Steady, But Trembling
articas_ursula (AO3)
artica's-ursula (FFN)
Chapter 1: The Dark World
Year 3979
"I am here, as you have called."
Without raising his eyes from the corpse before him—a newborn infant with twisted limbs, wrecked by inbreeding and mutation—Harry Potter acknowledged him.
"Death."
"Such a waste of five months, my lord."
"I don't see why that matters. It's nearing its end." Harry's dispassionate poison-colored eyes were cold; nearly reptilian.
"Yes, my lord," the death agreed, toeing the infant's arm, bloated with fly eggs, gas and bacteria under the boiling midsummer sun. One arm was only half the length of the other and there was an opening in the upper lip and roof of the mouth. Its head was abnormally shrunken. "It won't be long now."
It, spoken of so casually, was the end of human life. The last man standing, so to speak, was a young girl with poor vision and beastly-angled joints who had just delivered and discarded the dead fetus before them.
As their numbers dwindled, incest in humans had become common—the result being ghastly deformations and a very light grip on sanity. The boy who had sired the child—the girl's brother and also cousin—had long-since died; had rammed his head into the wall of a ruined building in an effort to make sense of his starving huger that he could no longer fathom. When he'd done so with enough force to invite unconsciousness, he'd simply never woken up again. The girl was almost done for too. The birth was four months early and had not been easy. An ample pool of congealing blood surrounded the fetus, which was connected to a chunk of browning purple tissue via a spaghetti-like umbilical cord.
As they left the tiny body, a pair of scavenger birds that had before kept a healthy distance so as not to offend Death's master landed carefully next to their meal. Harry did not turn as the sounds of rabid screaming echoed after them; a disagreement has arisen as to which of them would consume the body's tiny, putrefying intestines.
The drying blood trail led them to its mother, twenty yards away in a nest of sorts assembled from dirty fabrics and feathers collected from dead pigeons, all tucked away in the corner of a collapsed building in the damned remains of Western Canada.
The smell was nearly unbearable—a festering collection of body odor, excrement, and vomit churned together in a cesspool of disease and broiled by the day's heat. A solid wall of stench, yet the wizard didn't notice it.
Harry's detached tone reflected no particular disposition as they stood just outside the opening. "I'm fond of her," he said.
"You pity her, my lord," Death corrected. "Rightly so. An embarrassing end to a species."
The breathless, pulseless presence that was Harry Potter twisted its neck like a curious raptor. Perhaps the subtle shades of human emotion had finally been lost to him. As his eternal life wore on, he'd felt increasingly more like a dark creature—a harsh collection of instincts—than the dark wizard he'd once been.
When they were less than five feet away, the girl finally noticed them and flinched violently. If not for her tormenting after-birthing pains, Harry was sure she would attempt to savagely attack.
Neither Harry nor Death reacted. The wizard did not speak, but magic itself was reading his intentions carefully; dark magic began to amass silently.
Cognitively, she knew not what was coming; but her core sensed what her inbred mind could not. She burst into howling tears, clawing at the mats of her lice-infested greasy hair and trying to shift away on heavily bowed legs. Thick blood and dried delivery fluids were still oozing from between her thighs and a large fleet of insects was cruising about, occasionally landing on her sweaty body but mostly feasting in the puddle of placenta still attached to the poor child.
"She does not understand, my lord. Her suffering is redundant."
Redundant. Harry felt empty, but took out his wand—the elder wand, with elegant knots along its length—and pointed it unwaveringly.
He had watched her life go by with ineffective apathy. The only reason she'd lived so long was due to her bastardized form of accidental healing magic, which obviously struggled to support her poor health. It flared around her now in an attempt to appear threatening as Harry advanced, but it was weak like everything in this world was weak. She stared tearfully back at him through clouded gray eyes, thick with cataracts even with such youth. And though she was afraid, he knew he could take her life, if only to save it from such squalor.
"Avada Kedavra."
And it was done.
Year 3979
"My lord."
It had been some time since the death of the girl and, to Harry's perhaps foolish surprise, the world did not end. Animals continued to graze around the sad little wreck of the ghostly Belarusian town he stood before and there were birds in the sky. The vaporous currents of magic, however, which had even just a decade ago slunk around his ankles in a light-dark continuum, had changed. The currents felt thin and patchy like a dust cloud, struggling under his direction even as he had ended the girl's life.
Magic itself was, indeed, dying.
"Come away," the death suggested, because he could not order his master.
"To where?" he asked quietly, continuing to stare ahead sightlessly. There was no one else of his kind.
He was no one.
"I will explain."
There was nothing else for it but to go with Death.
This creature, a cypher drenched in ancient loss, was but one death. There were many deaths: a death for the dogs, a death for the deer, a death for the sheep. Death—who identified himself in that way—was the death of the humans: one of the many creatures whose blood anchored magic to the earth.
"We must move on to the next."
Brow furrowed, Harry looked up at him. "Next?"
"The next world," the death clarified as they walked a beaten animal run cutting through a thick copse of trees. The ground crunched with dry nettles beneath their steps. "There are infinite worlds of humans and we are fated an eternity of bringing humanity's end to each one."
At last intrigued, Harry stopped, his airless lungs completing his perfect stillness. When Harry did not make to move again, Death seemed to decide they had walked far enough. They were facing an old barn wall that was propped up at an angle by the three other sides that had collapsed against each other. Thick mint moss caked the wood an inch deep.
"What are you going to do?"
Death did not stop his movements at the wary question; instead, from beneath the sleeve of the draping robe he wore, he extended a thin blade of some blue-grey material and began to carve. "We shall summon the last drops of magic from this world to send us to the next; and to a point in it where its humanity's end, too, has begun to unravel."
He was drawing runes: tiny little symbols around the borders, and ones that were huge—bigger than Harry, even—in the center. Harry watched him do this for nearly twenty minutes with increasing apprehension before the death stepped back, as though to admire his penmanship.
And then Death looked to him, knife offered.
"You must supply the rune catalyst, my lord."
Uncharacteristically surprised, Harry took the dagger in hand, casting a predator's gaze about their surroundings. "With… what?"
"Sacrifice."
There was nothing Death considered dearer than the spilling of blood.
They were now in a thicket of sorts that had closed in on the rural farm to which the barn had belonged. There were no creatures of flesh and blood in sight; only parts of a skeleton from some carnivore's kill lay picked clean and half-hidden under a nearby bush. The majority of the area was filled with dense vegetation in muted green shading. No bright color bled from here; and that was when Harry knew what Death meant.
"You… mean..." Me. The thought brought neither the terror nor relief he expected.
"To sever the last hope of a magical breed is a terrible, powerful thing. The land itself morns it."
Unmoved, Harry reminded him: "You forget quickly, I cannot die—to my own regret. Not even to serve this… quest."
Death remained unfazed. "It was not your end to which I referred."
"…Pardon?"
"You are of no breed, my lord; and the deed has already been done."
Harry rocked back on his heels, the faint crunch of dry nettles echoing this movement. He said nothing.
"Intentionally forcing a life to end is an unnatural thing that brittles the soul. From there, carving a piece from the whole incites magic so terrible that few humans in this world have had the stomach to achieve it."
For several seconds, Harry mulled this frightful thought over. A directionless wind moved through the glen, shifting his dark hair and causing his unnerving green eyes to squint.
"Your soul is yet brittle from the death of the girl, my lord."
"And—what?" He said sharply. "—you're telling me to cut a piece out?"
"I cannot tell you to do anything," Death amended with irritating calm. "You are my master."
"But that is what you're saying," clarified Harry. His fingers curled and uncurled agitatedly like the untamed creature he'd gradually become. He had known it in the abstract, but the reality had never seemed… real. The last thing keeping magic alive here was, well, Harry himself; so long as the last drops of his immortal blood pooled in his pulseless heart. "And if I refuse?" he wondered.
Death, who seemed completely ambivalent on the matter, told Harry the truth: "Then we shall stay here, in silence, for the rest of time; until the last of all creatures has passed and every other death has already gone on to the next world."
Harry thought the kind of bleak isolation that Death suggested sounded even more horrible than this artificial existence with no one to keep company with besides Death himself. The former wizard had taken to roaming the world seeking out the last of his kind, but even that amusement was now gone.
Plants wilted if he kept near them for too long.
Animals of nearly every type panicked and bolted at his presence. Dark creatures whose allegiance belonged to him had long-since become extinct.
And yet, despite such an existence, what was asked of him was… frightening.
Harry had not felt fear in centuries.
"Fear is a mortal thing," said Death contemptuously when it seemed he could no longer stop himself from saying so. "And you are no mortal, my lord."
"Just give me a second!" Harry snapped, hiding the faint tremor of his hand that had reluctantly taken the knife. Death's gaze made him paranoid. His shoulders rounded as Harry hunched over his abrupt task. He wanted to ask if it would hurt, but Death was no friend to him and what if the ancient thing agreed and said it hurt very much to cut into your soul?
"Will it hurt?" asked Harry anyway.
"Yes, my lord," Death replied without hesitation.
Human no longer, Harry was a creature of cold insights. He could not stay here with this thing—which, though it called him Lord, would never be able to serve Harry as well as Harry served himself.
"Where does the soul live?" he asked hollowly.
Death's master thought for a moment that he could see the twist of a grim smile in the creature's eyes before the sight was gone. With one cloaked hand, a single finger pressed hard against Harry's skin: right between his eyes.
"I suggest going through the left eye. For you, it sees somewhat less."
Instantly, an overwhelming, almost foreign terror flooded through every part of Harry's body. His throat became too tight and he even thought for a second that he could hear his dead heart. Harry's eyes stung with instinctive tears even as they both seemed to try pathetically to protect themselves with thin lids.
It was a long while before Harry could move; maybe minutes, maybe hours. Eventually, slowly, he brought the knife tip centimeters before his watering left eye with two trembling hands:
And paid a very steep price.
Next time:
Harry arrives in the corpse of his counterpart, encountering problems associated with such an inelegant arrival.