To Ride Upon Svadilfari
-Chapter Twenty-
Bolide
It seemed that Malekith had finished gloating, for the red-tinted force of the Aether repelled Thor, leaving him sprawling in the sand thirty feet back from his original position.
With a cry that rent the air, more dragon-shriek than any noise capable of being produced by the human throat, Harry shifted his grip on Caladbolg and brought it in a glittering arc, rainbows of light trailing in the wake of the blade. Though he stood well back, only having advanced a few steps forward from where Loki and Hermione still stood, Caladbolg was not limited by the reach of its blade. There was the sound of sheering metal as the stroke impacted the ship, but before it could trace more than a faint scar on the black surface, shields engaged and most of the remaining force of the blow was dispersed violently, an accompanying sonic boom testifying to the energy.
Setting his feet more firmly in the sand, which offered little in the way of traction or footing, Harry tried again, this time the rainbow arc of the swing colored more intensely. But even before the impact hit, the ship's shields engaged visibly, so that when the strike hit, she could briefly glimpse the energy that made Caladolg's incredible abilities possible. But though the shields repelled the strike, the ship itself shuddered, tilting slightly.
Foot soldiers in their white masks began to swarm from the ship on some unheard command. "Concentrate on the ship!" Hermione barked at Harry, who didn't turn to look at her, but his horns dipped as he nodded.
Her wand sketching an angry pattern in the air, Hermione hissed a spell, a huge explosion tufting sand high into the air and obscuring whatever she managed to achieve with it. As the soldiers marched onward undaunted, simply skirting their dead, and she caught sight of Malakith expression, her grip on her wand tightened.
She could feel the Aether's power build with Malekith in its epicenter, then in a crushing wave expanded outward. Hermione braced herself, casting her shielding spell with little hope that it would be effective. Standing so close to Loki, she noted when he did something similar, being enveloped by an almost perfect orb of green-tinted energy that displaced the sand at his feet.
But the Aether washed around her, seeping into the sand. Beneath her feet, the planet seemed to shudder. "What's he doing?" she asked Loki sharply.
"While it's flattering that you seem to assume I know any better than you," Loki said tightly, "I am afraid I am as blind to the Aether's capabilities as you are."
The shuddering increased and Hermione nearly lost her footing, so she widened her stance and dug her heels into the sand. Dark shapes began to rise from the sand, making roaring waterfalls as they emerged. The shapes became more distinct as the shed their cloak of long obscurity. Ships, perhaps a full dozen of them, and smaller shapes as well. One emerged not two feet to her right. Standing chest-high, it was, in plain terms, a robotic dog. That did it a disservice, however, and didn't fully describe the sleek, powerful lines and elegant design of what seemed almost to be a living beast, except that she could clearly see the overlapping black plates that it was constructed of.
Shaking of its last coat of sand, its red-lit eyes turned toward her and it opened its mouth in a feral growl, revealing teeth that were constructed of the Aether-energy.
"Oh, I know what that one is," Loki said most unhelpfully. "Svartalfaheim's Surtrhundr were the envy of any among the æsir who ever hunted. Tireless, dauntless, and possessed of senses far beyond any normal beast, they also had teeth capable of piercing even the strongest armor. Once, they were used for sport, to hunt condemned prisoners across the surface of the planet."
"Really?" Hermione asked with interest. intrigued despite herself. "Did they-"
"Don't you dare hold a discussion about this!" Harry shouted, they being not quite out of earshot.
Loki sighed in a put-upon way. Then, before her eyes could track the movement, Loki was in motion, sweeping in front of her to drive one of his daggers deep in the neck of the beast, but it seemed not even to feel the blow as it turned its eerie eyes on him. It did not growl at him, its silence more unnerving than any sound it might have made.
"Well," Loki said as he was forced to spin to the side to avoid the teeth he'd mentioned. His expression was remarkably composed, even as the hund was flung to the side by the same force that had protected him from the Aether. "Do you think my father might get me one?" he asked her with a grin that he hadn't worn before in her presence, one that had neither a cruel edge nor someone's pain behind its amusement. It made him look remarkably handsome.
"Doubtful," Hermione answered. "Can you...your shielding, can you extend it to me as well?" she asked, eyes on the approaching hoard. Harry's first swing of Caladbolg had severed upper from lower, spilling entrails into the sand and blood arching into the air, but his second blow was combated by Aether-shields.
Hermione glanced upward to find Malakith standing in midair, surveying the battle like a conductor might his orchestra. The great teethlike ships were drawing closer, creating a vast ring around the four of them.
"I can keep them from you," Loki said. "Another spell?"
"Yes," Hermione answered. "Will you keep them from me?" she demanded.
Loki glanced over at her. "You are now going to clarify your every question?" he asked with good humor.
"I've dealt with many beings who would sooner adhere to the letter of a contract rather than the spirit of it. I am not Thor."
"If you make it a challenge, I will feel compelled to seek out loopholes," Loki pointed out.
"See it as a gesture of respect rather than a challenge," Hermione countered. "Will you shield me?"
"Go on," Harry growled, suddenly at Hermione's side. "If he doesn't shield you, I'll make sure that he regrets it." His eyes were trained on the other forming group, Thor and Jane. Hermione had almost forgotten the astrophysicist's presence, but Thor was building his battle-strategy around her protection. The flat, featureless landscape was incredibly poor for defense and he was soon going to have to be aware of potential threat from every direction as the hunds and foot-soldiers were determinedly flanking him despite mounting losses.
Hermione nodded to Harry even as Loki sulked, closing her eyes to increase her focus. Conjuration was a discipline linked strongly to transfiguration, which was why it wasn't taught as a separate subject. Hermione had been talented at both. Transfiguration in some ways was easier, in some ways more difficult. Transfiguring one substance to another, especially when doing so from animate to inanimate, required such an in-depth understanding of both substances that they were given seven years of lessons that wouldn't have looked too terribly strange in Muggle medical schools.
There was no real need to create the transfigured mice and other small creatures as complete beings, as magic would keep them alive without any real internal organs. But these 'hollow creatures' required a constant feed of magic to maintain, while completed creatures formed a closed system that could sustain itself when left to its own devices. Most of them would eventually, after days, months, or years, depending upon the wizard who'd cast the spell, return to their original state. The same held true for conjured creatures. But while they had worked with 'real' creatures common to the world, there was only the limit of imagination as to what they could actually create. Though while she might be able to conjure a dragon, creating a magical creature complete with magical abilities was something beyond the reach of all but the most specialized and powerful of wizards.
But she didn't intend to conjure a dragon. Instead, she focused on the sand beneath their feet, constructing the image she needed for transfiguration. When she'd fixed the image in her mind, complete from internal mechanisms outward, she pulled on the power of the Elder Wand and snapped the word of the invocation.
Eyes opening with satisfaction as she felt the world warp to suit her will, she watched as the sand sunk in places into pits.
"Sandtraps? Quicksand?" Harry asked doubtfully.
Hermione watched as a soldier half-slid into one of the pits and long mandibles burst through the sand to capture his leg and pull him down. "Antlions," she said smugly.
"Control?" Harry asked.
"Of course. You think that I'd just let loose monsters and hope they don't turn on us?"
"It's been done," he said, smile quirking upward as he recalled a few incidences where her temper had raced ahead of her good sense.
"What can't you do with your magic?" Loki asked, lips turning downward as he surveyed the chaos she'd turned the battlefield into. A hund lunged for his throat and he kicked it away without ever shifting expression, shifting to the side as a second followed. Catching it about the throat, he switched his hold on his dagger and traced an icy path like to a collar, flipping the dagger and using the hilt to tap the metal. The hund's head separated from its body and dropped to the sand. It didn't rise again.
Harry plunged Caladbolg deep into a soldier who'd drawn too close, leaving the massive sword sheathed in the Dark Elf as he pulled his wand out and muttered an incantation that
"No doppelgangers?" Hermione asked Loki.
"I have full control of the tangibility of my doppelgangers, but giving them substance enough to fight battles is very like to fighting several battles simultaneously. Even I am not able to sustain that pace of battle for long."
The first panic caused by her antlions was fading and the buzzing hisses and clicks of the insects were being silenced by the hunds, who were diving fearlessly into the sand, their metal pelts denting beneath the powerful mandibles but not being unduly harmed by them. Their Aether-fangs found no resistance in the insect's carapaces as they tore them apart.
The great fang-shaped ships seemed to have also settled into new positions, some partially destroyed, but with the way they seethed with red-tinted Aether energy told her that the damage that battle and time had done to them was irrelevant with the benefit of their energy source.
"What are the chances that those ships are charging some sort of immensely powerful attack?" Harry asked dryly.
"Oh, very probably. Although he just used them as hammers to crush the opposing army in Asgard's last battle on Svartalfahiem, so perhaps he will simply try to crush us."
"Comforting," Harry said, pulling Caladbolg free from the Dark Elf corpse with one hand. But rather than using it, he let its presence fade. Hermione, who'd been busily wrecking carnage by virtue of spells infused with the power of the Elder Wand-twisters of fire curling from the sky, kicking up sand to driven by a spell that conjured a driving wind and transfiguring them to needles as they flew, transfiguring several hunds quite poorly into rabbits and managing only give them pelts of white fur as either her lack of knowledge of their inner workings threw of her magic or she discovered they were resistant to it-glanced at him.
They'd remained in their tight triad, giving them numbers enough that they could defend no matter the approach of their enemy. Harry had assumed the role of shield, as Hermione's shields had again failed beneath the onslaught of dark-energy and he didn't trust Loki to do so. His powerful magic throbbed around them, near-visible in its intensity, keeping them safe, but Hermione's arm pulsed more unpleasantly as her earlier wound was strained by both use of the arm and magic.
None of their members had yet sustained serious injury, but that could all change in an instant, for Malakith's warrior, while not quite an army, were quite enough to have them seriously outnumbered, and his resurrected Surtrhundr were even more difficult to kill than his footsoldiers.
Loki ventured in and out of their protective shield, risking his real body in combat, but also materializing doppelgangers behind his enemies, giving them just enough tangibility to slit their throats. But the practice was apparently taxing to his energy. He was breathing heavily and sweat was beading at his temples.
"Alright?" she asked. Magic wasn't physically taxing to wizards in the same way that his magic seemed to be, but she could already feel the strain on her body in different ways. The feasts of Hogwarts were very practical things, for working magic could waste a wizard away to bones, flesh, and magic. Magic was an inexhaustible resource, but what they referred to as the natural magic of a wizard, intimately connected to their power, was a measure of how much magic a wizard was capable of bending to their will at a single point in time. When that limit was reached, the symptom was something like being burned from the inside out. Wizards were the only beings actually capable of spontaneous combustion due to magic overuse, though it wasn't always fire that consumed them. And it took a madman to press past the point of pain to where they would actually die from the force they wielded.
She wasn't yet in danger of that, but eventually she would collapse.
"I will manage," Loki told her tightly.
"Hermione," Harry said, voice low and feral.
She looked to him and he regarded her very seriously. When a nonverbal privacy charm enveloped them, he spoke. "Caladbolg isn't enough to get past the shields on the ships."
She immediately divined the direction this conversation would take. "The Dragon?"
The muscles in Harry's jaw tightened. "Dragonfire might work. I'm going to give it a try. But the Aether is something awful. If...something goes wrong, if I lose control, please don't let Loki or Thor interfere if I try to give you the Aether. I think once you host it, we'll have enough time to figure out how to extract and seal it again, but..."
Hermione worried her lip. "Harry, dragons never surrender treasure willingly," she said in a small voice.
He frowned more deeply. "I know. But we're outnumbered and outmatched. This time, I'm not willing to wait until the last moment to act. That's what brought us to this world."
Hermione hesitated, then nodded. "Then if you're willing to risk that, then I'll raise Fiendfyre."
Harry's brows rose, then he smiled crookedly. "Morals giving way in the face of need," he teased, but Hermione didn't smile.
"Get off the ground," he told her. "See if Loki has a form strong enough to bear you up, then tell Thor to get Jane clear. You'll never forgive yourself if you lose control." His hand reached out and squeezed hers in a gesture of reassurance. "Not that Hermione Granger would ever lose control," he said dryly.
She summoned up a shaky smile with which to answer him and had to force her hand to release him as he allowed the privacy spell to fail.
"Is there a plan?" Loki asked irritably, obviously somewhat angry at his exclusion. Harry didn't answer, instead sheathing his wand and launching himself upward, shifting to his dragon-self. For a moment, her heart soared as she looked on the majestic spread of his wings and his powerful, armored body.
But then she discovered what the ships had been waiting for.
Harry's shriek of pain left her deaf for several moments, but she could feel herself shouting Harry's name. Dragon blood hissed upon the battlefield, like an acid rain, but as his body impacted the sand, kicking up a great cloud of it, Harry rolled and pushed off again, using the speed that had once matched that of a Firebolt to avoid the worst of the fire.
As he belched fire upon the ships that were trying to destroy him, Hermione grasped Loki's hand. The movement and perhaps the contact startled Loki, so it was wide eyes that met her own as she pulled him to face her.
"Do you have a form capable of flight that can bear a human?" she snapped.
Loki's brows rose. "To what purpose-?"
She restrained herself from shaking him. "Do you?" she demanded more forcefully.
"Yes," he said, obviously still a bit bemused.
"Then, please," Hermione said, gesturing harshly for him to assume the form.
"I'll have you know that women who desire to ride me usually request to do so a great deal less brusquely," Loki quipped, but in moments an immense eagle was on the sand before her, dark-feathered with his pinions edged in gold.
Thanking Ron silently for the gift of her hippogriff all those years ago, Hermione mounted in such a way that his wings were unhindered, though his body was broader and less comfortable for riding than any hippogriff or winged horse she had ever ridden.
"I'm going to call up a very different kind of fire," she told him, "and there's a possibility that I'll lose control of it. We need to get to Thor. He needs to get off the ground."
Loki shuffled his wings in what she supposed was agreement. Arching his neck beneath her, Hermione realized it was a silent admonition for her to hold tight and she did so, clutching tightly at as many feathers as she could gather into her hands so she didn't run the risk of plucking one and causing him pain.
His powerful legs launched them into the air. Rather than flying the short distance between their position and Thor's directly, his powerful wingbeats took them soaring into the sky, his smaller, more agile body avoiding what Harry's mass could not, though Hermione had to grit her teeth against the scream that built in her throat at his maneuvers. There was none of the sense of power and control that was imparted by riding winged horses or hippogriffs. It was very clear to her that she was trusting herself to Loki, who had proven less than an hour ago that he couldn't be trusted.
They reached the peak of their arc and then, with a shrieking cry, he folded his wings and sent them swooping downward. Hermione leaned close to his neck, minimizing her profile so that she wouldn't be pulled off by the force of the wind, which was still filled with grains of sand that stung her eyes. Eyes watering, she blinked them clear as Loki, rather than landing, simply snatched Jane up in his talons and began to climb again.
Thor shouted something unintelligible, but he took to the air.
Glancing once more at Harry, Hermione spoke the incantation for Fiendfyre, feeling the spell work itself through her body, warming her with a warmth almost sexual as it in turn fed from her intent to destroy her enemy. Fiendfyre was Dark. There was no argument that could be made to counter that. Holding her wand aloft, Hermione gritted her teeth as fire arched from it. Loki's flight, made erratic by the need to keep avoiding the fire of the ships, which had turned some measure of their attention to them, meant that she couldn't concentrate the flame into a single beast, but that which rose from the unformed fire was sufficient for her cause.
Great nundu-like cats rose first, taking the Sutrhundr in strong jaws that crushed the metal of their bodies even as it began to melt. Dragon, serpents, chimaeras also rose from the flames, their attacks broader as they spread, rendering them into little more than ash. The battlefield below quickly became a sea of fire populated by monsters and it was with a great roar that that sea crashed into the great ships of the Dark Elves, breaking upon them like waves, fire rushing upward so close to them that Loki's flight was swept upward on an updraft of heat.
Harry's fire, distinguishable as it blazed blue, joined the Fiendfyre, but even he kept well clear of the fangs and talons of the flaming beasts. One by one, the ships toppled and crashed into the sand below, where they were overrun. When the last ship had fallen, Hermione bit the inside of her mouth so hard that it bled, drawing together her will so that she could cast the counter-incantation.
The fire retreated only reluctantly, but when it had at last been silenced, the sand beneath had been melted, slag glass and obsidian revealing the components of the sand. But standing there, untouched by a fire that had the power to consume souls, was Malekith.