I'm sure this is not the most stellar of chapters, but it's past my bedtime and an update is long overdue. If there are any typos or if I repeated anything anywhere, be sure to let me know in a review and/or pm, and I'll go back and change it. Just might take a few days since I've been working overtime lately. Yeah, yeah, getting hit by a fire truck while on duty should make me want to work less, but I like my job and I need the money. I should also get the next chapter out quicker since I no longer have to sit around and wrack my brains for a decent way to represent an epic spell. Love to everyone and please review.
Chapter 12
After Zorc reached street level, the deafening noise of his ascent was replaced with the shrieks and cries of terrified wizards. Dust hung thick in the air, diffusing the pale light that filtered from above so that the air became misty gray. This was all Harry registered as he finally rose from the corner he had dove to when the demon first began ripping chunks of rock out of the ceiling.
He coughed a little and looked up, but the dust settled on his glasses so that he couldn't see, and wiping them on his equally dirty robes didn't help. "Kingsley!" he called. "Sir, are you there?"
"I'm here," the Minister answered from somewhere ahead of him. "Is anyone hurt?"
"I'm fine," Harry said, stumbling over some debris as he made his way forward.
"We're still alive for now." Malik's sour voice came from somewhere to the left. Harry gritted his teeth against a sharp reply.
"Everyone come to the center then," Kingsley said. "We need to stay together until we figure out what to do."
"What we do?" Malik demanded. "What is there to do? Every plan I knew of involved keeping this from happening."
"And now that it has happened anyway, we're going to find a way to fix it," Harry snapped at him. He reached the dais and leaned against it next to Kingsley, who looked like a grey ghost. Above them, the stone archway stood untouched as if nothing had happened, the veil fluttering as it always had. Somehow though, it seemed to be different. Harry stared at it as Malik and Yugi reached them, both coughing as they tried to breathe the dust-choked air.
"So?" the Egyptian boy said. "What's your big plan to fix this?"
"Kill Zorc," Harry answered flatly. "When you're done being so critical of me, maybe you could help me figure out how."
Malik opened his mouth, but no comment came out. As loathe as he was to admit it, the wizard had a point. Being rude and sarcastic was a waste of time while Zorc had the run of London.
"If Atem were here, he would know what to do," Yugi murmured in Japanese.
"Don't start that," Malik said, sitting down with a sigh. "The wizards in ancient times couldn't kill Zorc, so I doubt the pharaoh would be of much help."
"You sound like you've already given up," Harry said.
"Well sorry," Malik snapped at him. "It must have something to do with watching thousands of years of my family's work go up in smoke."
"I thought the two of you had agreed to not fight," Kingsley said. He spoke in a mild tone, but both boys looked away in embarrassment. Everything fell quiet then, except for the cries of distress above them, and it was then that Harry realized what seemed different about the veil. He no longer heard the voices that had once whispered to him from the other side. Zorc's rebirth had even silenced the dead.
The light, already dim and murky, began to fade even further, and chunks of the ceiling fell to the ground nearby. Harry yelped as flying gravel pelted his face. "I vote we get out of here before we do anything else. Which way is the door?"
"Harry!" called a voice from above before anyone could answer. "Is that you, mate?"
"Ron?" Harry yelled back. He looked up, saw nothing, muttered "Lumos," raised his lit wand, and still saw nothing.
"Harry, are you all right?" cried Hermione's shrill voice.
"I'm fine. What about you?"
"We're okay! Stay there, Harry, we'll come down to you."
"No!" Harry called. "Hermione, wait, it's too dan—" He was cut off as another cascade of debris fell nearby.
"Keep your voice down!" Kingsley said. "The ceiling is too unstable to be yelling back and forth at one another."
"In that case, we should get out of here before people start wandering down and asking what happened," Malik said. He pulled himself back up and tried to rub some of the dirt off his face, but only smeared it around. "I think the arch was facing the way we came in, so we should be able to get out by walking straight ahead…if we're not crushed to death. Got any spells to keep us alive long enough to even see Zorc again?"
Harry sighed and didn't bother to answer. Together they started walking through the gloom toward the first step of the amphitheater, but they had barely made it when Yugi suddenly stopped.
"What?" Harry asked him as they all looked back.
"My Puzzle," he responded. "It is…warm."
Harry looked down at the golden pyramid cradled in Yugi's hands. Strangely, it was untouched by the dirt that hung in the air; it even glowed faintly. "Wait, has it always done that?" he asked.
Beside him, Malik muttered a curse in Arabic. "Only when its power is being accessed."
Yugi looked up with wide eyes. "Masaka. Zorc—"
"No," came a voice from the dais. Everyone turned in that direction and stared in shock.
A figure stood in the arch, a shadow within the ethereal light of the veil. A golden glow that matched that of Yugi's Puzzle emanated from his chest. The figure walked forward, away from the arch, and stepped off the dais. By then he was close enough for the light from Harry's and Kingsley's wands to reach him through the filthy air, and they could see that it was Bakura.
They could see it, but none of them could quite believe it.
In the resounding silence, Bakura walked right up to Yugi and grabbed his head. Malik shouted, and both wizards snapped their wands around to point at the white-haired boy. No one had time to do anything more though, as both the Millennium Ring and the Puzzle pulsed with a light so brilliant that all three were forced to turn away and cover their eyes. The glow faded as quickly as it had flared, leaving the Ring inert, though the Puzzle retained a soft light. Bakura let Yugi go and backed away a step.
Harry immediately whipped his wand back up at the white-haired boy. "Reduc—" he started, but Malik shoved him aside, interrupting the spell as he sprinted toward his two friends. The young wizard growled a curse as he stood up and rubbed his sore knee. Readying his wand, he opened his mouth to try the curse again, only to be stopped this time by Kingsley's hand on his arm.
"I understand how you feel, Harry," he said. "But you cannot assume that he is an enemy. Watch how those who know him react, then judge the best course."
"Kingsley, he tried to kill me."
"Did he?" Kingsley replied. "Or was it the thing that came through the veil before him?"
Harry pulled his arm away, but he knew that the older wizard was right. His head still pounded from the blow he had received upstairs, but when he looked at Bakura (now talking to Yugi and Malik with no trace of fear or wariness among any of them), he saw nothing of the manic violence the younger man had displayed earlier. Yet still, something about him was unsettling. It was with trepidation and a tightly gripped wand that Harry approached him.
"What is going on?" he demanded. "How—how did you…?" His gaze flicked to the veil and back to Bakura's face.
The young man smiled a little and lifted the Millennium Ring.
Harry only kept staring at him, unable to understand what the gesture meant.
"The Millennium Ring protected you," Kingsley said. He stepped up beside Harry, his posture much more at ease though he also had not yet put his wand away. "How?"
"There will be time enough for questions and answers later," Bakura replied, letting the Ring drop back to his chest. "Right now we have a demon to kill, and we must act quickly if we are to have any chance at all."
"Then I hope you already have a plan, because I have no idea where to begin and he hasn't been much help." Harry jerked his head at Malik.
The Egytian did not rise to the bait; he didn't even look in Harry's direction. His eyes were fixed on Yugi, and he asked a question in a language that didn't quite sound like Japanese or Arabic. The smaller boy gave a lengthy reply in the same language. Before Harry could complain, Malik turned to him sharply and said, "We need the rest of the Millennium Items."
"What for?" the young wizard snapped.
"For a spell," Yugi said in a voice that made Harry turn around and give him a closer look. It was deeper than his usual voice, and flavored with a strange accent that he could not identify. That was not the only difference, either. Yugi seemed taller somehow, and there was a steady confidence in his gaze that wasn't typical of his age. In fact, Hary would have sworn that right then he was not looking at a teenager, but at someone far, far older. "A spell that will defeat Zorc?" he asked.
"No, but it will help," the older-Yugi said. "We will need your help as well, wizard. Can you trust us to know what to do to win?"
"We have no choice," Kingsley said. "Whatever you need from us, I can help you get."
A faint roar reached their ears from above, and a tremor ran through the ground, punctuated by the sound of falling debris and a new layer of dust clouding the air. Harry swallowed all his questions and confusion and nodded his agreement with Kingsley's words. Now was not the time for stubbornness.
"We need the Millennium Items first," Bakura said. "Once we have everything prepared, we will need as many people who know how to fight as we can find, preferably people who have known many who have died."
Harry's gut twisted painfully. "We've only recently survived a war; most of the wizards here qualify on both counts. Why in the world would that matter, anyway?"
"Zorc Necrophades is not a denizen of the living world, so thus he cannot be killed here," the older-Yugi said. "The world of the dead is where he must be slain, and with the aid of the dead."
"So…this spell with the Millennium Items will drive Zorc back into the world of the dead?" Harry asked, hoping fervently that the strange group wasn't going to tell him that he would also be going there for the final battle. However, what Bakura said next was much worse.
"No." The white-haired boy gave him a chilling little smile. "We are going to bring the world of the dead into our own."
Ron and Hermione found them in the round room just as they were bringing the Millennium Items back to the veil. "Harry!" Hermione cried, flinging her arms around her friend. "You're filthy! Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, Hermione, but I don't have time to talk right now," he told her. "Are you okay?" He looked over her head at Ron to include him in the question as he kept walking.
"We were just shaken, mate," Ron said. "Can you at least tell us what happened? Looks like whatever it was broke this room."
Indeed, the room had a large crack across the floor, and a few stones had fallen from the ceiling. The blue candles still shone, but it had not moved when Malik and Harry came through it to get the Items and closed the door behind them, and it wasn't moving now. Harry only counted that as a blessing; Anderson had run away to who knew where, so they would not have had a guide to get them through the right doors if the room's defenses still worked.
Now he followed Malik to the door that would take them back to the veil, carrying the Millennium Scales and Ankh. Inert only a scant hour before, they now thrummed in his hands, and he was eager to be rid of them. As they walked, he summed up the events of the past hour as quickly as he could. The looks of growing horror on his friends' faces were almost too much to bear, and he cursed his own inability to stop the disaster.
"Harry, you can't blame yourself for this," Hermione said, correctly interpreting the look on his face. "It would have happened whether or not you were there."
"I let my guard down," Harry answered bitterly.
"Sure did," Malik muttered.
"And if you hadn't, he would have killed you," Ron said, shooting a glare at the Egyptian boy. "We saw the bodies at the bottom of the lift, mate. You got off lucky any way you look at it."
"Thanks," Harry muttered, although he didn't feel any better. Remembering the five dead wizards in the lift shaft made his stomach churn.
The dust in the veil's chamber had finally settled, so Bakura saw them right as they entered and jumped up the tiers to get the Millennium Items. He shot a curious look at Hermione and Ron but spared no time for questions. Instead, he gathered the Items and jumped back down to the dais, where the Ring, Puzzle, and Rod were already arranged around the arch.
"Er, is there anything else you need?" Harry asked, watching him place the rest of the Items in the circle.
"Yes, enough quiet for me to concentrate," Bakura replied. He settled down within the circle of Items, facing the veil, and stared at it as if it were his mortal enemy instead of Zorc.
"He looks scared," Hermione said quietly.
Ron snorted. "I don't see why. What could possibly go wrong with trying to mix the living world with the dead one?"
Malik shot him a dirty look, but he didn't say anything as Yugi stepped forward and knelt beside Bakura.
"Out of the circle, pharaoh," Bakura snapped.
Yugi didn't move. "You will need help in this."
"I started this mess," the white-haired boy replied. "I will be the one to finish it."
"You can try," Yugi said, standing up. "But I will help if I have to. You're not alone anymore, Bakura." He turned around and walked back to the edge of the dais where the wizards and Malik were waiting, and so he missed the grateful glance that Bakura threw his way.
"Pharaoh?" Hermione asked him quietly as he faced the veil again and sat down on the platform's edge. He spared her only a brief, unreadable look and focused his attention on the spell that Bakura had just begun to chant in that strange language he had spoken earlier.
"Atem came back through the veil with Bakura," Malik told her. "I trust your friend here has already told you his story and his connection to Yugi. He used his connection with the Millennium Items to reestablish it so he could help us."
Hermione looked back to the younger boy with awe. "Harry told me about it, but it wasn't a very believable story."
"I believe it now," Ron said as the Millennium Items began to glow softly.
Harry leaned forward beside Atem. He felt strange—on one hand, the boy still looked like the innocent young man he had met in Bakura's Tokyo apartment, but on the other hand his eyes held that ancient look that betrayed his origins and heritage. How was he supposed to act toward a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian pharaoh? In the end, he simply asked the question on and prayed he wasn't being offensive.
"Sir, can you tell us what he's saying?"
And to his surprise, Atem answered.
"He calls on the power of the Items. They are linked to death because of the ritual that created them: the flesh and blood of one hundred people were melted into their gold. He will summon these spirits first, and others will follow."
"How are spirits going to make the worlds merge?" Ron asked.
"By tearing down the barrier between them." Atem inclined his head toward the arch. "The barrier exists at the threshold of every doorway. Usually it represents itself as light. Here it manifests as a veil. When the veil is torn, the worlds will no longer be separate, but one. The Millennium Items hold the power to do this, but they are inert objects. The barrier can only be harmed by beings, be they living or spirit, and so Bakura now uses a spell to transfer that power to the spirits of the dead."
"How horrible," Hermione whispered. She turned to look at Harry, her face very pale even in the golden light of the Items. "Can you imagine if Voldemort had this kind of power?"
"He wouldn't have used it," Harry replied. "He was too afraid of death."
All the Millennium Items suddenly gave off a pulse of light, forcing everyone to shield their eyes. They faded quickly back to the steady bright glow they had achieved during Bakura's chant, and Harry lowered his arm to gawk at the scene before him.
Bakura no longer sat alone in the circle of Items. On either side of him knelt a lovely woman and a young girl, both smiling at him though their eyes showed great sadness. Bakura himself kept his gaze on the veil, but a single tear trace a trail down his cheek.
"He calls for the spirits of the dead by name now," Atem said. "I only hope he knows enough."
"How many spirits will it take to bring down the barrier?" Hermione asked as a dark-skinned woman in strange clothes walked silently out of the arch. The new spirit took her place in front of the white-haired boy and reached out with a spectral hand to touch his cheek.
Atem's answer to Hermione was grim. "Many."
An Egyptian man walked out of the veil and joined the woman, and another followed soon after. From far above, Zorc's roar echoed through the air. Harry swallowed, and on impulse he jumped up on the dais and walked over to the ritual. Just outside the circle of Items, he hesitated, unsure of what he thought he could do to help. Just then, another woman walked out of the veil, holding the hand of a toddler who had to be no more than two years old.
Are these the people that died to make the Millennium Items, like Atem said? Harry thought first. My God, they killed even children?
Then he wondered, How many children has Zorc killed already?
How many is he killing right now?
He stepped into the circle. Bakura did not acknowledge his presence or slow his chant in the least, but a couple of spirits moved aside to make room for him. "I'm pretty sure you can hear me," Harry began. "And I'm sorry, I know you wanted to do this alone. But this is my world too, and my friends that are in danger. I won't sit back and watch you fail just to satisfy your own guilty conscience when I can summon more help."
Bakura didn't respond, but the girl sitting beside him looked at Harry and smiled. He took that as encouragement and faced the arch, raising his wand for good measure. The veil, which always before had only fluttered, now flapped as if buffeted by a strong wind. Harry watched it nervously for a second, and then he tightened his grip, curled his free hand into a fist, and uttered his first name. "James Potter."
Three more of the strange Egyptians walked through the veil to join the crowd. Feeling stupid but still determined, Harry shifted his feet and raised his wand a little higher. "James Potter!" he called again, louder this time.
"'I summon James Potter forth from Death's realm by the power of Millennia,'" said a quiet voice behind him.
Harry spared a glance back to see Atem. The pharaoh had a faint smile on his face, as if he approved of the wizard's bold action. For some reason, that only made Harry feel more awkward. Turning back to the veil, he repeated the new phrase.
The next spirit to walk through the veil was his father.
James Potter moved to stand beside his son, laying a hand on his shoulder. Harry couldn't feel it, but he drew strength from the gesture anyway. "I summon Lily Potter forth from Death's realm by the power of Millennia," he continued. "I summon Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore forth from Death's realm by the power of Millennia." His voice cracked on his former mentor's ridiculously long name, for he could not help but stifle a small laugh. "I summon Sirius Black forth from Death's realm by the power of Millennia."
He felt Ron and Hermione enter the circle as well, lending their voices to the call, and he tried not to repeat the names that they began to call.
"…Fred Weasley…"
"…Remus Lupin…"
"…Nymphadora Tonks…"
"…Severus Snape…"
"…Cedric Diggory…"
Soon Kingsley's deep voice joined the chorus, calling for people who had died in the first war, long before Harry could have ever known them.
"…Fabian Prewitt…"
"…Gideon Prewitt…"
"…Marlene McKinnon…"
"…Dorcas Meadowes…"
"…Emmeline Vance…"
And so the chants went on, and slowly the room filled with the smiling, sorrowful spirits of the dead. Not all of those called came through the veil, but Harry could sense them on the other side, ready to help tear down the barrier.
They all stopped at the same time, and the sudden silence seemed louder than their combined voices. The spirits all stood at the ready, looking at Bakura. He barked out four harsh words, making Harry wince, and the glow from the Millennium Items grew and expanded, becoming a glow that seemed to come from the air all around them. It was a strange kind of light, obscuring the surroundings instead of revealing them. Harry looked around, but he could see nothing clearly except the spirits surrounding him. So many faces that he thought to never see again. He wanted dearly to talk to them, tell them that their deaths had not been in vain, that life had gotten better after Voldemort's defeat…for a little while, at least. However, he feared that to speak now would break the spell.
From somewhere behind him, Bakura snapped out another command, and as one, all the spirits lifted their hands, positioning them as if they were finding cracks in the light that Harry couldn't see. One last time, the white-haired boy spoke, and the spirits pulled.
A low, bone-chilling moan echoed through the chamber as the light crumbled into nothing.
In the center of the arch, the veil tore in half and fell to the ground.
