(Begin)
He had become a God.
He wasn't entirely sure how. No, scratch that, he knew how, what he didn't know was why.
Why he, of all people, Harry Potter, The-Boy-Who-Lived, Wizarding Saviour, The Triwizard Champion, Basilisk Slayer, Dragon Fighter, Bane of Dementor's, and Defeater of the Dark Lord Voldemort, had another title to add to the list.
Death.
Not Master of.
Just... Death.
And he sat, staring blankly at the Marauder's map, unfolded in front of him, his eyes boring into the place where his name should be.
Harry Potter, was nowhere to be found. Instead, there he was, sitting stock still on the bed closest to the door of the Gryffindor boys' dorm, and the nameplate plastered above his head read a single word, it sank into his mind with an unsettling finality.
Death.
With a pained sigh, he folded the map up, and placed it safely back into his trunk, before collapsing bonelessly onto the four-poster bed.
He tried to think if there was some way this could have been avoided.
The hallows, once they had all been united, refused to leave him. He had thrown the stone in the lake, snapped the wand, even gone so far as to burn his father's beloved cloak. All of his efforts were in vain. No matter what destruction he wrought upon the fabled items. When he returned to his room later that day, there they were. Laying across his pillow, pristine and new. Seemingly aglow with powerful potential.
Oh, how his rage had grown and grown. He had done it all. Blasting curses, severing charms, even resorting to fiendfyre in the safety of the room or requirement. Nothing would ever permanently damage the hallows.
He had even allowed Ron to best him in a duel, several times in fact, hoping that the legends were true and it would sever his connection to the wand, at the least.
It was a waste of time.
Eventually he accepted it.
And that acceptance led to where he was today.
Upon the umpteenth time of returning to find the hallows in perfect condition, his will to fight them shattered. And with a sigh of resentment, he reached for the items.
Slinging the cloak over his shoulders, he palmed the stone in his left hand, and twirled the wand in his right.
With an eagerness he would deny having felt with his dying breath, he held the wand aloft, ready to test it's powers. He thought for a moment, before deciding to start small, with a self-affirming nod, he whispered the simplest spell he could think of.
"Lumos"
However, instead of light filling the room, blackness quickly overtook him.
When he had woke. He was unsure whether it had been seconds he had spent asleep, or perhaps days.
Everything was... Different.
His vision had cleared. A discovery made simple after finding it blurry with his glasses on, and removing them to wipe them clean, only to find he could see better than he had ever in his lifetime.
The world seemed different, everything seemed slightly grey, and cold.
Rising from his position laying on the floor, he discovered that the hallows had vanished.
Not seeing the items, he felt strangely, disappointed. He raised his right hand, and curled it around the air, reminiscing on the power that had thrummed in his veins when holding the wand.
And suddenly, the wand was there. Resting in his hand. As though it had been there the entire time. He blinked in surprise, and in his shock, his hand opened and allowed the wand to fall to the floor.
Only it never fell.
The moment his hold on it was loosened, it vanished. It was simply, gone. As though it never even was.
Dumbfounded, and more than a little curious, he closed his hand around the air once more, visualizing the wand in his grasp again.
And there it was.
Oh, how he had laughed.
The hallows, he discovered. Were no longer mere, objects, which could be haphazardly strewn about the room.
They had become a part of him. He could now summon and dismiss them each with ease.
He felt powerful, beyond all reason.
He was startled out of his reverie by a soft tap on his shoulder.
He spun quickly, his instincts from the fight with Voldemort a mere week ago taking over in an instant. The wand appeared in his hand of it's own volition, and his arm snapped up. He stood in a balanced stance, his eyes scanning the room quickly, ready to strike out at whoever had touched him.
The room was empty.
As he relaxed, he looked towards the wand in his hand, thrumming with power ready to be released. Without having voiced a word, or even had thought of a spell to cast, it's tip glowed the deadly green of the Avada Kedavra.
He dismissed it quickly. Only to bring it back a second later as another tap was felt on his shoulder.
Once again, he spun, ready for anything.
And once more he found nothing.
The taps, continued, with varying frequency, sometimes minutes apart sometimes mere seconds. It wasn't until later he would realize exactly what those taps meant.
He learned to ignore them quickly.
He walked from the dorm room, into the adjacent bathroom, and stared into the mirror.
His eyes had changed too.
Where before they had been an entrancing emerald, they now glowed, shining with the powerful, eerie green of the Avada Kedavra.
It was unsettling to say the least.
He washed his face, and returned to his bedroom quickly.
He opened the window, and gazed out of it. The wand appeared in his hand again, and he twirled it absentmindedly. Looking towards the forest, he decided to test the wand once more, he raised it, taking careful aim, and muttered the severing charm.
"Diffindo."
He watched as the spell shot out of his wand, a silent yellow beam streaking quickly towards to forest. He watched with bated breath, hoping to see at least a large branch fall.
The streak of yellow light reached the forest, and collided with the tree-line with a flash.
He breathed in slowly.
As he exhaled, as though pushed by the wind of his breath, five trees fell to the ground with a resounding series of crashes.
"Sweet, Merlin." He breathed. Staring down at the wand sitting far too innocently in his hand.
Dismissing the wand quickly he turned and left the dorm.
He wound his way through the hallways off Hogwarts, passing through the great hall, heading towards the hospital wing.
There he found his friends and pseudo-family gathered around three hospital beds. Two holding George, who had a bandage wrapped around his head, and Bill, who was covered head to toe in bandages, Fleur sat, resting her head gently on his chest, sleeping softly. The Weasley family, painfully sans Fred, gathered around the two beds. And they mourned together. The third bed holding Remus lupin, missing his left arm. But smiling softly as he watched Tonks slowly rock their sleeping child. Hermione leaned against the back wall of the room, conversing silently with Headmistress McGonagall. Madame Pomfrey bustled about various cabinets, sorting through potions.
Everyone in the room seemed to have a soft glow about them, varying colors and brightness, an aura surrounding their form.
As the door swung shut behind him, heads turned towards him, and greetings were given. But his eyes were locked on Bill.
Bills own aura, a soft amber color, was weak, glowing much more faintly than the others, and as he watched, it began to flicker.
Bill was dying.
He wasn't sure how he knew, exactly, that that was what the light meant, but on some level, he did, the light surrounding each person was the strength of their lifeforce, their tie to the world.
The oldest Weasley child had mere minutes left in this world.
He stepped forward, placing a hand gently on Fleur's shoulder, softly shaking her awake.
He ignored the questioning murmur of his name, and placed a hand on Bill's forehead. Turning slightly, he locked eyes with Arthur and spoke gently.
"Arthur, Molly, I'm sorry, but he's fading."
The Weasley family burst into stuttering questions and denial. Pomfrey bustled over quickly and waved her wand in an intricate pattern, various parts of Bill glowed different colors, and the mediwitch paled quickly.
"It's the partial lycanthropy, his body is somewhere between human and demi-human, but not fully either, I had given him both regimens of potions just in case, but his body is rejecting it. Nothing is holding."
Quickly she started casting spell after spell, within moments she was sweating from the exertion. She swore as the Weasley clan watched on, stunned.
"It's as if his magic is fighting me! Nothing I'm doing is working!"
Harry put a hand on the panting witches shoulder, pulling her gently aside. He summoned the elder wand, painstakingly ignoring Ron and Hermione's sharp intakes of breath, he tapped Bill gently on the head with his wand, saying no spell, but pouring his intent into it, forcing the powerful magic to bend to his will. Bill's eyes shot open, and he drew in a ragged breath. Harry met his eyes, and knew in an instant that Bill understood the sorrow in his family's faces.
"H-How long?" He asked, his voice dry, cracking.
"Minutes," Harry said, "There's nothing we can do. I managed to wake you up, at least this way you can say goodbye."
Bill nodded, and shot his parents a watery smile. And Harry stepped deftly out of the way as the family converged onto their loved one.
He caught Hermione's eye, as he slowly walked out of the room, intent on giving the family as much privacy as possible. Her piercing gaze promising questions, and his own blank stare giving no answers.
Shutting the door to the hospital wing softly, Harry leaned against it with a sigh.
He stood there for a few minutes. Unsure of what to do, where to go.
He felt another tap on his shoulder.
Fleur's heartbroken wail sounded from behind the door, echoed by the sounds of Molly and Ginny sobbing.
He understood now, what the taps meant, and he hung his head, his hair swinging down, blocking his face from view.
Inside the hospital wing, the baby, Teddy Lupin began to cry.
_HPDW_
Bill, was not the only one to die.
Saint Mungo's found it's patients resisting treatments as well. Within months things as mundane as Dragon Pox became a fatal diagnosis.
Magic, was dying.
It started with the medicine, it spread to the artifacts, brooms failing in midair, then it moved to the wands, the spells, all of them, even a simple Lumos spell was taxing to most witches and wizards these days.
Naturally, the ministry, and other magical governments of the world were in a state of complete panic.
Nearly everything shut down, all efforts going towards the Department of Mysteries, and other similar programs and divisions. Trying to discover and put an end to whatever was causing this decline of magic.
Harry, perhaps just as naturally, went into hiding once again.
It was his fault, he knew.
Since the day he had become Death, magic around the world had entered a state of decay, getting weaker day by day.
Whereas he, simply grew stronger and stronger.
The world itself bended to his will now, he had no use for incantations unless he wanted to overflow the spell with power, otherwise, he simply flicked his wand, and whatever he wished was willed into existence.
He had done it, he, who wanted nothing more than to be normal, he, who barely even had wanted to be a wizard at times, had become a god. Immortal, and powerful beyond all imagination.
Tom Riddle must've been rolling in his grave.
Unable to do anything to help the decay of the wizarding world, he sequestered himself off in a cabin in the mountains that he had purchased for a healthy sum of gold. He simply sat back, and watched everything he had grown to love crumble around him.
He had tried, mind you, he had tried so hard. Studying every book he could find, using the stone to bring back any and every witch and wizard with some amount of intelligence into the workings of magic itself.
There was nothing he could do.
Magic was simply being pulled from the world as though by a vacuum.
And that vacuum was himself, with every passing minute his power grew, and magic outside faded further.
He had eventually turned to suicide.
Of course, nothing had worked, not the Avada Kedavra, not Sectumsempra, not Reducto, Not Fiendfyre, not muggle firearms, not even the fabled Sword of Gryffindor, strengthened with basilisk venom, could end his life.
So, he sat, and tried to figure out who he could save.
He speculated, that the possession of the hallows was what gave him such power, as their master. But as Remus had proved a few days after Harry's mastery of the items, you don't need to be the master of the hollows to use them, he had proved this by calling back James and Sirius, his brothers in all but blood, to introduce to his new child.
So, keeping that in mind, Harry had theorized that if he could give two of the three hollows to two people, then perhaps the power of the hallows would allow them to retain their magic.
Unfortunately, he could not give a third person the third hallow, for the moment all three are gone from his possession they return instantly.
Still, he had some semblance of hope, now it was simply left to decide who to use the hallows on.
Wizards and witches, he decided, could live without magic, it would take time to adjust, perhaps years, perhaps decades. But being a muggle was not the end of the world. They would adapt, and they would survive.
The problem, was the magical creatures, those not fully human, those who required magic to live.
The vampires, the werewolves, the centaurs, the goblins, the house elves, the dragons, the veela.
His thoughts had turned to metamorphs, it was highly debated whether or not they were truly human.
Should magic cease to be, would they simply be stuck in one form, a normal human? Or would the lack of magic holding their ever-changing cells and bodies together simply cause them to stop being?
That train of thought had not ended well, and it was decided, the first hollow would be offered to Tonks.
His thoughts immediately turned to Remus. But after a moment of thought he was given pause.
Remus, as almost all werewolves, had been fully human at one point in his life. It was only a magical curse that granted him his lycanthropy. So, should magic vanish, it had chance, as a magical creature, to kill him, but it had just as much chance to simply turn him into a normal man again.
He had withdrawn from his hiding for a moment, to confront the man, and present him with his theory. Remus of course, while not too keen on the prospect of dying, was practically jumping for joy at the thought of being normal again, and declined Harry's offer.
So, Harry had returned to his cabin, and delved deep into thought again.
Eventually, it was decided, that he would offer the second hollow to Fleur.
And so, the day came where he gathered the two women together, and made his offer.
Of course, they had accepted, and in the end the stone had been handed to Fleur, and the cloak was given to Tonks.
He kept the wand, as he had found that normal wands had a tendency to shatter after he would cast a spell, unable to properly channel his now great power.
And so, the three retreated to Harry's cabin, and watched the world crumble around them.
It was, a tragic time, to say the least.
Fleur, in her excitement at the prospect of retaining her magic, had forgotten her family shared the same danger she was in.
Two weeks later, a tear streaked letter arrived from France written in her father's hand.
Her grandmother, mother, and sister, had all died on the same day.
Her grief was great, and the resurrection stone was used almost constantly for the next week. And many tears were shed as she spoke with the shades of her family.
Nine days later, the werewolves died as well.
Not only Remus, no, the Gods were far crueler than even Harry had imagined.
Teddy Lupin had died in his crib.
Fleur used the stone, and allowed the grieving Tonks and Harry to reunite with their loved ones and say goodbye.
And the three of them cried as one.
More time passed, and more creatures died. The goblins, the house elves, the centaurs, the vampires.
They all died, until there was nothing left but wizards, who could barley access their magic, and Harry and his chosen two.
A month passed, and finally, magic died as well.
As the final Lumos spell sputtered out, and wizards were made muggles. The lack of magic in the world, caused something new to be born.
Across the world, dead men and women began to open their eyes, and loose a guttural groan, their minds clouded and dominated by a deep, insatiable hunger.
A hunger for living flesh.
Magic, was not the only thing that would die this day.
(End)
(AN:)
This is just a plot bunny that has been bouncing around my head for a few days, I have finally given some life to it with this post. I may continue it, I am not sure. If enough people want to see more than I more than likely will. If I do decide to continue this story, the setting will move from the HP universe to the TWD universe, as I have essentially ended the HP universe in this chapter.
Anyways, please review, I don't care if you liked it, hated it, or just want to tell me what you had for breakfast this morning, any interaction is appreciated greatly.
This is Onyx-Pendant, signing off.