White-tailed Eagle

by LawrenceSnake

After the war for our existence, the Hunter is remade in pulchritude. She's never found a home to call her own, though she has had many families. And 'one' agenda. Protect the future of sentient-kind, against any threat. But perhaps she longs for peace... at least for a little while. Until something crawls out from the dark to persecute those she loves. To them I say: time to pray.

2. Son of Man, You Cannot Say, or Guess

A/N: So much to enjoy writing, I hope you have equal or greater pleasure reading it!

---

Son of Man, You Cannot Say, or Guess

BY: "How?"

"Excuse me? I can't quite make out what you're saying."

BY: "How did you do this?"

"I explained it before. In this place I'm more powerful than you. In hindsight, I might have been so in any place. It's good to get that finally sorted out between us, don't you think?"

BY: "But I - I was always - "

"I know you were in so many stories – so feared and so well known. Personally, I never thought much of that 'popularity equals power' nonsense. It's never been tested under controlled conditions. I've tried to stay out of the stories, myself. I prefer anonymity, and my own counsel. And in that one story they simply won't forget. At least they never knew my name. Could have been any old witch in the woods. I was always stronger than you thought. Killed a dozen times, but it never took. Even burned to ashes in my own oven, I came back, after a good while. How's that for a frail old biddy, eh? Now you hush and let me finish my knitting. Time to stop struggling and let the deep darkness take you. Your stories are all done, Baba Yaga."

(Frau Totenkinder) {Fables #27 In Like A Lion - Out On The Lamb}

---

The Sol System, GSD 4.6 000 000 017 CXV, Planet Gaia, Local Julian Calendar: Saturday, March 7th, 1964 CE

Only one being knew of the extent that the land encompassing Toirmiscthe Forest harkened on for. A swathe of untamed wilderness of a size that any trapper or opposing naturalist would weep for. A landmass that stretched out into the North Sea but was invisible to the lines of rudimentary cartography and mundane human sight due to the deep saturation of the Power that had led the founders to build their fortress so near the nexus. It contained not only the largest ecosystem of magical creatures in Britain but a vast range of species that had survived in isolation along this few thousand acres of their native isles since the second Ice Age.

Winter was still here, but so was spring and beauty. The crystalline clear waters of the Phendrana river brimmed over the edge of the drop in a smooth, gentle arc, falling in a soughing and frothing cascade among boulders as black as onyx. It broke up on them and vanished in a white foam, from where it spilt into a wide pool that was so transparent that every pebble and every green strand of water-weed swaying in the current, could be seen in the variegated mosaic of the riverbed.

A large dark bull trout attempted to jump the lip of the small waterfall. For a moment it hung in the air, flexing its fins and flicking its tail, before falling heavily into the seething foam.

From out of the pine trees advanced a grizzled old Kodiak bear, who checked for danger as he entered the silver birch clearing leading to the large misting stream.

After a tense few moments, the snuffling mammal cautiously padded through the deep snows to the nearest tree and marked his territory; Spring was fast approaching and with it, his push for greater dominion in both land and progeny. He would kill any cubs he came across, even those he may have fathered... his remarkable nose constantly undulated for threatening scents to his shaggy brown person, even as he made for the overhang to try his luck with the fish.

He sensed nothing.

Not even the bowstring of the one hundred pound torque bow being drawn back just below the ear so that they could taste the salt on the taut sinew and silk woven cord.

When his end came, he was only able to stagger for nearly two metres before keeling over into the crimson soaked slush, the arrow had passed straight through both arteries of his proud thick neck and the beast's primitive mind fuzzed not unpleasantly as his brain was starved of oxygenation; breath coming in panted gasps of mist before he expired with little to no pain, he attempted to stand, convulsed drunkenly and fell, thumping into the drift with finality.

Quick but decidedly not clean, at least not against the pristine whiteness.

The hooded Hunter emerged from her distant hiding place, hooked the set of deflex triple-tipped recurve arms over her back, sunlight glinting off the polished Cyrlic wood and other composite materials such as rune-carved whalebone that betrayed its homemade nature, but it looked far from shoddy work, quite the opposite.

Aran knelt by the cooling kill, then drew a foot of fine oiled steel from her belt, pushing the six hundred pound bulk up further onto its side quite easily. With a swift and practiced movement she slit the belly from sternum to anus, adroitly running the blade around the genitalia, separating the layers of blubber as the skin was peeled back, severing the gullet and pulling the waste entrails out. She also cut open the stomach and gall bladder, searching for the bezoars she'd detected through smell. Though she was immune to their poison-nullifying properties, Witches and Wizards weren't and Horace would appreciate the gesture of free potion ingredients.

She proceeded to efficiently gut, skin, drain and clean the carcass then and there, preferring to get such necessities out of the way than having to dress it back at her own den.

Within thirty seconds she had bundled every useful part of the animal together and slid her Bowie knife back into the horizontal lying Gorog leather sheath at her waist, leaving only a few specks of gore, the poisonous liver and a pile of small and long intestines out for any scavengers. She placed the bundle over her left shoulder and retrieved her multi-barbed arrow from where it had sunk half its shaft into the loam with a twist and a yank. She was not one to believe in anything less than appropriate force for the current threat, the steel tip was a fragmentation head that split into three prongs when entering material; even at two hundred yards and with a half-pull these beauties would impale any fauna no larger than an elk and shred a human target to bits.

Aran soon brought the meat, offal and rolled fur to saddle securely atop her purebred Friesian stallion, Ambrose. He stood twenty seven hands high at the shoulder and she had reared him from a foal with the help of Nicholas Flamel, when she had stayed at his estate in Limousin. The massive charger was aptly named, as good old Nick, sentimental in his old age, had raised the stock with Elixir and it showed in the stud's growth as it would in his longevity; for the strapping lad was already twelve and still getting stronger every day.

She was soon homeward bound to cure the ursine hide and smoke and stew her spoils down to a red iron-rich feast in the larder behind her cottage, for whenever she had guests around, as well as to ensure that her companion was well fed on half a fridge's worth of root vegetables though he of course preferred her to deign him with some Egremont Russets and Ellison's Oranges from her orchards before that as well. The bones she would saw into and grind down to utilise in magic.

The massively built horse nudged her insistently on the shoulder and ear with his sable muzzle, fooling about. Aran, in return, shoved him in play and he pranced around primly until Aran could remove his home-crafted saddle with expert hand-stitching, she needed no bit or reins to guide him.

After grooming Ambrose, the Raging Devil settled down in a plush egg-shell chair for the afternoon, high above in her cabin's warm glass-ceiling sky-loft arboretum. Here she'd planted trees from life-giving worlds encountered on all of her travels and as the woman who had also been known as the Red Death calmly sat back in blissful meditation, breathing hyper-clarifying incense; she watched the Celestial Clock at the cross-beam's centre rotate irregularly, fluctuating through the models of the twenty eight known Galaxies... and she dreamt of those left behind.

Life had become so much... quieter. Aran lived for these moments of tranquility as much as she had lived for war. The moment was all she needed. And one needed the contrast after all, not adherence to a single ideal. Though in some regards, she of course thought her time was always constructive and well spent.

She gardened, collected rare literature, taught numerous lessons at the school as a substitute (along with her own specialties), cataloged magical creatures, built, carved, sculpted, weaved and forged, sought out new tucked away places and magical secrets; even dabbling in certain arts that her own ancestry meant were viable alternatives. Last but not least, she sometimes cooked Michigan Class and Haute cuisine for her friends on the staff.

But that was not to say that peace had made her lose her edge. She had fought for her existence for longer than she had ever reflected in silence during her long life.

Every time it truly bucketed it down. Aran would stand in the glade not too far from home and practice the Art of the World. With switch, chain, sword or whip. She would always stay dry and untouched, deflecting the torrenting raindrops or the swirling snowflakes, even the wind-swept leaves, but her favourite was Spring, when veritable clouds of pollen seeds would wing their way in every direction; and she cut the millimetre wide antigens down into even tinier pieces; such was her dexterity and precision.

For such peace could not last.

---

It was mid April.

And Rubeus Hagrid was at a complete loss.

Someone had done a piss-poor job of concealing these tracks as he studied the dusty path. His magically pure boarhound pup sniffing around the area curiously while he squatted over the faint impressions in the spring afternoon.

Even Fang couldn't pick up the scent, if any was there for the sniffing out...

Slightly frustrated, Hagrid picked up his hefty frame and made back for the castle with the long strides atypical of a half-giant; a shame his route home was over a good seven miles away...

It was just past noon when he reached the Hogwarts grounds and immediately made his way at a more hurried pace to the entrance hall, greeting the students that milled around on lunch-time break as he went.

Within seconds of stomping inside, shutting out the general hubbub that the lower years created while in youthful play; he had found the door he was looking for, even though two days ago, it had been located up on the third floor.

It was a plain, nondescript arched egress, save for its great height, but then, he only outstripped his boss by about four feet. A shred really, compared to everyone else.

Upon the upper oak cross panel was a brass name plate which read: 'S. ARAN - SECURITY'.

"Professor Aran, Professor Aran, it's urgen', Professor!" Hagrid burst in with characteristic force, hollering in his distinctive West Country accent and only having to stoop slightly to avoid braining himself on the lintel such was his hurry to enter the office.

The retired soldier of fortune and extra-galactic adventurer was calmly seated behind her cluttered desk, filling out a status report to the headmaster on the runic wards and corner-stone enchantments. It was more for her benefit than his. Albus trusted her implicitly to protect the students within these hallowed halls; and she'd put aside one of her self-made liquid crystal 56k28k monitors to perfect her calligraphy - she'd come a long way from the rudimentary stick drawings she'd drawn for her fathers, when she'd only been thirty eight months old. Today she wore a woad shawl-necked jersey, coal Levi's and exquisitely patterned tan brogues. The Z suit under-layer was the only element of her armour functioning at the moment and its morphing wear-and-tear immune capabilities were as incredible as always.

"You're out of breath, Rubeus. Take your time," she assured him, not looking up as her wrist looped the Phoenix feather quill deftly across the vellum parchment, the twenty fifth sheet of which was rolled out on a writer's tablet, prior pages stacked immaculately beside.

"I - I need to show you somethin'. You'll know better tha' me wha' to do wit' it when we ge' there. And I wouldna' 'ave interrupted ya if I didn' think it was impor'ant. Someone's messin' with our lures, out above the Eas'ern gullies! They were put back sum time this mornin' bu' I know they were moved in a' mean time!"

Aran halted her progress update abruptly upon hearing the news, putting aside her quill, point floating upside-down. She leant her left arm against the arm rest of her leather high-backed chair in the classical philosopher's pose, thumb and forefinger beneath her jaw and lower lip as she stared up at the gamekeeper.

"The Lethifold Sap ones?"

"... Aye."

Aran lowered the same hand that had mused in contemplation to the mahogany table top and clicked the surface thrice with a single digit; considering for only a moment.

"I'll get my affects."

Aran's shoes would shift from in-door to out-door types seamlessly, getting rid of any accumulated muck before traipsing inside. They were now hardy chocolate and tan Salomon Cosmic 4D 2 GTX Hiking Boots from the not too distant future. Within ten seconds they were out of the door as the bell chimed for the end of the lunch period, bringing the students in from the lawns and benches.

"Professor?" a typically brave, and slightly amorous, Gryffindor upper-class-man, called out. "Are you off to slay dragons with that monster?" he pointed to what was harnessed across her back. And Hagrid adopted a wide-eyed look of surprise as if he'd misconstrued the lad's sentence, scaring him stiff before he saw the beaming grin tugging the bristly mess of bracken that covered the entirety of the friendly half-giant's chin.

"Something like that, Micheal. Run along, children. Bella, you look enchanting today, well don't let me keep you, wouldn't want to be late now," she reminded a few dawdlers affectionately and with a wry smile.

"Yes, Madame Aran!" the third year young lady from Slytherin, who Aran had complimented, peeped out of a mixed house group, in a tremulous, nearly reverent tone of voice. Awed at being addressed by the head of the Arithmancy department, who was a role model to the girls as much as Dumbledore was to the boys.

Hagrid chuckled as they walked back across the lawns for Toirmiscthe's tree-line.

"What?" Aran asked, all teasing.

"The kids adore ya," he said gruffly into his beard, Sam could see him reddening with a mixture of abashment and happiness at the admission.

"No more than they do you, Rubeus," she returned with equal gaiety.

"Not 'zactly the same now, is it? Bu' cheers."

They enjoyed a comfortable silence as they took in the beauty of the grounds on their stroll. Grim business could resume once they were actually there.

"I once though' I'd neva be happy 'ere again," Hagrid whispered suddenly.

Aran looked up at his bushy face from where she reached the lower part of the shoulder socket, nodding silently for him to continue.

"Since that damned fire... and ya helpin' me bury Aragog. He was one of me first real friends ya know..." Samus did, this was just the first time he was relating this story while sober. "But I was wrong, things... 'ave never really been better, have they? The forest is free of the more unsavoury elemen's. Gytrashes, Nandi bears, Dumbledore's much happier only bein' headmaster, more time for all of us too."

The Hunter nodded at his proclamations, although she would never feel guilt for suffocating that - creature and its mate in their lair with woodsmoke and napalming their egg clutch into burning jelly. She had seen first-hand what their kind could do in the Congo and other corners of darkest Africa, how they could devour entire villages in their glut for Human blood and flesh. As soon as she'd arrived back from her journeys and heard about the colony from Ogg, who had finally retired a year ago, the old instincts had just awoken. And she'd had to act.

"... It's a new day. House unity and, wha' do the ICW call it? International – Magical – Cooperation, tha's it. Is at an all time high, none of tha' Pure Blood Supremacy nonsense. Thanks ta those there curriculum changes you headed. How many classes 'ave ya restructured now?"

"Three. Astronomy, Mundane Studies and History. Though I get oversight on new developments in Potions, Runes and Arithmancy as you well know. Albus and I worked hard for those policy transitions. Minister Leech was a fantastic help, of course. Even despite the noble families trying to oust him from office every other month, or worse."

"Wha's wrong with those people? I mean, it's tha 20th Century fa' Pete's sake!"

"They're no different from the Mundanes, Rubeus. Race... culture... blood, heritage. Many believe diversity to be a weakness. We both know that that same unique variety is what makes us strong. Oh, of course they'll claim such dogma is merely for the instance of preserving tradition, or some such nonsense. They don't even have the most basic grasp of genetics to back them up. And their discrimination deeply sickens me."

"Same here. Magic finds its way through tha family lines, Squibs or no. Mug - sorry, Mundanes or no. Why can't everyone just treat others how they'd like to be treated?"

"Because, sadly, then nothing would ever be got underway or accomplished after the fact."

---

It was near three o' clock in the afternoon when the duo returned to Hagrid's spot of interest.

"Fang! No! Bad dog! Stop that!" Hagrid urged as the pup clamped his jaws onto the hem of Aran's ornate long coat and began whipping his head from side to side while pulling insistently in a one-sided tug of war, his little paws dug into the ground for traction.

Samus just found it a lark. Though eventually she allowed the bolt of cloth to turn intangible and Fang rolled end over end as he lost his grip on the misted material and tumbled down the hill with a yelp, before bounding up again and running circles around the Hunter, dropping into the 'let's play' stance that all canines still used as throwbacks to their wolfish ancestry.

"He'll calm in time, Rubeus. Don't worry yourself about it. Now, let's see what we have here..."

Aran leisurely slung the combat strap of her scoped Weatherby Mark V rifle, off her broad shoulder and laid it across her knees as she lowered herself at the knees, balanced on the balls of her feet to inspect what she knew at first glance to be a botched path-finding coverup.

She scraped up some of the fine dirt and sniffed it cautiously, recoiling from the rank redolence; faint as it was. But nothing was hidden from her nose.

"Well done, Rubeus. You were right." The Ancient Defender hopped up, resting the maple stock whorl in her right crook as she did so.

"Wha' kind are they?"

"Caingorm Kobolds," Aran announced, "Riddle's people tried to eliminate the scent of their passage with glamours, I'd say they have a leashed pair, bull males, both fifteen footers at least. They've brought them far from their caves."

"I knew sum one was foolin' with us..." Hagrid growled, morose.

"Maybe... with all the trouble of transporting them, they must have a viable plan to get past the Castle's Wards, but how...?"

"Tha's impossible, why, you and Professor Dumbledore 'ave made sure a tha'!"

"Perhaps. But that blazing fanatic has a plan for what I denied him eight years ago... I should have left him to scream in the furthest recesses of my mind. Before sending him into a neutron star."

"He didna' have enough Human left in 'im to die regardless o' what you could 'ave done to him."

"Oh, I have my ways, Rubeus. He is a pitiful sort of evil, so much power with so limited a direction. What a failing. He could almost be a tragic figure, but not a sympathetic one."

"... People are beginnin' to disappear, Professor. On tha continent as well as 'ere on the mainland. Do ya think - ?"

"My responsibility is to the school, Hagrid. And the students within. Those times are over."

Hagrid remained silent.

Aran heard it then, they were being watched from a distance. She touched her temple to indicate to her companion that they were under surveillance and slowly removed several brass cased high velocity bullets from her bandoleer as long as her middle finger. The Mark V was chambered for the .30-378 magnum. Old Roy W himself had gifted her a case of the publicly disallowed military cartridges along with one of the first working prototypes of the blue steeled bolt-action centerfire back in 59', when she'd saved his life with a shooting iron of much lesser quality.

She breeched the rifle, inserted the maximum four rounds one after the other and closed the turn-bolt home with a satisfying metallic click.

"Over there," she said without moving her lips, eyes gesturing to her left.

Hagrid cocked his repeater crossbow carefully as he made to look at the tracks again while casually surveying the glen at the same time.

"I think I see 'im."

The Hunter laughed inwardly at their arrogance as she brought the rifle up, scanning the distant glade. The iron cast mount, based on the anachronistic schematics of a German-made Kahles K 6-24x56 Illum AMR scope, was in actuality a custom-made Foe Glass, with Chozo ground kaleidoscopic lenses, Aran could already see further when sharp-shooting than what any mechanics could reasonably enhance, but this allowed her to look past, and even pierce, protective enchantments, carvings that had a similar effect were engraved into every bullet primer case and rim nose tip that she possessed along with the interior cross-section steel parts of the gun itself; so it could not be transfigured into an overly large courgette or ripped from her hands at a whim.

A disillusionment charm would never work against Aran from close quarters and it didn't save the Death Eater from a distance of four hundred and fifty three metres. For he was too busy sneering at the head of security's Muggle weapon through his mask's own telescopic eye slits to recognise the threat it posed.

Birds took flight from the nearby field as the shot echoed out over the hills.

---

"Did you really have to take his life, Samus?" Professor Dumbledore wondered agitatedly, as he paced in front of his desk.

Aran felt for him truly, Albus was simply not a man who could burden the responsibility of extinguishing another creature's soul. But Aran did not believe in its immortality, or the immorality of such an act. Especially when those concerned threatened her charges with their presence - she would restrain from killing them all out in the countryside... but if they dared step into her halls, there would be a reckoning the likes of which they had never dared to dream.

"Yes," she answered frankly.

"Why?"

"To give them a message of my own. They've put a lot of work into making sure we didn't notice their presence until now, Albus. They'll assault us within a week, probably on the night we are plied to with a false message to draw one or both of us away from this stronghold."

"You are absolutely certain of this, my old friend?"

"I trust my instincts. Riddle wants blood, he'll get it. But not from anyone belonging in these walls."

Dumbledore stopped wearing a hole in the floor and stopped to peer intensely at Aran and Hagrid, hands tucked into his aquamarine and silver sleeves.

"But... this is good..." he mused to himself. "Tom will reveal our own weaknesses..."

"Exactly, and we will be able to patch them up in retaliation."

"Tom must have another agenda..."

"He did the first time, this stands to be no different."

"Are there precautions you can take? To taking them in alive?"

"Riddle is insane, not dead. He won't be stupid enough to send people against me that could relay information back to us under pressure. More likely they'll be catatonically Imperiused vagabonds scraped up from Knockturn and given a crash course in the Dark Arts. Their aim will be to kill or kidnap teachers and students, sow terror, gain unwilling sacrifices for his rituals, but that will only be the immediately apparent objective. We will keep track of them all. And not one will live to threaten us again."

"Samus..."

"This is the job, Albus. You may not like it, but this is the job. I have to do this my way."

"... And I am going to let you, but please, Samus. Think of the children."

"I do."

---

That very night, Aran was entertaining herself with a light patrol of the corridors, though thanks to one of the many 'Slug Club' parties that Horace threw occurring this very night. The Hunter had been escorting students back to their houses well after the all-inclusive curfew that Aran not only demanded, but actively enforced except for special occasions like Yule Balls and other treats for the students.

"Good evening, Professor," a Hufflepuff prefect entreated as her work came to a close.

"Morning would be more fitting, Mr. Diggory."

Amos smiled winningly at the school huntswoman and gentlemanly asked if he could accompany her back to her apartments as thanks for ensuring the other members of Slughorn's little soirees returned to their houses. After hours it was usually their duty, but Aran was being extra vigilant and had decided to allow the upper years their bit of extra fun while she stretched her legs after hours and hours of paperwork.

"That is very gallant of you, Mr. Diggory. It would be my pleasure, and it is a good time too, I wouldn't wish to make any of the other ladies vying for your company jealous..."

The handsome young man was sputtering something incomprehensible as he offered her his arm and Aran accepted it as they strolled down only two quiet halls and around a corner together, before Aran's office reappeared for her on a landing leading out to the spiral staircase.

"Don't think I'll be letting you run off to the kitchens alone now. I have to check on the perimeter."

"From within your office, Ma'am?"

"Yes, yes, it won't take but a flick of an Etecoon's antennae."

Amos opened his mouth to say something but snapped his jaw shut a second later, thinking better of it.

The door swung open easily at Aran's presence and she immediately brought up the large golden-chrome holo-state image of the castle, grounds, and about fifty kilometres in every direction that rested on her war table. Such auto-updating cartography had taken her years to program. She was still working on a way to transfer the real time schematics to her omni tool whenever she wished. Without her suit's incredible hardware and no materials to spare for creating the tools necessary to build such a complex piece of machinery; Aran had to rely on magical Arithmancy configurations, Rune info-grams and her body's own incredible electrical capacity to power up the adaptive maps. While her visor could display the same schematics, only her office's main terminal could track whoever was within the walls, disguised or no.

While Aran busied herself in checking the blind spots where she hadn't placed cameras, Amos gazed around at the bizzare gubbins and interesting paraphernalia around her office.

There was a large painting of a jungle with alien geometries, a Muggle rifle hanging from a coat stand where the famous Witching Cloak hung also. A massive cabinet that took up one of the many walls, a rack of medieval weapons took up another, stacked with several blades including a Scottish claymore that resembled the Wallace Sword.

Tapestries and artifacts galore stood out all around.

But the Pièce de résistance was the huge Tome that was given pride of place on an ornate reading stand. It was bound with a curious pale brown leather that Diggory did not recognise, and he had been allowed a supervised visit into the Restricted Section. If he didn't know better, he would have to say it looked suspiciously like human skin... and the spine decorated in shrunken bones. A strange multifaceted Rune was carved into the marking sheaf's stone clasp.

"Where did you find this, Professor?"

"The book?" she inquired without even glancing back. "Years ago. I had some rather interesting encounters in Angkor Thom and it found its way into my hands."

"Where?"

"Cambodia."

"Ah..."

"Hmph!" Aran laughed at his knowing reply, but decided to spare Amos further embarrassment by inquiring what continent that country was located in.

"Don't touch it though, but that goes without saying. I've had to be very careful at extracting its hidden Magicks. Its invocations are remarkably similar to the Chi spells used by ancient Taoists. Except it's much less... forgiving if the practitioner makes a mistake. It costs more than joint pain and your muscles and nerves rebelling. There are much higher costs. To the body. To the soul."

"How do you know if you haven't suffered any effects?"

"It had other users throughout history. They weren't quite as lucky."

Amos gulped as he looked once more at the foreboding grimoire. It was then he noticed the complicated astrolabe contraptions monitoring it, not to mention the voices he could just discern, whispers at the edge of hearing... and beyond.

He stepped towards it.

"Nothing out of the ordinary," the huntswoman announced, breaking into his dark thoughts. Aran turned back to Amos with a smile that quickly faded as the youth trembled; his gaze still fixed on the Tome. It was calling...

"Amos!" Aran snapped.

The Hufflepuff prefect seemed to jump nearly a foot in the air, looking at her wildly.

"... You need a stiff drink," she all but ordered. "That thing's harmonics are truly off the scale, and even with all my precautions... and Horace just plies you with thimbles of cherry liqueur at those underplayed ceilidhs, doesn't he?"

"Professor - I - this is a school!"

"Don't get ahead of yourself, Mr. Diggory. You'll get a nip of something in a hot drink not the whole damn bottle. I won't take no for an answer."

Amos tried to comport himself and regain his bearing, it helped that Aran was using her Psionics to block the Tome's mental suggestions from further influencing the boy. It was reaching out to others. That was new, that was interesting...

"Then by all means, Professor Aran. Let us retire to the kitchens."

---

"Good late morning to you, Mistress!" the head House Elf, Rufiopy, chirped happily up at Aran. He and four others were working the graveyard shift.

The Hunter couldn't help but be amused at the sight. Every other female teacher or faculty member was addressed as 'madam', 'miss' or 'missus'. While the students were 'young miss' or 'young master'. She was the only one to be singled out as the Elves' 'Mistress' while Albus got the grand title of 'Master'. Every other male adult had to contend with a simple 'sir'. It tickled her pink to imagine that the slightly less diminutive cousins of Brownies saw her and Dumbledore as the power couple that ran in the school. And even though they weren't married, they all but did!

"And to you. A bottle of the 1847 Satureja and bitter Orange, please. And a Butterbeer for the boy, but hold the extra sugar."

"Right away, Mistress!"

"Wait a tick! We never have Butterbeer, Professor!" the fifth year protested, surprise evident.

"Correction. You poor sods don't. We responsible adults have our own still hidden away here though. Away from you young rascals!"

"Outrageous!" Amos mock-huffed.

The two of them, teacher and student, sat across from one another at one of the many smaller counters while Rufiopy levitated a tray over with their drinks.

"Thank you," Aran acknowledged the middle-aged Elf kindly as he set the beverages down with the utmost care.

"It is my pleasure, Mistress Aran." He did a small hop-skip and a dance as he walked back to supervise the mopping up; after bowing low to the undisputed protector of the castle of course.

Aran uncorked the Elven distilled gin and added one dash to Diggory's Butterbeer, before downing a measured sip from the bottle herself. Amos took a gulp of his frothy glass tankard and relished the extra warmth to the cockles of his heart, along with the unusual aftertaste.

"I shouldn't have let you in there with me," she said after a moment of silence. "I apologise, Diggory."

"There's no need, Professor. I'm sure whatever enchantments you had raised would have stopped me from doing anything foolish."

"Ah, well that's the problem, isn't it? One flaw with any protective wards, no matter how small, among a veritable super complex of woven spells can be exploited. Every permutation has to be considered. Every outlandish discrepancy from within as well as from without. If the - intelligence residing in the Tome had compelled you to open it, my wards wouldn't have triggered. Thankfully, the monitors I have set up will record those signatures it transmitted and within a few hours I can draw up a counter-measure to inscribe into the relays."

Amos warmed his hands on his beer-stein. "Professor Thornberry has us simply decoding incantations, and that's hard enough. Do the applications for Arithmancy and Runes really stretch so far?"

"More than you can possibly imagine. It's a hybrid programming language. There have been many terrible accidents throughout the ages among dabblers who didn't conduct their experiments with the utmost diligence. I'll have it moved to a separate chamber in my quarters."

"... How many of those kinds of artifacts did you discover before you started at Hogwarts?"

"Oh, all kinds of odds and ends. There are dark places in the world, where few to none dare tread, ancient nexuses of power, of knowledge..."

"I think I prefer my Care of Magical Creatures to trekking across the world, there's enough variety here to keep anyone busy!"

"True, exploring is not for everybody, but sometimes – "

Aran stopped abruptly, perking up. Alert.

"Professor? What is it?"

"Shh," the Hunter held up one finger to silence him. She turned to face the exit portrait and scrutinised it. After three seconds she spoke in a tone that brooked no argument. "Whatever you do, don't leave this room. The Elves will protect you."

"But I'm a prefe – "

She gave him a glacial look.

"I'll guard the kitchens, then."

Aran rolled her eyes inwardly at the erroneous self qualification and quickly exited through the portrait hole of a bowel of fruit, while Diggory was drawn to one of the small windows that was situated along the sinks. It was beginning to rain... not just rain, but pour it down in sheeting buckets, a vast white mist headed across the lake in a foreboding fog-head front. Then lightning struck.

There was a blast of intense cobalt light and a whoosh of wind as a portkey deposited a man in full Death Eater regalia right behind the boy. His ugly mouth-grated silver mask and Celtic Rune adorned all-black battle robes marking him as one of the Dark Lord's Chosen, willingly or otherwise.

The reflected flash off the brass cook pots and the unmistakeable sound caused Amos to spin around. But even as the Knight of Walpurgis raised his wand to stun the teen, his arm was roughly pinioned from behind, forcing the wand tip away and his throat constricted with his assailant's left. Aran had returned in less than the blink of an eye.

"You picked the wrong school, bud!" she snarled in his ear, even as her iron fingers crunched the delicate cartilage in his throat to rubbery pieces, preventing him from performing an incantation.

But the conditioning Voldemort had imbued his agents with made them far from average Witches and Wizards. The gurgling man shadow-shifted, trying to buck Aran off as they collided around the room, his wand blasting out different coloured jets of light every half second, sending Amos and the House Elves for cover as utensils, food-stuffs and their two drinks were propelled across the room to smash against a wall, explode into splinters of ceramic and metal or went up in flames.

Samus cursed at being made a fool of by a near-helpless foe and promptly broke his wrist in mid-flight, causing him to drop his wand, this also ended the unique form of combat Apparition, they both scrambled up but Aran made it before he was onto his second foot. She kicked out his knee, clasped his chin and the base of his skull from the front in both her mighty hands and turned his head nearly clean upside down; letting him fall to splash into a puddle of spilled milk that had been upturned in the struggle, it quickly veined pink.

"Oh my god! You killed him!" Amos gasped at the brutality.

"And what do you think would have happened to you if he'd managed to take you to him?"

Diggory immediately looked contrite, but understandably nauseous.

---

A/N: Despair. Soundtrack choice: C21 FX - Blood Red Roses – Christopher P. Bragg

---

She flipped the Death Eater over with a flick of her foot and he arced back to his feet on invisible strings and burst at the seams.

His guts, skeleton, flesh and skin split like a gourd, filling the kitchens with the rank acrid smell of fecal matter, which quickly faded as everything with the slightest capacity for condensation frosted over from an intense and unnatural cold and the torches were extinguished to dull red coals in their bracket braziers. The Elves could do nothing but flee into their little tunnel dwellings in the face of such malignant black sorcery.

The retired bounty hunter was too enthralled by the sheer demented genius of the modified bone-thief Curse to take action, before the tall, shadow cloaked, grey rotting monster pulled itself free from its human glove puppet in a cascade of crimson. Its terrible inhaling breath filled the massive room with its menace, seeming to make it contract and shrink around the pair. Diggory was screaming blue murder as he took cover behind the counter, his tears turning to icicles that caused his cheeks to remain stretched and distorted in his crying gasps; incapable of closing his mouth even if he wanted to.

A blurred blow took the catatonic Aran across the face, laying her philtrum and nares open and knocking her flying into a bar stool that tumbled over with a crash. Then it was upon her, the sheer feeling of helplessness overwhelming her spirit as she desperately tried to restrain its thrashing, black scabby leprous hands.

Her mental defences were a tatters, and through the rushing of water as it felt when you desperately tried to reach the surface before your lungs burst; Samus Aran relived nothing but the worst memories of the entirety of her long life.

Mother's face, among the mashed heads of many disappeared between the dragon's jaws, eye popping free from her socket. An explosion lit the horizon, her father's ashes fell to stick on her blood bathed skull. Her body was melting under a spectrum beam of death, poison and parasites tried to carve her up from the inside out.

Its long, filthy clawed nails pushed in close, raking four deep furrows across her other cheek, eye-socket and brow as it closed its hand slowly but surely, the wounds bubbled with dark magic.

Another mentor died for her, friends were tortured or turned, she was trapped for mere hours in that lab, that place, dissected, impaled, flayed, breaking free in an orgy of death and despair, killing indiscriminately such was her fury. Those rare moments of hopelessness were all she had left now.

The thing forced her back against and over the counter with hideous strength. A nightmare chill sapping all the warmth from her marrow as it bore its weight, both physical and intangible down on her. For all the world looking as if it was about to take her as its own.

"They brought me there. Tortured me. Tore up my mind. I have to get away! I'm running! I can run faster than anyone... running in a dream. But my legs are lead and my ankles are putty. Something's behind me. Moving with me! A half life. A crippled life. An unending life. – It's on my heels. If I slow down it will get me! I'll suffocate in it – in its darkness! And I won't be able to scream, or yell, or fight it off... because it will be inside of me!"

It was an indestructible non-being. An amortal afreet from the blackest hell, as ancient and cruel as the Djinns that ruled the Old World.

"It's in my blood and it wants to get out! Crawling under my skin... it's grabbing at me. Snatching at my veins like ropes – tendons like wires, fingers pulling back through my ribs, sloughing off my bones, when they're not cracking or bending back. I'm sinking to the endless abyss. Pitching waves running into the night, it's in my lungs, the liquid, slowing me down. I can't get away!"

The particular fell breed that was spitting and gnashing at Aran's gritted mouth with its own sucker, needle-filled maw, while she pushed back against its flailing skeletal hands was known as a Vordak. Its fell power distorted existence around the centre of her being, drawing her warmth, her existence and trying to unravel her immortal soul to lap up into its fiendish cavity.

"FREE! FREE! FREE! Nothing can hold me! I'm running like a truck, a barreling truck, right uphill. But the load is full. And that thing is breathing down my neck. It's gaining while I'm losing ground! But I must run! RUN FOREVER! FIGHT FOREVER! NEVER GIVE IN! Out of the pitch black it comes for me... the alien. The animal. The reason I live. It's everywhere. It's everything. Don't give up. Can't go on – knees giving in – gristle shot. Don't give up! Every second is blood and fire. Bones heavy. DENSE LIKE LEAD. SHOT. THROUGH. LIKE. STEEL. IN – THE – HEART – CAVING IN! DON'T GIVE UP! CAVING IN... UNDER THE WEIGHT... THE WEIGHT OF..."

"THE DRAGON."

Vordaks. A powerful Covern entity of several Assyrian Dementors, this was not one of the puny weakling wraiths that hailed from the icy wastes of Greenland - those that the Dark Lord Ekrizdis had roped and begat as easily as a herd of wild horses and which were only ever a true threat to Wizards or Mundanes alike in great hordes. No, unlike the 'tamed' Azkaban guards, who were stoic enough to only enjoy consuming excess happiness for prolonged periods of time, Vordaks only had one goal in their fevered excuses for sentient minds; the consumption of souls for the master who had summoned them.

It was a demon.

But Samus was the Devil.

---

A/N: Resurgence. Soundtrack choice: With Every Passing Day – Jason Creer

---

"No. NO! He never overcame me! Mother fell before me! Phaaze went to oblivion around me! The Ing didn't stop me! The X didn't stop me! THE REAPERS DIDN'T STOP ME! I. AM. ZAH-MUS. WARRIOR! PROTECTOR! THIS ONE INCUBUS WILL NOT STAND BEFORE ME AND LIVE! KILL IT, GIRL!"

She was the only Lord of the Earth that was worthy of worship and this hell-spawn had royally pissed her off.

The hoarfrost began to evaporate in wisps of steam, the torches were reignited, her wounds purged the filth, creased in on themselves and sealed shut without a mark to betray their previous existence.

Aran was screaming through her rows of clenched teeth as the Vordak's arms and eyeless head were shoved inexorably away, clarity re-coalescing, existence itself stopped twisting and deforming...

Then the talons came out.

Two sets of four, twelve inch hooked raptor blades of golden hued dull Denzium steel alloy burst from her omni tool's invisible housings. The immaculately honed knives could cut through Wurtzite Boron Nitride polycrystalline super-abrasive structures like a regular diamond saw would vaporize anything else in its path. The rare alloy was also anathema to wraiths as much as iron was to the fey folk.

The Greater Dementor howled in abject horror as its meal was cut off, but Aran's rumbling growl tore over the ungodly sounds as she bodily cast it away with every iota of her renewed strength, slamming the near-immortal up against a nearby fridge.

Her unceasing bellow of victory drowned out the Vordak's hellish death screams as she plunged her eight dagger-tipped fists through its chest. They were face to face as she squeezed off the movement in its arms by flexing her metacarpals inward, she absorbed its hate and disdain for all life, reflected it, channeled it back into its ghastly mockery of a humanoid's features as it gnashed and sobbed in the realisation that it was caught in the grip of something more terrible than itself; before ripping them free.

Aran's deafening cry ended as abruptly as it began, the Vordak lignified in milliseconds and collapsed into a pile of crumbling ash, leaving a blight against the red clay Pugin tiles. The Hunter was inhaling and exhaling heavily but in even spaces, spittle hung from a corner of her mouth and her eyes were slightly crazed with battle lust.

She turned mechanically on the spot to see a still weeping Amos peeking over the table top, knuckles white as they gripped the edge.

"You all right?" she murmured, voice hoarse.

His quivering head jerked in an approximation of a yes.

"Stay here. There's more of them... Rufiopy!" she called and the Elf materialised in a wisp of smoke. "Shrink him down and keep him in your chambers. Give him something for shock. This is far from over."

Aran grabbed the portkey talisman from the Death Eater's remains and phased through several metres of brick, entering the long darkened corridor that led round to the Hufflepuff common room.

Four more Death Eaters, their lit wand tips raised, had their backs to her.

Her Shard Visor activated and the world became a vision of fractures and shatter-points, the disposable Knights all contained a Vordak within their shifting stained-glass windows, streaks of oily shadow besmirching the warm and cold frosted panes.

The two at the front had passed around the corner. The other two waited behind as a rearguard. She walked up behind the first, popped her right hand's blades and stabbed him through the base of the skull while yanking his forehead back with her left.

Even with the added precaution of telekinetic auditory filters blocking the excess noise, the erratic shift of light on the wall from his sputtering Lumos spell dying caused his companion to turn. Aran slipped the knives into his vitals as she walked passed and didn't stop even as he fell.

While she had left Diggory the first time, she had scouted out the opposition as fast as she'd been able without revealing herself to them. There were at least two dozen Imperiused Wizards mocked up as Death Eaters, four of them corralling two Mountain Trolls between them. Aran bemoaned the fact that she hadn't thought to commit to mandatory deep scans. Her edge needed honing.

She'd also activated the silent alarm in her office, to rouse her friends and colleagues from their beds as well as lock-down the student dormitories with additional enchantments. But then she remembered the true power of the Imperius Curse, how it could endow as well as control. If Tom was half as smart as he liked to think... they could enter the children's rooms.

That was not going to happen.

Aran checked the corner and reached out with her perceptions, marking every intruder she could detect, even those under disillusionment spells. Why hadn't her warning charms activated? Helga's barrel hidden entrance had been opened and the two Death Eaters were exiting the door, one carried an unconscious little girl, clad only in her nightie, bridal style. Aran saw red. But unlike before, it was a measured, refined veil of red.

Those bewitched by the Unforgivable Curse of Control could not feel pain when under its heady influence. They could not even be scared out of their wits, precluding the use of psychological warfare and scare tactics. But they could be startled and they held or lacked as much initiative as dependent upon the creativity of the caster.

Considering his power, it was amazing they actually paused for an instance in surprise and shock as Aran charged down the hallway, claws extended, pumping at her sides like the pistons of a locomotive, voice rising to an incredible base of roaring objection.

The one to her left dropped the prepubescent as if she were a sack of flour, fumbling for his tool and weapon in one. Aran vociferated louder than ever as she closed.

The other pointed his wand at her rocketing form and shrieked: "Crucio!" the power behind the Curse caused a flash of red sparks to flash from its tip as the invisible force rocketed outwards.

It struck Aran in the right shoulder.

She didn't lose her stride.

The next moment, his arm and wand were flying away in pieces, in a shower of blood and sparks, quickly followed by his severed head departing from his body in four perfectly bisected chunks.

"Avada - " the other half managed, before Aran cleaved his skull in half with her newly transitioned left vambrace, mask and cranium smacking into the walls in opposite directions, along with a massive dollop of the red stuff splattering the high arches, with accompanying brain matter.

The Hunter stood triumphant once more above the rapidly leaking bodies of her foes, they bled smokey grey shadow as well as maroon ichors... a lingering jolt of foreign pain in her transverse humeral surprised her, it seemed she was not as immune to magic as she liked to think... resistant, yes, but total immunity...? She would certainly not stand in the path of the dreaded Killing Curse to find out the extent of her upper limits.

Still, it hadn't impeded her. She gently scooped the first year up in her arms before the growing pools reached her curly brown hair and carried the poor darling to her office and laid her on a conjured divan. Aran also pocketed the Tome within one of the many hidden voluminous undetectable extension charmed pockets of her magnificent Witching Cloak, shucked the intricately embroidered jade and olive great coat on and then threw her hidden armoury open with a wave of her hand.

Firearms stretched from floor to ceiling, both past and present models and those that would be unfamiliar to any other gun collector that lived.

She quickly equipped herself with two sidearms, one she clipped into a horizontal magnetic strip sheath on the small of the back and the other in a bottomless ankle holster under her jean cuff. Then she selected her main weapon, something that could fell a Ukrainian Ironbelly with the proper application of violence and slipped that into the weightless unhindered confines of her robe as well; before sealing her command centre behind her and vanishing the entrance.

Three Death Eaters were marching down the third floor's Charms corridor when the Hunter materialised behind them courtesy of the Come and Go Room. She detached and hurled two of her Denzium blades into the backs of their heads and choked the third to death telekinetically.

After stealth-killing her way through another half dozen, she quickly reached the rendevouz point next to the statue of the hump-backed crone. Aran had long since sealed the secret passage to Hogsmeade hidden there but it would not take long for the other members of staff to join her...

"Who goes there?" a stern female voice issued from the clock-tower passage.

"It's me, Minerva," the hybrid answered. Then, realising she'd need more than that. "They're not yet gone. But we're still free," she called out to her old friend and colleague and after half a heart-beat's pause; she emerged.

The now thirty year old Minnie McGonagall looked as old as the Hunter and just as combat ready, her black hair was askew from her sleeping braid and she was wearing a tartan dressing gown over her night dress and Argyle slippers but her eyes were abright and she seemed to have been in an altercation, blood running from a gash in her arm.

"I hope you drew first blood, my little one?"

"Yes, three of them are incapacitated upstairs but I was slow... I see you have not been idle either," she gestured at Aran's bloodied weapons.

"Mister Diggory and Miss Sutler are safe. The students are all being guarded?" Aran asked, sheathing them before healing Minerva's wound in a second by placing her own hand over it.

"Thank you, Sam. We repelled them from Ravenclaw and Gryffindor Tower and have patched up the Hufflepuff Den. But none of them have gone near the Slytherin's Dungeon."

"Curious... it is fortunate you have aimed to stop them and not to dispatch. I have marked those of which can be killed without triggering the release of a Vordak. It should show up for you as well."

Minerva paled. "He would dare? To bring such creatures into the – you fought one?!"

"I vanquished one. And exorcised others."

The Scotswoman had to visibly collect herself. "Well... Albus is down in the catacombs with Pomona, Derk, Poppy, Filius and Évariste; they took some of the children and drew him into battle there."

"Sweet Mary..."

"Indeed. There must be at least fifty of them all together! But with you up here... tonight might be ours after all."

"Tonight will not be our end, Minerva. But it will be theirs."

---

A/N: Aran dusts off her oldest skills. Soundtrack choice: Broken Dreams – Shaman's Harvest.

---

The pair stopped by the balcony overlooking the study areas before the spiral staircase.

"I count ten," Aran whispered.

"How shall we take them?"

"You tie up the two which are possessed, I'll take care of the others."

"Are you sure?"

"Without nary a doubt."

Aran leapt over the railing and performed a death from above stomp to the nearest clavicle. This flowed into a Wushu jumping spiral kick which snapped the neck of another.

By then, the Death Eaters were returning fire, most of it bright green. Samus rolled into cover behind a lectern while three were incapacitated by their waist-coats suddenly Transfiguring into strait-jackets and tangling up two others.

The Hunter drew her modified all-steel Belgian M1878 Nagant revolver from behind her back, used her omni tool's nano foundry to mold one of her sets of spines into seven Denzium .45 gas seal bullets, she loaded it in a trance, closed the loading gate and jumped sideways through the air, firing bolts of lightning from her right hand and pulling the trigger with her left.

One went down with his mask melting through his face, the next with a 11.5mm round hitting him in the eye, the last one's heart was stopped by the white indigo-edged projectile when it struck him in the chest and subsequently set his companions on fire.

It wasn't fair or honourable as Aran cocked and gunned another down by shooting him in the top of the cranium as he doubled over and pulled the second Knight into the path of a hurtling Killing Curse, before dealing with the last by blasting all four claws into his chest and throat then pulling them back into place with a micro-thought.

The gun had used her own pestle and mortar ground smokeless Cordite powder, this coupled with its unique operation caused every shot to emit the echoing sound of a pound of slate striking on slate after being dropped from a hundred feet into a deep canyon, rather than the Hollywood blasting roar everyone usually expected before they'd ever seen or heard a real gun fired in person.

McGonagall descended to behold the carnage.

"Heavens... what did we do?"

"What was necessary."

Aran and McGonagall reached the lower landing of the main staircase, but not before Minerva used an expert steps to slide Transfiguration spell to send four more Imperiused shock troops slipping off the swiveling staircase to their doom a half dozen floors below, as Aran had summoned their wands away.

"Who goes there?! Professors? Oh, thank goodness!"

Their Head Boy, Ravenclaw's star pupil Bartemius Crouch, was leading several awakened students of all ages, judging by the degree they were sweating and panting, they had been chased half-way across the castle.

"They're behind us!"

"We have this, Barty."

"I can help you!"

"Help them," Aran commanded.

The Hunter heard McGonagall telling the band of students to barricade themselves in the kitchens as she walked past and let her gun settle into her right hand as she deployed the three-spined vambrace on her left with a beautiful 'SNIKT'.

Seven Death Eaters rushed around the corner.

"Morning!" Aran greeted brightly. Then she raised her pistol and blew the nearest one's lungs clean out of his chest. Followed by a 'T' cross-section special typical of paramilitary forces veterans.

The noise was enough to make the pupils who hadn't yet fled do so.

"Back to back!" the Hunter ordered.

McGonagall was a redoubtable ally, fending off those who were slick enough to shadow shift away from Aran and attack the brunette instead. She used whips of fire, shifting stone and jets of water and gusts of compressed air against their Dark Curses; felling three.

Aran was slightly more pedestrian.

She ripped one's leg right out of his buttocks by stomping on his foot while flip kicking him with her free foot and revolving back in the same motion; a physical impossibility for anyone that wasn't Chozo. Another she killed by scooping his leg out with a backhand sweep fist then hammer striking him with the same hand so hard in the pelvis as his groin soared up to meet her that she split his spine. She made sure the next was truly dead by doing what anyone should do to a mad dog savaging you, it reminded her somewhat of snapping a wishbone after Thanksgiving.

Number three had his entire body pulled free from his third vertebrae, number four was put down with a knife hand spearing him through his heart and out of his back. The last two, and any still living, were shot twice in the head where they lay after Minerva had stunned them.

"Samus!" McGonagall admonished in outrage. "They were our prisoners!"

"And now they are not, Minerva. They were blank slates, minds wiped and reprogrammed by Riddle to kidnap children under our care for use in perverse occult rituals and to murder us in our sleep at the first opportunity open to them. We will not show leniency to such a tactic. So do not mistake caution for cruelty. We must stamp them out wherever we find them; to dissuade the enemy otherwise."

"I don't approve of your methods."

"Your approval is not requisite. I am in charge of the protection of this school."

"And a fine job you're doing at the moment, what with the enemy within our walls!" the Scotswoman fired back. Aran wouldn't lower herself to dignify that rejoinder with an equally biting and unassailable rebuke, turning away to deal with the next wave.

Her brutal efficiency undiminished, Aran rushed her next victim, spear pitched him onto his back with a ram to his breastbone, straddling him. The blow left him clutching his cracked sternum while Aran exposed the hollow of his throat by leaning his head back forcibly and snapped her fist thrice into the soft flesh and major artery, pulping it underneath the force of her attack.

Two more were killed with biotic vectors and a siphon reave. The last present, she seized by the front of his robes and his hair through his hood and rammed the side of his skull into a pillar several times until the stone gave way and she was left with a sticky chalk mess and a crumpled mask.

Then twenty confronted them.

"Where do they keep coming from?!" Minerva cried.

"From all the seedy streets of all the cities in all the world. The disenfranchised! The impoverished!" Aran yelled back as they took cover.

They peppered her column with all manner of Dark Hexes. But then they brought out the big guns.

"Deletrius!"

"Reducto Maxima!"

"Confringo!"

"Lacarnum Inflamarae!"

The Hunter's side of the corridor was reduced to rubble as the detonations ripped through the stone. Minerva was barely able to shield herself from the shrapnel in time.

Death Eater's continued to hurl jets of green light where they were sure Aran had fallen, sending up plumes of rubble and fire through the stone dust smoke.

Five of them promptly fell dead in retaliation, two with smoking holes through vital organs and three clutching at spouting arterial spray or scrabbling at their mortal head wounds as the last-minute firing synapses stuttered out, not to mention the foot long lengths of star metal embedded in others. One cut off his fingers as he gripped the ever-sharp edges and whined piteously as he died.

She was clinging to the vaulted ceiling arches above and had rained death on them before deciding to join them personally.

One of her own brands of magic flared, blue nimbus aurora engulfed her irises, but without an accompanying Mass Effect eezo engine to harmonise the fields, the subsequent emanations were all but completely invisible.

It still left Minerva slack-jawed when she saw the fifteen men floating helpless in mid-air. Aran flexed her mind and eight of them went to atoms, the seven furthest just managing to survive the repulse wave intact while being blown into the walls; gravely injured or crippled.

Aran didn't bother to dump the cartridges of her Nagant, opting for a New York reload by drawing her second piece from her ankle holster. A Fegyver Es Gepgyar PJK-9HP, a Hungarian clone of the famous Belgian Browning Hi-Power. This particular model retained a checkered grip, ventilation ribs, a ring hammer, beer-sights and a two-tone nickel steel brown carbon fiber finish.

Her masterful trigger control had them all writhing on the floor a second later, Aran opened the loading gate of her Nagant, performed a reverse rail-road spin of the revolver's frame and blasted the cartridges through their masks by spinning the cylinder with her thumb while using a micro-push of biotics to turn the thin Denzium shells into veritable miniature rail gun coils without the use of any actual juice.

"Look out!" Minerva warned.

They had stepped up their game. Aran and McGonagall smelt them before they saw them.

Lightning flashed through the windows and illuminated the heavy muscle Riddle had seen fit to smuggle into the castle.

Two bull Mountain Trolls definitely complicated matters. They were immune to all but the most powerful spells.

Luckily, Aran had the perfect cure for this stinky affliction.

She drew forth what she'd chosen from her munitions cabinet. The small-arms cannon billowed easily out of her robes' endless inner pocket, while her pistols floated at her side once she'd released her grips on them.

Her centrepiece for tackling large dangerous Magical Creatures of the mega fauna variety was a Holland & Holland Double Rifle 'Big Bore' Nitro Express, chambered for the .700 calibre, the one thousand grain cartridges she'd hand machine-ground were replete with pure copper Minié ball soft heads and Tamisier grooves. It possessed enough sheer swaging and obturation PSI to kill an Orca or even a Blue Wale if directed at the right essential organ.

The gun itself was a masterpiece. It had a 29 inch barrel, a standard front sight with combined moon protector, a fixed rear-sight regulated at 100 yards with a folding leaf sight regulated at 200 yards, a reinforced sidelock ejector, double triggers with accompanying front articulated trigger and classic pistol grip cap box. The stock was made of deluxe quality walnut wood, while all the metal-work plating was of a case colour hardened finish, unique deep stippled Acanthus leaf scroll pattern engravings were set against this tailor-ordered 'Rose and Scroll' burnish; along with the butt end metal shoulder protector panel as well.

Aran unlocked the gargantuan weapon, slid the moon clip home with two side-by-side 164 gram bullets, hurled it away and closed the barrels up with a snap.

Then she saw the hostage the Death Eaters holding the Troll's chained leashes were carrying.

A favourite student of hers. Molly Prewett.

"Minerva! Cover me!"

The Raging Devil rushed them with her double rifle outstretched in one hand. The recoil was enough to blast any unprepared Human individual over, but there was no muzzle flash when the massive round sent one of the Trolls toppling over backwards to turn his handlers into pudding. Aran made sure to protect the ears in the vicinity that mattered with her biotics.

The second's club came up and over but Aran power slid between his knobbly squat legs, revolving on the slick tiles, she shot the second Caingorm over her shoulder and sent the entirety of its tiny brain and upper part of its skull splattering over the rafters.

Flipping both the rifle and herself from the floor, she just managed to dodge two streams of sickly green death during both pirouettes, before ending the final two with a similarly placed head-shot with her drawn semi-automatic just before she rose and a lightning fast Mozambique Drill for the last.

Both Trolls and men hit the ground before her Holland & Holland's stock fell neatly into the crook of her arm, even as she replaced her flash-forged magazines and piped another round from her omni tool.

"Well..." Minerva finally breathed again after witnessing the display. "A fat lot of good I was there," she said grimly as Aran scanned the corridor with the monster of a weapon she was reloading with her mind and picked the crying Molly up under her legs and cradled her above her hip, to which the girl immediately wrapped her thin arms around Aran's broad shoulders and her legs around her delineated torso and sobbed into her collar.

"Nonsense. My warning made them focus upon you for the split-second I needed. And – son of a..."

More, always more.

"Damn Riddle to the seventh circle!" Aran spat as she ran with McGonagall towards the Entrance Hall, having to keep pace was irksome, but she was not willing to fight with a child in her custody and had to reload her rifle with her telekinesis as they sprinted away from the mass of jeering zealots.

Finally, they ran into some more teachers.

"Take her!" Aran told Professor Sprout, she turned, allowed her rifle to stick in place to a high corner of the ceiling with her biotics and pulled her double-action.

Before her allies could even raise their wands, Aran floored their enemies with a pulsating corridor-clearing shock-wave thrown from her empty right palm.

Even as she leveled the reloaded gem of an automatic pistol at their scrambling forms, a recognisable male shout came from behind.

"Bombarda Totalus!"

"Proctor! No!" the Hunter warned.

Their Defence against the Dark Arts Professor, Simon Proctor, was a brilliant man. But he'd erred fatally.

His powerful wide-spread Gouging Curse brought a good deal of the marble roof down on top of the invader's heads. But the primary reason Aran had fled besides the child's safety, was because they had all been harbouring a Vordak in their souls. And she had been gathering the spent Denzium casings and ricocheted rounds with her power over matter, leaving her unable to kill them efficiently until now.

Sure enough, even as their colleagues rejoiced in jubilation, Aran and Minerva watched with mounting apprehension as the air went to ice and over twenty of the Greater Dementors crawled from the debris. Then there was no more rejoicing.

"BACK! BACK I SAY!" Aran roared at them and backpedal they did against the Dementi as the Hunter switched out her copper coated bullet magazine for one with reformed Denzium rounds plucked from where they lay or had embedded themselves. She only ever carried two magazines because of this.

She rapid-fired all eleven rounds, catching the cartridges with her biotics and blasted their ranks with them too. Only half of them fell.

"COME ON!" she challenged.

They swarmed over her like the tide, Aran had summoned and re-molded her Denzium claws back to her as fast as she could, but it was too late for such paltry measures.

"GET – OFF – OF – ME!" the Raging Devil roared, struggling in the grips of twelve lesser sons of Hell. Strength turning to ice water as she wrestled with them.

"For God's sake, help her!" Minerva screamed at her fellows. "She'll be kissed! Patronuses! All together now!"

"Expecto Patronum!" they announced as one.

Multiple Corporeal and intangibles flew forward and for a moment, the emblematic representations of human hope and happiness, riding on silver mist knocked the Vordaks back.

Then they were sucked up into their foul orifices.

Riddle's brilliance reared its ugly head once more, he'd overcome, through depraved experiments, a Dementor's primary weakness. The Vordaks didn't need to sense their food's despair to overcome and absorb it regardless, but neither did their prospective victim.

Aran's hands glowed with so much Neutrino energy that her bones shone clear through the skin, even they were translucent. She managed to reduce several of the Vordak's to dust as she stole their life force away, taking in the radiance of the souls they had devoured and sustaining her struggle.

But she was tiring, even her incredible fortitude was taxed by the combined and multiplied affect of their already enhanced and uncanny powers. And as she buckled, curled up into a ball and shielded her mouth, the eight or so temporarily foiled Vordaks decided to engage in a lesser-known but just as viable aspect of their feeding habits and began to simply rip her apart.

"EXPECTO PATRONUM!"

The brilliant twin lights threw the snarling Vordaks clear off Aran's tattered, bleeding form.

Samus rolled over to see who her saviour was. Even though she knew through a bloody grin who the most likely suspect was.

Dumbledore was marching down the corridor as if he were on the war-path, duel-wielding his original Pear wand he'd purchased from Diagon Alley circa' 1892 in his left and of course, the Elder wand itself in his right; that he had defeated the Dark Lord Grindelwald himself to obtain.

Both silver gold Phoenixes. In and of themselves epitome's of the true Patronus, melted the Dementor's presence away, such was Albus' power in the emotion he was summoning and even reduced several of the more greedy to burnt out husks as his joy and cares caused them to disappear into the Ether as they feasted themselves into oblivion. The son of Percival and Kendra was not the greatest Wizard of the age by dint of his academic skills alone.

For a moment, Aran thought they had won.

Then her HUD went haywire as it warned her that every remaining infiltrator had flat-lined, having either slit their own throat or allowed their soul to be taken by their erstwhile comrades.

Which meant...

They were coming.

A hundred descended down the main tower, above and below and even Dumbledore had to ready himself to cast again in the face of such odds. Both Patronuses dimming against a tide of true fell evil. A speck of light against the black.

"Gather around! Around me!" Dumbledore projected with the still-not-lost voice of the orator.

They did so, Aran reached them last, gaining in speed all the while; she had produced a strange jagged stone from one of her Witching Cloak's many hidden pockets. Its fissures glowed with both pure white and rainbow light at the same time, but as the hurricane of Vordaks were about to reach wand range, she brought it up to her chin in both hands and breathed upon it, causing its inner effulgence to pulsate on every exhale. She had done so once every day since she had recovered her memories.

"Cast in three! One! Two! Th –"

Aran whispered in a tongue no human could replicate.

"Through vigilance and strength. We create peace."

She punched skyward and a wandering white sun burst into being from her clenched fist.

The dome of Aetherian Core Light Energy expanded to protect the entire Faculty. The Dementor's broke against it, many dying, their advance halted.

Gobsmacked as they were, when Aran commanded them to cast their Patronus' upon the strange crystal she held; Dumbledore was the first to contribute.

"That's it! It's as fully charged as it will be! Now close your eyes!"

"What?!"

"Why?!"

"We're not - " multiple voices questioned, though the Greater Dementors scratched at the shield and Albus had already obeyed without question.

"Close your eyes."

They did so. And Aran bolstered additional telekinetic protection. Even as their protective bubble began to fade, she reached inside her own chest with a phased arm and pulled free seven sparks of matter-antimatter from the Energy Transfer Unit her old friends had gifted to her several lifetimes ago. The wisps of creation joined with the Light Crystal as well.

The Hunter reared back her arm, put as much of her own strength into it as she dared and clapped it into her hands in one motion as if in prayer.

The home-made annihilation field detonation, infused with both the Darkness of the Sixth Dimension and the World-sustaining power of an alien world; along with a dash of pure positive emotion: it killed every dark creature in the immediate vicinity, scorched the walls black and burst many an old portrait to flaming ash.

---

"Alright! Everyone! Where are you, you miserable curs?! What's with all this damn smoke? We showed those blood traitors if this is the state they're in! I can't see a damn thing! Dilungo!"

Some of the smog lifted, but not near enough. Tiberius Dolohov had Portkeyed onto the first landing of the spiral staircase, long after the initial assault. He was there to meet with what he knew would be at least some of his master's puppets and their prizes. The old fool and his flock couldn't possibly defend against the entirety of the forces his master had arrayed against them.

His easy smile, hidden by his Death Mask and accompanying relaxed posture disappeared at once when the fog rose and vanished in a strong gust of telekinetic wind and when he saw what lay ahead of him.

Albus Dumbledore and Samus Aran stood barely three metres away from him, with the staff at their backs; all of them were relatively unharmed.

For just a moment there was a silent stand-off. Then Dolohov went for his medallion portkey.

Aran tore it from around his neck without even a single gesture. A twitch of her eye-lid was enough. Horrified, he opted next for his wand, only for Dumbledore to promptly strike the offending appendage with a non-verbal flicking flash of red light and relieve him of his weapon.

"No! Get away! I'm unarmed!" he cried, putting his hands up in supplication as the Hunter stalked forward menacingly.

First, Aran backhand slapped his mask clean off, revealing the gaunt terrified features underneath. A snap punch to the liver followed, axe-poling him on the spot but Aran propped Voldemort's Inner Circle Member up by his lapels.

Her pankration straight kick took him right in the solar plexus, hurling him down the stairs four at a time to land on the Entrance Hall's landing; much the worse for wear after such a short but impactful trip.

"Get up! Get the fuck up!" Aran hissed, seizing his hood and half lifting, half dragging the Death Eater to the lowest step. "A Death Eater, that is what they call you, is it not? Well let's see you eat some death now, murderer. Open your mouth and bite the stone!"

"SAMUS!" Dumbledore thundered, upon seeing such an act about to be committed in front of him.

"Not now, Albus! Every second he draws breath is a second more that he can use to carry out what he came here to do. Riddle entrusted you with something didn't he, Dolohov! Something more than ensuring the transfer of hostages!"

"The Ministry will take him into custody! See what he knows!" the Headmaster insisted.

The Raging Devil scoffed at that, she saw his side, flawed and nonsensical as it was. Riddle would not allow any of his servants to compromise him. But more importantly, her blood demanded he die. They were still in danger and she trusted her instincts after a thousand thousand struggles between life and death.

She knocked several of his teeth loose jamming him in place, while the Staff protested in horror and indignation. Aran wanted to scream at their bleating hypocrisy. These men had come into their home and tried to subject them to fates much worse than what she was about to do to this bigot.

---

"Now let us see if you can palate this," she deadpanned to her victim, before executing him with a single stomp.

There were screams of disbelief and disgust at the grisly result of her actions. Aran did not care, in her eyes, at least she did something, dammit.

She looked up to see numerous cast ropes that Albus had conjured to stop her, but he hadn't been able to restrain her. Magically created items were about as useful against her as low-level magic itself. Especially when going up against a Dark Energy manipulation barrier.

---

After the fact, Aran wished she had done this. It would have made the whole night much easier, but one pleading look from Albus had undone her, damn the man. And she had acceded to his request. After all, even she couldn't determine every outcome, her only condition was that he scan the Knight's mind with his rare gift of Legilemency.

"Why did you come here?" Dumbledore demanded of the Death Eater.

Dolohov was able to resist for all of two seconds before Albus tore aside his formidable but limited defences.

"... To... to kill... her."

His face twisted momentously as several magical code-words activated. Aran just managed to dive in and knock Dumbledore aside as the Death Eater's entire body was perforated to such an extent that most of his features exploded in tendrils of darkness. Riddle's ace-in-the-hole expanded from Dolohov's meaty shell, reducing him to so many scraps of pink mist.

The Bogeyman itself.

Aran had heard rumours of the Screaming Bogey of Strathtully. A Boggart of near immeasurable power and gluttonous size. Lyall Lupin had managed to trap the elephantine black shadow in a matchbox two years ago; in a Ministry Operation that had claimed the lives of fourteen members of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures before they'd managed to contain it. The Ministry called that debacle the Strathtully Slaughter.

The immense Bogle was rapidly gorging itself on the combined fear of the castle's inhabitants; it was expanding, gaining in strength. Glowing white narrowed eyes staring out malevolently from its swirling depths, at the tiny mortal meals before it.

Dumbledore regained his feet and flicked the branch of Elder.

"Continent Obscuritas!" he bellowed.

The Bogle was compressed inward momentarily but it rapidly fought off even the Headmaster's incredibly potent Counter Curse. Its amorphous girth pulsating outwards, almost flexing the magical granite stone blocks out of their mortared places.

Aran added to Dumbledore's efforts by summoning a wide singularity into being, although incapable of forcing the creature into the Dark Dimension like her armaments would have been capable of doing, it did help box in the monstrosity but it was an uphill battle even for two as formidable as they were.

"Hold him down for just a bit longer, Albus! I'll bind the creature to another plane!" Aran roared over the noise of hurricane winds in a closed corridor. She knelt, one hand aloft to help with her dark energy restraint while her other palm settled into the dust and drew forth a lode of the Power from the castle's very earth.

"Redgormor Narokath Bankorok Aretak," she heard the corpse God impart from the nether, (or was it her own voice?) as her omni tool's laser focus suite projected invisible software guided scalpels which carved the glowing indigo runes of a Nine-Point Circle of Magicks around the behemoth. There was a rush of air and a vortex of violet light whipped up to entrap it, taking all of the pressure off Dumbledore as he slumped, ashen-faced against the wall, his reserves almost completely depleted from resisting a creature of pure magic for so long.

Luckily for him, his counter-part and protector had prepared for such an extraordinarily dangerous containment.

Her omni tool activated a scripted Conjuring Charm, which brought out the repaired Vanishing Cabinet from the Room of Requirement, right beneath her target in a flash of cerulean light. The Magick Seal forced the Boggart down to size and into the dark confines and Aran leapt forward to slam the wardrobe's door home and activate its gear lock mechanisms before rushing around it; tracing Arithmantic rune grids over the ebony wood with her palm. They blazed with gold light as they took effect and they grew brighter still as the occupant put all its considerable effort into breaking free; shaking it on its spindly diamond spaced legs.

The Hunter braced the doors with every fiber of her own remarkable strength, while the Staff watched in mounting apprehension. Aran gestured brusquely at the Headmaster while her back strained against the rattling, smouldering doors and he readily complied, running up to her.

"Take this lodestone," she told him, handing him the relic from her greatcoat. "I recovered three from the old Celtic Hallstatt sites. In place of your core, use one drop of your blood on the glyph and it will revitalise the key markers under the school where they broke in. You'll need to put all of this fortress' magic into defending the foundations and the living quarters from any form of attack; physical or otherwise."

"What is in there, Samus?"

"Something beyond any of your ability to combat. This battle is mine alone. Begone! At my calculations, he'll batter through the limbo barrier within two minutes. And he'd wipe Knockturn off the map if I close the link. Then the rest of London. And after that no force on Earth could oppose him."

"What is it?"

"The first and the last enemy to be defeated. All of you must go. He's tuned in to me now and me alone. He'll be made tangible by my nightmares. He's something I can kill, unlike before... Jesus! How did Tom manage to harness so much of the Power?! The reports never mentioned the Bogle was this strong when Lupin trapped it."

"I was wondering about that too... he must have conducted sacrificial rituals at the North and Southern poles..."

"One at the close of the Summer Solstice and the other at Winter Equinox, of course..."

"Those disappearances, so many children... heavens above..."

"Nothing further from it. Though neither exist save for what we make for ourselves. The man is insane, but by my forebears he's a genius as well. Just our luck."

"Samus..."

"Go! Damn you! He's coming..."

Her friends and colleagues raced down the corridor, looking back many times at their head of security as the Boggart began to splinter the door she held closed, smoke and fire seeping out of the cracking, lengthening interstices.

Upon them all withdrawing to safety, Aran flung herself back, while at the same time, the brother of the last remaining Vanishing Cabinet pair in Britain was ruptured into a thousand pieces.

And once again, through the billowing red smoke and hellish brimstone; her raison d'etre lived; standing before her as vast and terrible as he'd been that day everything ended and everything began.

---

A/N: Lord Ridley is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch of course! I finally got around to watching part three of The Hobbit. Safe to say, the first ten minutes were the best part of the film.

---

The Neos Vovonian life-form crouched at a formidable thirty feet tall in the vaulted corridor, unable to reach his full height. He had always been... too big compared to his kin that Aran had hounded through the dark corners of the Universe. For he had glutted himself on the loot and flesh of a thousand worlds and slept coiled at the hearts of suns drained dry. Steam glistened off midnight hide. The same shade it had been when she'd first laid eyes on him. In another age, another time. Eyes of pitiless orange flame burned in his sockets, alight with malicious cunning and delightful cruelty, the long diamond shaped snout dipped finely at the end, giving him the almost noble mien of a classical ancient dragon, if not for the fact that the corners of his huge narrow mouth were hitched in a ghastly smile, glistening grey teeth larger and sharper than any of Earth predator's, past or present, glistened through the solitary gap of his twitching lip. The gums royal purple, clear saliva dripping in a thin strand from said same corner.

His breathing was utterly silent. Like the Raging Devil, he was a creature of sheer effortlessness.

"Hello, little girl..." he whispered an avalanche from somewhere within his mighty chest, though his mouth did not move an inch to betray him.

"Hello, mother fucker," Aran replied, arms crossed high under her collarbone. She had never bothered to refer to him by the name his minions had foisted him with. Primal terrors had no need for family titles. He was a thing, not a being. A force more presence to her magnificent mind than flesh; their physical confrontations had always been secondary to the spiritual peregrination.

The Draconian fiend's long death mask quivered ever so slightly before her. He was drawing in all the newly fresh sensations of smell and electroreception that were his to command once more, his anticipation and excitement mounting as he determined the lack of three shining beacons in his nemesis' body; overflowing with information control. But the power was still there... curious... the situation had never been more different from their past encounters. Aran felt a horrible roiling sensation in her breast.

It was pure terror, spreading through all her limbs and screaming for her to run and hide. To flee and survive. But she did not quail and she did not back down. She merely gazed up at him, her eyes intense yet serene. And then that bubbling swamp of despair became a healing river, a flowing source that was both within her and beyond her.

The air between them thickened, pulsing, building.

Ridley licked his blackish, barbed, wolven tongue over his armoured snout. It sounded like a giant's hand smoothing an equally large piece of parchment.

"This time you are going to lose..." the monster gloated, eyes of hell-fire gleaming.

---

A/N: Stage One. Act I. Frenzy. Soundtrack choice: C21 FX - Ancient Evil – Cody Still

---

Aran saw the move in his eyes before even he did.

Claws sharp enough to rend the outer hull of a battleship flashed forth, one pair following the other in quick succession.

Biotics allowed Aran to parry them both. A dancer and a behemoth made mince-meat of their surroundings as the former was pushed back by the ungodly variety, angles and amount of attacks heading her way.

The Hunter spiral back-flipped through the thicket of death and vector looped with her biotics, changing her direction to swing up and around Ridley's jaws which had snapped at her in mid-air, mounting his nostrils.

A bolt of lightning issued from her open palm, right at his left ocular socket, but all three sets of his eye-lids closed in reflex from the jet of effulgence, blasting the attack away in a shower of sparks though the pain caused him to buck and send her flying up higher, to grab the Gothic arch cross-rib beams above.

He punched upwards, Aran pirouetted aside and his obsidian forearm sunk through into the second floor, pulling down tonnes of stone as he withdrew, forcing Aran to dance to the third beam down. His second attempt was a palm strike and his thumb caught Aran's leg as she dodged, pinning her to the ceiling.

Ridley cackled manically and mashed his hated enemy once, twice, thrice against the roof. Aran repaid him as he prepared for a forth slam by seizing hold of the beam and tearing the twenty tonne length of stone free, and down, increasing the piece of masonry's mass tenfold and smashing him across the hollow of his throat and clavicle with the incredible thrust, causing him to grunt in pain as it imploded into him and release her.

Aran rained dark energy warp wreathed blows down on him along the same amount as the multitudes of granite chips that showered amongst their forms. Until Ridley pressed her into the wall with his sheer girth. The shoulder barge stole her breath, then the Dragon used his mostly folded solar wing to scrape her along the corridor at sixty miles an hour.

The trip ended when he saw fit to drive her head first into the opposite wall like a toddler having a tantrum, breaking his toys. Aran braced with her arms, foiling him as the curtain battlement crumbled like sandstone, he tried again, the sole of her foot saved her from the second impact, hissing, the animal spun and threw her forty feet down the adjacent hall.

Aran slid on her back, expertly dragging her momentum down and slowing her flight with another plyometric kick against the floor, slamming into the T-section of the lower cloisters with a hefty 'oomph!' laying her out on her back, stunned.

The dragon reared back for a second, as if about to sneeze, what issued forth instead was a veritable machine-gun stream torrent of plasma orbs that raced towards her, blackening the hall with carbon even as it came.

Aran telekinetically projected herself along to the side like a dart, a picture perfect biotic blink. The explosion of plasma hurtled after her once it impacted, filling both corridors as the heat expanded. Her Witching Cloak and her biotics would keep her safe from the convection and the material itself but Aran was not willing to expend so much energy on taking a hit she could avoid instead.

Her flight took her back to the main staircase and she rolled aside to avoid the after-flow of molten matter, summoned her double rifle from its upper corner resting place and readied it, checking both passages.

Nails, no, claws scraped deliberately along, echoing shrilly. Aran tracked both entrances and whispered another Nine Point Circle incantation, slowly this time.

"Little girl... little girl. Don't lie to me... tell me where... did you sleep, last night...?" he crooned mockingly.

The firing mechanism flickered with pale violet witch fire for a second, before fading, the enchantment was complete.

"That actually hurt, little girl," he projected, the voice sounded down both avenues. "You've gotten stronger... but on this pitiful world... SO AM I!"

Out of her peripheral vision he exploded through the architecture in ambush, barreling towards her, but he was wily, not daring to expose the softer parts in his mouth, the nervous centre and chemical glands by trying to roast her where she stood. Not when she was armed.

Aran turned on her foot and fired with both hands holding the weapon. The massive slug bounced off of the back of Ridley's pointed crest and he screeched in agony as his head was flung back momentarily. The Hunter cursed, his hide was nigh impregnable.

Her second shot, aiming for his eyes once more, was knocked aside by his barbed tail, a one hundred foot coil of bone, sinew and pure perfectly evolved muscle for steering through nebulae clouds and solar prominences. The reverse cut would have sliced her in half had Aran not pulled off one of her famous contortions. A row of unlucky surviving portraits squealed as their homes were turned to dust from the force and speed of the blow.

But by then he was already beside her. He plucked the gun from her hands, or at least tried, as Aran held on, relentless. She struck him with bolts of energy as he swung her about, but they were as the bites of mosquitoes compared to the amperes she had been capable of channeling on Zebes, with the Varia suit at her fingers. One attack from the Terra-watt level wave beam had crippled him then and there. These merely angered the monster.

Aran was smashed into the walls and floor until her head rang with the vibrations and the second shot had been similarly wasted in mid-flight, the shot staggering his arm back to stop him from gutting her but not piercing the adamantine skin that covered fear itself.

Ridley flung the empty Elephant gun aside as he loomed over her, lying in one of the many craters he'd caused.

---

A/N: Stage One. Act II. Cruelty. Soundtrack choice: C21 FX - Perception – Christopher P. Bragg

---

"Now... that's quietened you down a bit, little girl." He reached down calmly and pincered both of her arms between what passed for thumb and forefinger, lifting her high in a crucifix hold. He began to pull in opposite directions. "Your dear daddy seared the flesh off my bones, crushed me beneath my own damn flagship on that sty you pigs huddled in! You reduced me to a living corpse on Zebes! Smote my ruin upon the mountainsides of Tallon IV! Drove me to the depths of the earth on Norion! Then I all went to pieces on Urtraghus and again when I took your precious prize from those walking bags of blood! ... You crushed, perforated, boiled and drowned me under Norfair... but you'll never be rid of me!"

"You say that... as if your continuing existence... is an aspect I'd like to deny..." Aran gasped as her muscles quaked, resisting but faltering more and more against the immense opposite forces enacting on her astonishing frame. He was so blasted strong... so strong... "You couldn't be – further... from the truth of all things."

He snapped forward, aiming to bite her head clean off. Aran flipped her legs up and just managed to trap his jaws open. If she failed now, she would be a quadruple amputee.

"Let... me... go... or – I'll do something you'll regret..." She was barely holding on, her shoulders about to be torn loose from their sockets, her calves, thighs and spine screaming.

Ridley merely chuckled and began to summon a plasma lance up from the blistering bellows of his throat.

"You asked for it, beast... observe."

There was a flash of mint light from four points, neutrino siphoning fields that stole all the tension from Ridley's perverse embrace. The harmonics staggered him but did not lignify or rot his flesh, at least not all over. For on his right hand, Aran had seized the index finger with both hands and put all of her unique ability into the stranglehold on that same digit.

With a flash and a sizzle, it came clean off in a smooth ring of necrotic crumbling, formerly invincible flesh and she fell neatly to the ground and landed on both feet with pantherish grace and her prize.

"Impossible! What are you?!" he shrieked, flailing back, gazing in numb horror at his now maimed and rapidly wasting hand.

"Something more."

With a flourish she hurled the departed talon straight through his left eye and saw it protrude from the top of his nose in a spray of neon ichors.

"DAMN YOU!" Ridley cursed, half blind and foaming with incandescent livid white hot madness.

Aran kept him off balance with more jets of electricity at his fresh wound, then slid in underneath him where his bulk gave her the advantage. Ridley went ballistic, tearing the furnishings apart in his effort to repay her for the mutilation – but his size worked against him, at least until he'd cleared enough surroundings to mount a full three hundred and sixty degree spin.

The Devil leapt over the Dragon's tail and caught some of the kinetic energy as it passed underneath. He released a point-blank solar flare shedding from his beautiful hexagonal patterned wing membrane. She absorbed it with a combination of her Magicks, her Witching Cloak's intricate sewn Runes and her two powers over matter. Ridley split the lensman fissure on the back of his untouched hand and put half a yellow star's plasma radiance into it as he backhanded his old enemy. Aran saw the flow, diverted, subsumed, re-channeled and released it back against him in a mesmerising display that matched the atomic motion of a molecule higher than any on the Periodic Table in its complexity of animation; forged into a final back hand fist of her own.

Every bit of the combined force sent Ridley ploughing through seven walls and out into the rain and night.

Aran was yanked with him as he looped his tail around her waist.

---

A/N: Stage One. Act III. Magnanimity. Soundtrack choice: Vulcan – James Pagget

---

Hunter and prey fell together, one a glowing blue shooting star of brilliance pressed to the breast of the black one as they fell into the ravine, uncaring of the ferocity of the elements and reveling in nothing but the need to destroy one another.

Ridley kicked his opposite up and off him as they plummeted, rolling, unfurled his massive wings, trying to take flight. Aran caught him around the throat with a biotic lash composed of liquid lightning and dragged him back, swung up to his face and punched his injury inwards rapidly driving the impromptu stake deeper with every blow; screaming he thrust back his head, she collided with the speeding rocks but managed to tether him to the edge and yank back as she rolled, negated the slack he'd temporarily created, dug her feet into the solid rock, in yet another astonishing exemplar of fluidity, grace and strength.

His huge throat nearly tore asunder, but the solar flares from his wings flattened her in response. Ridley writhed, flung his foe against the side of the crevice and displaying his own remarkable flexibility for a creature his size, managed to turn and bathe Aran in a pure jet of plasma that melted most of the mountain face inwards, but weakened the resulting overhang.

With an incredible cry that bespoke of all the nameless history between these two immortal enemies, Aran, with no heed to restraint, on fire, energy waning as her protections tapped her stamina, twisted her hips back as far as was allowed, stood as best as she could upon a river of lava and drove forward to smite the red hot stone above with both hands clasped together.

Adults and children screamed or covered their ears in both the castle and her closest town as the reverberations shook through their bones while sending every loose item not nailed down crashing about.

Four thousand metric tonnes of granite broke off the landscape in a Richter event and crumbled over to inhume them both.

She could hear his voice even as she grinned through charred lips. An echoing thunderclap, magnifying in volume, booming yet muffled over the quake; croaking, like amplified premature burial.

"Arrraaaaaaaaaaaaan!"

He bellowed to the deep as they were covered in the mountain slide, dragged down into the black. The rumbles of the Earth coinciding with the thunder of the Heavens.

Now it was her turn to laugh.

---

A/N: Stage Two. Act I. Perspicacity. Soundtrack choice: Rising Force (feat. Tina Guo) – R. Armando Morabito

---

She slid down and over the edge. Clung to the barest lip by the blister covered fingertips of one hand as he disappeared below, unlike her, he could not form any kind of protective barrier while in a planet's atmosphere.

With several biotic blinks, she ascended up the fortifications, needing to catch her breath after such fierce bouts. And settled on the central tower.

Then she remembered. The bastard had minor morphing abilities of his own, he could shrink and compress his form somewhat to a more reasonable fourteen feet!

Lightning illuminated the gargoyle ramparts and through the driving precipitation, every statute could have been him. For he could disguise his skin better than any octopus or chameleon as well...

Almost recovered, Aran stealthily made her way down the gallery, trying to control her breathing which now came in blasts of steamy mist.

She snapped her vision back and forth to every set of empty eyes, more than one had a weathered left or right orb. He'd defaced some of them...

A flash of light again, did several move? Or just one?

She pushed the soaking wet strands of hair out of her eyes, swept it back in the barest display of anxiety.

There it was, a screech of bone on a blackboard.

She pivoted and removed the dragon's head with a hammer blow and a roar of triumph, it came apart in basalt pieces.

Aran whirled.

Nothing but the night and the rain and the dull-eyed grotesques.

"COME ON OUT AND FIGHT!" she called over the driving rain and the wind.

Pathetic. She would do the same if she could; fighting smart was not fighting cowardly. But she was afraid. So afraid... all it would take was one...

The Hunter heard it at the very last second and reacted, but she still cried out for the first time as the whispered venomous barb jutted through her shoulder from behind, then pulled back, slamming her into the diagonal roof in a shower of tiles. She blunted his second claw attack as he loomed out of the dark, but he yanked her up once more by her injury and nutted her into the beams. He tried for the plasma breath once more, but Aran hit him with everything she had from both effulgent palms, right in the epiglottis, then cauterised her stab wound as she brace pulled herself off of the end of his tail.

She levitated every piece of debris around her with a wave of her fist then spread all digits and accelerated them to a fraction of light speed but the beast blocked the expanding hurricane of shrapnel with his wing, brightening the wondrous material at every impact point to an opaque brilliant impregnability before they returned to the same dusky bronze transparent membrane.

Ridley impaled her through the stomach in retaliation and subjected her to another short flight drag up the steeple. Aran siphon tore his thumb off on his favoured offensive hand and sliced the closest thing to his Interosseous artery open in return, spraying glowing orange blood in place of her crimson.

"YOU LITTLE CUNT!" he wailed as she healed and released electro-magnetic warp resonance gigawatt hammers at him.

They exchanged fire, both coming off the worse, until Ridley clapped both wings together and sent out a shock-wave blast of such intensity that it caused Aran to unbalance through the semi-circular blast of superheated rain that echoed out for well over a mile. And he seized her in his jaws as the torrent resumed.

Aran was able to stop him from eating her with another siphon drain, weakening him further and wrenching his mouth wide even as her wound closed entirely. Ridley spat her clean from the spire.

"I don't remember you having their power... but you're still just a little bird without feathers, who can't even fly!" he jeered at her falling form. Ready to end this farce by maintaining his air superiority, so he could cook her from where he was safe.

"My fathers, my family. Were – not – birds." The Devil floated on the wind before him as she rose to his eye-level, long coat billowing around her. "And who says they couldn't fly?"

---

A/N: Stage Two. Act II. Versatility. Soundtrack choice: Ascendance – Audiomachine

---

Aran charged through the down-pouring sky with both fists outstretched, Ridley rocketed forth through the rain and they collided with a mach 3 explosion that would have torn the towers from their resting places had it not been for the centuries of magical strength residing in its walls.

"Those people you care so much for, Aran! I'm going to take them from you! One by one! And where are your friends now! They abandoned you after a few scuffles and some rocked foundations. That's how much the safety you provided was worth."

Blue and orange light blazed off each other as they tore into the sky, the great black dragon under the moon, his wings of gold carrying them higher as they fought.

"And when the dawn comes. When that building lies in ruins, the elderly put to the sword and the children within devoured and I turn my gaze to the world beyond... the legend of the Red Death will be worth nothing at all..."

Ice particles coated them as they shot up into the atmosphere, borealis brought into being by the immense confluence of energies crackling against one another.

The Devil poured lightning down his throat, the Dragon wrapped his wings around her and scourged the flesh from her back; causing her to cry out an alien name and redouble her twelve-point simultaneous strikes into chain volleys that began to crack and sunder even his iron bones.

But he could heal fast as well.

Ridley blazed forth another jet of plasma orbs that ignited the hydrogen around them even as crystal flows swam around them from Aran's involuntary psychokinesis. She swam through the stream of creation and staggered her nemesis with three alternating power swings to the chops.

"FUH! KING! DIE!" she punctuated with every straight-diving haymaker, breaking off his attack. And indeed, even his incredible stamina was beginning to wane under her onslaught, his sable hide turning brighter and more sickly as unique chemicals in his species' bodies were released away from the external tissue layers to collect in his deep subcutaneous cell linings around major organs to increase reaction time, regen rates and quite literally turning him red in response to his flagging success.

He pitched over and managed to python coil her in his tail once more and pull her into the upper stratosphere in his wake, her ears popped from the pressure and invisible fists filled her lungs but she was prepared; drawing forth dark energy bubbles filled with breathable gases to sustain her and slip into her nano-crystular internalised battle trance for thirty seconds. Body glowing from within from her power, Aran wrenched free, clambered up his spine with four bounding leaps, dodged his wings' efforts to dislodge her and buried an indigo glowing knife hand into the base of his skull.

---

A/N: Stage Two. Act III. Fidelity. Soundtrack choice: Time Traveller – Peter Roe

---

She controlled him as they fell, forcing him into a nose-dive through the clouds, until his wing caught her on the scruff of her own neck and tore her loose, to be smashed with a colossal hand, then booted away and above.

They fell apart, Ridley tying to regain the skies but a flash of neutrino reave sparks of astonishing strength took all strength from his right wing, unbalancing him momentarily and then the Phoenix flame heralded a worsening of his plight.

Fawkes burst into existence next to his free-falling friend and dropped the Chozo short sword from his beak. It whirled end over end until Aran caught it perfectly by the fitted pommel even as she rocketed faster towards her foe beneath, who's size and subsequent air-resistance slowed his fall, her sword arm outstretched.

Aran landed upon his chest and cleaved him open, releasing what looked like lava from the wound in a great geyser as Ridley screamed in fury.

The Hunter forced the blade into the fresh partition, searching to pierce his black heart, blazing off embers and releasing founts of glowing liquid. The Dragon tore her open quickly with his talons, not daring to touch her for long, then managed to pierce both her arms with his tail even as she hacked and stabbed at him repeatedly, he clamped his jaws over her clavicle and nearly snapped her in two; feasting on her rich blood and marrow, alleviating his own wounds.

In desperation at the sudden turn, Aran let go of the sword stuck in her enemy's rib and freed her arms from the barb to agonizingly pry his jaws free from around her, even as she wilted from the plasma gushing through his teeth and flowing over her; crisping her flesh which pushed back all the while in a contest of destruction and renewal.

Aran pulled out one of her last tricks; phasing one of her arms up into his brain and clawed at the matter with all the electricity and warp sparks she could muster.

Ridley yanked her away, clasped her in both hands, trapping her arms at her sides, flipped over and pushed all the energy in his wings to accelerate them well into Mach 5; the sound barrier shattering several times into hyper-sonic speed, aiming to drive her into the rapidly approaching ground with all his terrible might.

But the Devil was far from helpless, affecting a full body phase transition, she moved through his abdomen and wrapped herself around his wing stem with a complex ground take-down grapple, then boosted fully into his back in a blaze of blue glory. The Dragon screamed as they accelerated further, unable to change his flight-path as she controlled one wing with a large stasis bubble while she gripped the other with her body; wrangling, bucking, twisting, flailing: it did him no good.

He struck the crust of the Earth in a cataclysm.

---

A/N: Stage Three. Act I. No Sound of Water. Soundtrack Choice: Knights and Lords – Audiomachine

---

The impact of their struggle was felt around the world, not to mention nearly bringing down the illuminated Hogwarts Wards almost a mile away.

It took well over five minutes for the two combatants to find their feet again.

Ridley's left wing was mangled beyond repair as he crawled out of the crater that might have led to Australia. His snout bent, teeth missing and skin as bright as blood with a few black patches remaining; though his original skin tone soon re-coalesced together.

His breath came in gasps as ragged as his tattered wing.

Aran charge clothes-lined him as she passed in a blur of speed.

Vociferating both with his mind and his mouth as he chewed on dirt, Ridley bit into the stone of the plateau island they had landed on and chomped it up into gravel. Then he expelled the white hot pebbles in a cone blast.

Grey's sword flew with them, though not by the beast's command, and morphed into the power stave her foster father had used against Mother and her pet beast, across space and back through time. Aran revolved it like a helicopter blade between her fingers and batted the maelstrom away, sending up jets of steam through the now easing rain and off the surface of the lake.

Ridley bull-rushed her on all fours, she pole vaulted over him, opening the cut on his bulging brain and slicing the sinew of his damaged wing as she flew, eyes closed in a state of flow, with the halberd's reverse spear tip and axe head respectively.

The Dragon went for a diagonal to horizontal tail sweep that connected and sent Aran flying but she flipped over in mid-air to land feet first against a jutting boulder, bent her steel cord knees right down and surge off. She flew straight and true, taking Ridley under the chin with a biotic assisted upwards crack of the staff, he flew up and revolved over while Aran space boosted higher in a flash and brought the staff down in seamless reverse transition; halting his trip and slamming him back into the indented ground with a 'boom'.

But that landing was not his last as Aran flash-stepped and flip body-slammed him again, her weapon coming up and over her golden maned head in both hands.

She stabbed the pointy end of the staff in his gut, standing atop the tip, only for the monster beneath her to spit fine thin jets of plasma through pursed lips at his nemesis and forcing her to perform more acrobatics to avoid them, taking her weapon clasped between her ankles, deflecting the odd orb with manipulations of her lower legs and Achilles tendon as much as her arms and wrists.

---

A/N: Stage Three. Act II. Shadow at Evening. Soundtrack Choice: Metroid Cinematica - Wings of Fire – Sam Dillard

---

"Prepare to die, Samus Aran!" Ridley seethed once he'd pushed her back to a more comfortable distance.

The Hunter spun her staff to rest in her hand behind her back with an easy flourish. Outstretched palm facing him. "To die would be a great adventure."

Her nemesis grinned. "Death – is the only adventure you and I have left..."

A curling front of solar power tore forward from his untouched wing, Aran Wushu wheeled aside, catching some of the power with the staff's neutrino capacitor as it passed and released a standard gluino charge beam from the tip that aggravated Ridley's chest wound.

Puffing himself up, he unleashed another concentrated lance of the fifth state of matter from his belly and Aran was forced to spin and slap the ground with such force that it pushed up a stalagmite of stone wide enough to halt the flow as he tracked her sprinting form.

She warp fired the molten mess at him with a flick of her hand, but his wing protected him once more and, catching on, he yanked up a projectile of his own. A granite rock that looked to be about three hundred metric tonnes and hurled it at her.

Aran raced forth, leapt onto the boulder and ran clean up and over it as it fell. She jumped out and fell like the sword of Damocles atop her foe and planted the spear into his clavicle.

Claws came up to scrape her off his shoulder, but she was already gone, the staff morphed and ripped free.

The Devil landed on his injured wing, seized the lower bundle of open weeping muscle with both hands, braced once and yanked back. The feature was torn out by root and stem.

"GARGH! I'LL KILL YOU FOR THAT! EAT YOUR HEART!" Ridley promised, effulgent tears swimming from his remaining eye, even as his wing disappeared into nothing, no-longer a part of its host's body.

"Then come," Aran challenged him.

Unbalanced, Ridley's next sequence of attacks were slower, predictable, Aran had time to murmur a continuous incantation from the Tome, once again invoking the Ancient of endless hunger to enhance and fortify her foster-father's weapon as it morphed back into its Gladius form.

Her cut caught the gap between blade and tail and took it off in a single swipe.

The acidic other-worldly Magicks halted his own blood-stemming and flesh weaving back together.

"What now, you piece of filth!" she jeered, the reverse revolution taking off a larger chunk of the tail further down.

Ridley's balance was shot, his rudder cut, he took another great lunge but Aran simply allowed him to fall on her blade and for his own momentum to rip himself from belly to throat.

He shrieked loud enough to chase the night away.

---

A/N: Stage Three Act III. A Handful of Dust. Soundtrack Choice: Metroid Cinematica - Orphan – Sam Dillard

---

"Do you want to know a secret?"

"STAY – STILL!" he screamed, trying to rend her apart. She danced aside.

"I told it to you before, but you wouldn't remember, would you? It was the only moment in my life when I couldn't possibly be afraid of you!"

"Indulge me then!"

"I don't feel fear as you do. As any animal does. It's not just a reflex of my flesh, it's not even an instinct or an emotion. It's my credo."

"What?!"

"Honour is a gift men give themselves. Justice is a creation of the weak to hold the strong accountable. Now fear. Fear is power – when I was a little girl, before you and your insects brought your bombs and your guns onto the people I love, even now. I knew it as my greatest friend and teacher. I'd embrace it. I'd climb a tree none of the boys would dare, capture and release animals they couldn't track or wouldn't touch."

"Sounds as if you weren't very careful! Went around sticking your little snot-nosed monkey face into things that didn't concern you!"

"On the contrary, I was more careful than children my age ever were. But I'll freely admit I embraced adventure unlike any other. I trusted in that hidden mentor, who taught me that danger was the only way to grow. Haven't you ever wondered why I never ran, why I walked up to your feet, as bold as the day?"

"Because your pathetic fight or flight triggers hadn't actualised yet?!"

"No. I was too scared to run. And what did that accomplish?"

"What are you even talking about?!"

"It stayed your breath. If but for a few seconds. While everyone else around me was slaughtered. I survived then, and I have survived this long because I came to value what I despised. Take joy in what I should hate and take refuge in the terror you've always inspired in me! I even thought we could be best friends when I first laid eyes on you! I knew what to do to make you stop and think, until the truth was exposed and you devoured the woman who bore me! Your differences inspired me with all the wonders of this great and never-ending Universe! Isn't that beautiful?! Isn't that grand?!"

"You have lost – what's left of your goddamn mind..."

"It might seem that way from a certain point of view. But I could never let you carry on to the long sleep. Letting you stew in your own misery for a thousand years until you lost what was left of that animal mind of yours was more than enough to satiate my desire for revenge. Do you remember what I brought you? How I showed you your folly? What came of blood for blood, monster?!"

"DIE-DIE-DIE-DIE-DIE-DIE-DIIIIE!" Every attack punctuated, every attempt foiled.

"I didn't think so."

The sword flashed again.

"YOU – FUCKING – BITCH! YOU TOOK MY HAND!"

"All this time, all our battles, and you've still learnt less than nothing. Beast."

"RAAAAAAAAAARGH! GONNA' EAT YOU ALIVE!"

The Dragon charged wildly, unheeding of any danger in his madness, maw gaping. And at that exact moment, Fawkes flamed into flight and released Aran's fully loaded double rifle from his talons as he passed to land the grip directly into her right hand. Aran's spell switched weapons in a trance.

"Sure, here's an appetizer."

Both triggers pulled. The barrels exploded with violet flame and sent both massive slugs into Ridley's mouth at the most opportune moment imaginable, puncturing the chemical glands that produced his plasma and detonating the matter out of several orifices she had carved into his belly and blowing a chunk of his head and crest out.

For a moment he swayed on the spot, then he vomited up a portion of his insides and fell face first into them.

All was quiet on the tiny island. Then.

"You think - kah - killing me, will evuah, ever give you peace?!"

Aran had stepped a few paces away and presented her back to her nemesis. Signifying that he was no threat to her. "I'm not looking for peace. Heh... true peace... no, just a moment, just a moment in time. And you are the next in a long line of them." She sheathed the sword in the inner pocket of the Witching Cloak.

"Is that all you've got, Zah-mus?! Heh, heh! You - you ain't shit!"

"IT'S OVER!" Aran spun back to roar.

"FUCK YOU! YOU THINK I HAVEN'T HEALED FROM WORSE THAN THIS! WHEN MY VESSELS, BONES AND ORGANS KNIT BACK TOGETHER, I'M GONNA – "

"I said. It's – over. If I walk away from you, you will forever cease to be."

"Don't you dare turn your back on me, Aran! As if you would do that. After what you've revealed! Everything you are, every piece of good you ever achieved. All of it – you owe to me."

Aran stopped stock still as she strode away. Then she half turned.

"Quite. And it is for that reason that your demise always provides me with much catharsis. Unlike most beings in the Universe, I am very comfortable with the rationale of revenge. You started all of this – and I will always finish it."

"I'll see you in hell, Aran!"

"... Perhaps... but you'll burn there long before me."

Ridley howled the laughter of the damned as Aran looked up to behold the ancient castle far off in the dark distance and the coming dawn.

"What do you see there? Yourself?!"

The Devil did not look at her age-old nemesis.

"By your own spirit, by your own hand... when you truly kill me. You will go back to hell."

Aran was mute to his statement. The wind causing the rain to lash her still form once more; baptising her in blood and fire.

Her head swiveled almost curiously around to behold the Dragon, wheezing on the shattered ground.

---

A/N: Soundtrack choice: Valhalla Rising OST - The Return – Peter Peter & Peter Kyed

---

She stopped in front of him as he raised himself up on his knees, the Magick eating him from the inside, rendering him as weak as his victims.

Aran raised a palm languidly, a telekinetic battering ram smashed into the monster and threw him back to slam into a large rock face, spreading him against the slab as if he were Prometheus chained to the Caucasus.

The Hunter wormed her fingers into one of his many wounds and began to rip the stitching of flesh, to tear the seams of his gut lining clean open.

Ridley screamed and screamed a sound of unrivaled excruciation, not to mention violation as Aran shoved her arms through the membrane into his entrails and leant in as close as possible so she could look him in his remaining eye and savour his helplessness at her hands.

And then it was over. She pulled the steaming bags and tubes of offal free, along with the primary organs on top and dumped the mess under his nose as he expired.

---

A/N: Soundtrack choice: Mado Kara Mieru - (feat. Lia, Aoi Tada, Kaori Omura) – Christopher Tin

---

Fawkes alighted on her shoulder as heavy as happiness and freedom as she walked away and never looked back.

She made her way down to the pebbled shore as the Bogart's body burst into red flames that etched themselves into the very stone, forming a sigil of the Dead Eagles.

Aran gained strength with every step. A wild and indescribable joy filled her heart as Fawkes wept against her head and gave her his tears.

It was over. For the first and last time she had vanquished him forever.

Now her life could truly begin. And truly end.

Another day.