalation. Mary Donnell, one of Aunt Petunia's frequent gossiping partners, Harry had bitter memories of scrubbing floors until her hands were raw as they had tea and lamented that good families sometimes turned out bad eggs like her mother.
"Yeah, it's me." Her voice was just as rough.
"You're… one of them?"
"A witch, yes." The news was out, the Statute shattered, but who the hell cared when the world was tearing itself apart at the seams?
Donnell's voice turned… hopeful? "You can - you can help us then? Can take us somewhere safe?"
Did she not care that Harry was kneeling in her own aunt's remains? Harry turned fully, and felt a flicker of surprise. Donnell had a baby with her, curiously silent and still, and there's a wide, shell-shocked look in her eyes. Harry decided that no, she probably didn't even realize. And there were more people craning to look at them. Even Tufty wended out of the ruins of Figg's old house, dragging a crushed rear leg behind him. The remnants of her childhood tormentors begging safety from her.
A bomb landed on her aunt's house. Chances were, they were all very, very sick.
Harry swallowed her tears and started working on a Portkey.
Once the bombs had petered out, an army crept out of the deep cracks they left in the earth. Huge hordes of savage, twisted monsters that seemed designed to prey on the people left reeling by the death of the sun and the breaking of the planet. They didn't use guns, though they made effective use of captured arms and gunpowder, took insane glee in the spreading of napalm. In a world before the Bombs, the Muggles would have driven them back with ease; after them, they seemed unstoppable.
Harry remembers the messenger Gringotts had sent, rather shorter than the average teller but stacked down with sword, axe, and shortbow and shaking with fear.
"They're called orcs in the human tongue," said the messenger, "uruki in ours. They are, are our cousins in a sense. The oldest legends of our race speak of a dark power, which cursed them, and bound them to his service with fell magic."
"Another Dark Lord, then." The idea that any one power could master an entire race was just absurd. Such a power might even blot out the sun. Harry wasn't sure whether she was angry or just tired.
The goblin shook his head and tittered. "The people of Gringotts have fought the uruki since we were established in London. They're everywhere in the Deeps of the world, skittering like insects in the dark. But they've never been organized. No greater power could keep their mad bloodlust at bay. And never, never have they breached the surface world before."
"But now the sun has gone."
Strange, to see her own terror reflected in the eyes of a goblin. Gringotts had never forgiven her for the break-in, and theirs was not a race inclined to show weakness in front of their enemies. Harry felt all eyes on her.
"What do you need from us?"
Gringotts asked her to go to war.
Harry remembers stumbling out from Gringotts, spattered with black orc blood and aching, just to sit bonelessly on the stairs overlooking Diagon Alley. The alley stayed emptier now than during the worst points of the Voldemort conflict, and the buildings looked lonely in the light of the bluebell torches and the background of bomb-blown London.
It was a new moon that day, or what accounted for one - the moon motions had grown erratic since the loss of the sun. The sky was clear, save the blanket of stars that shone brighter since London's lights had failed. She raised a hand and traced constellations.
Mars was bright that night. Venus had gone.
After a vanished sun, a vanished planet earned little more than a sigh. What meaning had the morning star when morning never came?
After a year of trial and toil, what survived of the International Council of Wizards convened in the ruins of Geneva. Harry joined as the representative of the United Kingdom, jointly appointed by the magical and Muggle population - the Defeater of Voldemort, Dumbledore's second, and one of the first to open her home to refugees.
The news was humbling and horrifying. Wu Xian of the Magistry of China spoke of a Great Dragon, the length of the Great Wall, which commanded the minds of the country's plentiful Fireballs and torched the countryside and set whole cities ablaze. Kamiti of Kenya described how a long-suffered dark witch of the Sahara had set the nundu against the orcs, heedless of the carnage and the plagues that followed and devastated the region even further. Weku of Chile told how the rainforest and its creatures had grown strange and ill-tempered, and its people overcome by a sickness of sleep no magic or medicine could cure: they would stand sedately while a tiger mauled them, or walk into the sea to drown, eyes dead and deaf to all. Will Murphy, once Principal of Ilvermory, was a man of few words, but the image of chunks of the east coast just breaking off into the ocean was hard to shake.
She took her turn at the podium. After summarizing the events from her perspective, and a long discussion about the orcs (for none but Goringothu's clan had recognized the monsters), she closed her eyes and took a fortifying breath.
Harry remembers running through a few desperate calculations in her head. They had a certain amount of food, a certain amount of fertile land, a certain number of mouths to feed, and a - comparatively - small-scale conflict to maintain.
"It's dizzying to think that just seventeen months ago, I was convinced that the dark wizard terrorizing my country was the height of evil, that running and hiding and slinking about, splitting a meal a day between the three of us and kipping in a magical tent was the worst sort of misery." A chuckle rippled over the attendees. Smiling wanly at the black humor, she continued. "It wasn't even true then, and it certainly isn't true now. We've been spared the worst of the Long Night's horrors. Whether that remains so is something only Seers can tell, but while it does, it is our duty to see to it that others may share in our fortune."
She gave the chamber a long look. Most of the attendees were more practiced in politics than she, and she could not read them. But for every inscrutable face was one with mingled hope and disbelief - and twice over one that looked uncomfortable. Not everyone had outstanding miseries to share.
"No one in this hall engineered this catastrophe, but we are all affected by it. There's only so much my people can spare without compromising our battle with the orcs and losing everything. But what we can spare, we will. We are stronger together."
Harry stepped down from the podium, thoughts already flying. The hall rumbled from the force of the standing ovation.
She remembers when the call came out from Norway: they were drowning in an orc army that appeared practically overnight. It came from the north and the east, and the Swedes and Finns were ominously silent, so Harry was picked as one of the nearest with orc combat experience to try and delay the inevitable as the surviving settlements were evacuated.
The largest of those settlements was at Stavanger. It was particularly defensible since it was on a peninsula, with high cliffs overlooking the fjord. The majority of the orc forces were instead forced to approach from the south, lest they be picked off by idle potshots of the patrolling wizards of Freyr Academy. Battle in the goblin Undercity had taught Harry that there was nothing so viciously satisfying as a squad of orcs bunched up, a fact she was happy to pass on in the form of the jousting hex, the plane banisher, the bludgeoning curse, the slashing hex, a well-placed reducto…
But the tour de force, the ultimate weapon they had to counter the orcs, was Fiendfyre.
"The problem with uruki isn't that they're powerful, it's that there's so sodding many of them," Harry explained (unnecessarily - the Norwegians probably knew that better than she did). "And they aren't stupid. They know wizards have them by the balls. But we have to be out there to do it and we need our wands, and they don't care about throwing away a few squads if it means we're dinner."
Given a choice, an orc would eat a wizard over a Muggle. God only knew why, but it was an accepted fact already, and already causing… issues. Wizards already had enough doubts about playing guardian angels to Mugglekind. Maybe that was the point - psychological warfare, divide and conquer.
She shook the unpleasant thought from her mind, staring at the flame-ravaged landscape. Fiendfyre had its downsides, worse still on the surface world than the Undercity. But the tactic remained effective. They hadn't seen a living orc in days, devastated as they were by the still-writhing Fiendfyre.
Harry remembers the instant the orcs' commander took the field. Hagrid-sized, wreathed in shadow, a burning brand in one hand and a coiled ember at the monstrous waist. The free hand reached without fear, coaxing the flame-beasts as a normal person might a skittish pet; her own stag answered to it readily and she stumbled as her mental grip on the spell snapped.
Her stag-Fiend was there, but her connection to it had gone. Her control of it had gone.
Still reeling, Harry seized Andersen's arm and screamed for him to sound the retreat.
Stavanger fell, and Norway went silent. Harry took the evacuees to Albion, outside the London wasteland, where they huddled in shock and anger and bitterness until grief turned into grudging acceptance.
They called the commander Surtr, after the demon of legend. Sadly, there were more of them.
Between the Muggles, the goblins, the ICW, and the refugees, Harry rarely had a moment to herself. She took to vanishing when the pressure grew too much. It was irresponsible, and selfish, and she always came back to worse trouble than before she left. But she had to. The alternative was madness. Toss on the Invisibility Cloak, swing abreast the Firebolt, and fly fly away. Once to Privet Drive, to crouch in the dust of her once-bedroom. Once to the hut on the rock, now broken off into the sea. Once to the cave where a Horcrux had once been, still cold and eerie with a thousand corpses. Once to the ruin of Stavanger, desecrated by the uruki.
There were men there, and wizards, sharing grins and haunches of meat with the orcs. She recognized some of the faces, and relearned the meaning of hate.
On one such flight, two years after sunfall, a strange new light on the western horizon drew her to the coast. The stars glimmered with unusual clarity: the Plough was now a sickle, raised like a threat by the sky, the handle just touched by the soft glow that shimmered over the quiescent ocean. She touched down on the sand and peeled off the Cloak. The cool air brushed her wind-strewn hair and made her shiver.
The strange light had not only drawn her attention. There was a man on the beach, singing softly in an unfamiliar tongue. Very tall, pale, with long dark hair silvered from age or stress, eyes closed as he sang. He didn't react to the crunch of sand.
Harry listened quietly. The song instilled in her a sharp sense of loss and longing. Though the words remained foreign, the language had something of the rhythm of Finnish. A refugee perhaps? She tried to keep track of them all, but some were doomed to slip through the cracks.
He had a beautiful voice, though. At length the song drifted into silence.
"I didn't expect to meet someone when I flew out today," she said gently. "There aren't many people outside the sanctuary settlements. Are you lost?"
The man startled visibly, and his hair jostled as he turned and revealed a tapered ear. Not human, then. They, more than the others, tended to 'get lost', which was a tragedy. His hand cupped the drape of the Cloak over her arm, spider-walked up her elbow, and hesitantly found her cheek. Her heart twisted in sympathy at the man's mute shock. How long had he been alone, that the existence of her required irrefutable proof?
"Yes, I'm real, and I'm talking to you." The hand on her cheek was ungloved and chilly; Harry let her broom hover where it may and took it to warm between her own. "I'm Harry Potter. Witch of Hogwarts." There was hazy recognition of her name: a slow blink and eyes that drifted to her forehead. "I was listening to you sing; I hope you don't mind?"
The look on his face was peculiar, but gave way to a faint smile and a rueful head shake.
For some people, long silence made talking to a new stranger simple, while for others it made it more difficult. Mindful of this, Harry let the pause last enough to welcome him to speak, but not long enough to become awkward.
"Have you been here long, or did the light draw you too?"
He looked back at the horizon, smile fading into an unease she understood all too well. Two years under eternal night, and now the appearance of sunrise in the west? It filled her with foreboding.
"Sad how such a short time can change your perception of things," she continued lightly. "This will have the researchers in a tizzy. The sun falls, but we don't freeze; the stars move about as they like, and now a mysterious light in the west. It's no doing of the wizards overseas. Murphy's last word was situation normal."
Again, a pause, but now he spoke up. Even in conversation his voice was musical and his word choice dramatic, traces of his native tongue turning the English alien.
"This light has no origin in blackened Endórë. It hails from the uttermost west, and is now returned at the fore of the host of the Valar at the ending of the world."
Wonderful. One of those. Harry hid a cringe. Doomsday predictions were penny apiece in the Long Night. Preaching the inevitability of destruction accomplished nothing but to splinter what morale she could scrounge together. Of course the end was inevitable if they all decided to lie down and die.
"Things look awful now, but it's only by surrendering that we guarantee it will never get better," she said, unable to nip the note of censure in her tone.
He looked at her in surprise. "Your losses are innumerable. The grief of your people is like a stale vapor that hangs overhead. Your lands are sullied and your larders thin. Your greatest powers were broken in the first strike, and the strength of the Enemy of the World only grows as you struggle to endure. What hope do you have?"
A question she'd been asked before, by people far more upset than than he. He seemed more pragmatic than the average panicked doomsayer, so she answered candidly.
"Before Sunfall, Earth was home to approximately ten billion people. Now there are maybe five hundred million, not counting the orcs. Before Sunfall, there was enough arable land to feed us all, if we could distribute it right; now that's a question. Before Sunfall, humanity was its own worst enemy. Maybe that's still true. But there weren't man-eating hordes or demons."
"Is this meant to be hopeful?"
Harry shook her head. "It's not a matter of hope. It's not in question that we're worse off now than we were then. But there were times we thought the world was ending, and then things got better. We just had to keep trying."
"And when you fail, even then?"
"Then we die knowing we tried, that our lives were dearly bought, and that whatever happens after, we won't be called cowards."
Gray eyes opened wide and startled.
"It's a very Gryffindor point of view," Harry allowed, smiling wryly. "Or so Hermione says; she's a friend of mine. Maybe we'll die a little sooner for it. At least we'll live before we die."
"And in after-times live longer in the telling," said the singer, "until the last days of Endórë; those who went not quietly into the night. I understand." Unexpectedly, he sang a few lilting verses in his native tongue, and laughed softly. "Witch of Hogwarts. Though I have long lingered on this shore in solitude, I have heard of you. You have many names and that is perhaps the least of them."
Harry grimaced. "It's the truth. But I prefer when people use my actual name."
"Harry, then." He gazed over at the horizon, the sea-light playing over his face, and seemed for the moment unbearably sad and wistful. Then deliberately he put his back to it. "If the world retains any memory of me, it is as Maglor, son of Fëanor."
The shift in his bearing was so sudden Harry felt whiplash. His eyes were steel.
"So long as the people of Earth seek to thwart Morgoth, so shall I."
END Retrospective