To Ride Upon Svadilfari

-Chapter Twenty-Eight-

The Collapse of the Cosmological Constant

Hermione breathed deep the stinging, more than slightly polluted air that filled Midgard's New York City and felt at ease. Unlike her other adventures, this one had a less pressing time schedule. Balder had been dead for hundreds of years and nothing was likely to change that or make him more difficult or easier to retrieve no matter how long they delayed. So there was to be no haring off ill-prepared. Odin had granted them three days on Midgard to arrange for their absence, whether that absence was permanent or otherwise.

She was putting off the painful process of deciding to withdraw completely from her university or simply make some other arrangement concerning her classes this semester by coming here. Hermione doubted Tony Stark was the kind to offer advice when someone was in need, but he made it very difficult to concentrate on her own issues. He was his own personal gravitation field and his universe revolved quite blatantly around Tony Stark. What made it disgusting was that he somehow managed to make it charming rather than off-putting, though she supposed it helped that he was handsome and richer than Afagddu, who'd ruled the goblins before the great wars that had left Wizards the contested but triumphant rulers of magic.

She was allowed entry into Stark Tower without even a single demand for identification. The reason why became obvious as the last set of doors closed behind her. "I have alerted Mr. Stark of you presence, Ms. Granger. He asks that you join him in the lab. If you will proceed to the elevator, I will escort you there," JARVIS said.

"Of course. Thank you," Hermione returned politely, doing as requested. The elevator took her above the regular floors, to the levels she'd heard Ms. Potts refer to as 'Tony's toybox.' It was certainly true it resembled some sort of mad child's dream, less laboratory and more dreamscape, peopled by robots with distinct personality which kept him company as he transformed the laws of science into flexible guidelines.

She'd only been there three times, but it wasn't the sort of place one ever forgot.

When the doors opened, she found Tony busily doing...something, ignoring the robotic arm that was prodding him the arm with an extended plate of what appeared to be muffins. Finally he turned to glare at it. "Poke me with the again and you'll find yourself repurposed to sort mail." With a sad kind of whirring that made the scene even more surreal, the robot relented and sat the plate on a nearby surface with a sulky click.

"Of course," Tony said, "You're welcome to the muffins if you'd like them, Hermione. Some sort of wholegrain and seed business that Pepper left, so they probably won't kill you."

Hermione smiled at his offer. "No, thank you. I've already had breakfast."

"So you say now," Tony retorted, "but let's see if that's the story you tell when the doughnuts get here. So, what brings you to my playground? Or do you want me to guess? That would be fun too."

She cleared her throat. "I don't know how closely you follow my grades..."

Tony snorted. "I was prepared to buy your degree, but all I hear from your dean is 'Hermione this' and 'Hermione that' and 'we'd like to award Hermione this scholarship because she has this irritating eidetic memory that gives her an unfair advantage over all our other hardworking students who actually have to work at it-also could you mention to her she takes up an unfair amount of our professors office hours considering she probably needs the least help of any student we've ever had.' Things like that."

Hermione blinked. "He didn't really say that."

"Well, no, not directly. Do you actually monopolize your professors' office hours?"

"That's what office hours are for, aren't they. You hardly see other students making use of them unless there's a paper due. And they're still undergraduate courses yet, so that's actually somewhat disappointingly rare."

Tony gave her a blank look. "You're 'disappointed'," he made air quotes with his fingers, "there weren't more papers?"

"Yes. Why not? Classes are too short to have any really in-depth analysis of anything, so papers are the perfect way to show your professors you have a real grasp of the material."

"Right," Tony drawled. "Well, that' s the kind of attitude I'll one day pay you for, so keep that up." He clapped his hands, declaring that subject closed and the lights in the room darkened, so that the holograms his machines projected were more brightly visible in the air. Schematics of some kind, she thought, though for what she couldn't determine. "Okay, grades. I doubt you're here to report on them-you'd likely send an actual report if it came to that, so something bad is about to happen to them. Does this have something to do with Thor's mysterious reappearance this morning?"

He rolled his eyes at her startled glance. He pointed to himself. "Genius. But that's irrelevant. In this case I'm just not stupid. Thor reappears and snatches Jane. Mysterious and coincidental absence from your classes. Equally coincidental reappearance when Thor reappears. If you tell me you haven't been slumming in Asgard, I'm going to be disappointed. What's the booze like?"

"I wasn't there to drink, but they make a very fine hard cider from pears."

Tony hummed thoughtfully. "What, you didn't enjoy the mead? And here I was looking forward to drinking stories that involved at least a goat."

Hermione frowned at him and Tony raised his hand. "Hey-remember, Tony rules apply in this room. You get to pretend to have a sense of humor."

"In that case, no goats, but there was these handsome, clever ravens..."

Tony snorted. "You need to work on your sordid storytelling. Okay, so no drinking contests with the gods. So what did you do while you were there? And why do you have to go back?"

Hermione prevaricated. "Well, Odin thought we could be useful in a certain matter..."

"Useful for you debating skills or useful because you're magic-wielding aliens from another dimension?"

"Funny, Tony," Hermione said, crossing her arms.

"What's so funny about that? I was being serious. I have to say, Harry takes a little getting used to, but you might be able to make a case for fantasy pin-up girl, so long as you're fine with appealing to the severe librarian crowd. You're not really well-endowed enough to-"

Hermione held up a hand, forestalling that conversation. "I think I've missed something."

"Missed? No. I've just been spying on you. And before you tell me it's illegal, I'll have you know that there isn't anything to protect the rights of actual aliens in the states of New York or Connecticut."

"Please tell me that you didn't actually ask someone that."

Tony tilted his head from one side to the other as if he was literally juggling a thought. "No. But I'll make you half a million dollar wager that there aren't any actual laws that protect real aliens. So, why don't you make yourself comfortable, take of that whatever it is kind of magic that you're wearing, so I can get a look up close? Please?"

Hermione sighed, contemplated her options swiftly, then decided if Harry had felt secure in revealing himself to extremely questionable allies, she could do the same for Tony. But she would do it properly, because it wasn't only anger that had made her snap at Harry so. Oaths were very serious things in the Wizarding world, with sometimes unpredictable consequences once broken. Secret-Keeping, Wand-Oaths, Vows of all kinds, none were simple words, simple promises. Her Marriage Vow was actually the mildest oath she was party too, as she and Ron had chosen one of mutual toleration. Not that adultery was to be expected or personally tolerated from either of them, but some of the old, very traditional Vows had the capacity to cause excruciating pain from something as benign-in the modern world at least-as embracing another man.

As she had no desire to deal with her Marriage Vow interfering with her ability to spontaneously hug Harry, Hermione had patiently explained to many of her new in-laws how the lesser Vow was a sign of the trust between them rather than any lack of commitment to the marriage. And if Ron had experienced a lapse in judgment, she really preferred that it be her choice to punish him for it or not, rather than relying on a Vow.

She extended her hand to Tony, whose brows arched upward.

"What, we're going to shake on it?"

Hermione rolled her eyes and waggled her fingers meaningfully. With a put-upon sigh, he slipped his hand into hers. She gripped his hand firmly and met his eyes, intruding upon his mind with a mental whisper. His mind was...odd, somehow. Legilimancy on Muggles wasn't illegal, so she'd occasionally used the technique when details about their targets showed evidence of memory tampering. So she knew the 'feel' of a Muggle mind, the vulnerability of it. Tony's mind was-the adjective that came to mind was slippery, like she was staring into a dazzling, shifting kaleidoscope by entering. There were no barriers, not like a Wizard would have, but there was still something not quite right about it.

But she shook off the eerie sensation, because Tony's expression was growing more skeptical the longer she delayed. "What?" he asked, "do I need to kneel or something? Because I'm getting this whole vibe..."

"You don't have to-" Hermione began irritably, but Tony was already shifting, until he was glancing up at her with mock-innocence, one hand still held in hers.

"This floor is harder than I remembered," he commented offhandedly and his mind agreed with him by way of presenting a lurid interlude with Pepper Potts Hermione very much did not need to be party to.

She brought her other hand forward, so that his single hand was clasped between both of hers. "Anthony Edward Stark, I bind thee to the keeping of my secrets. Thy tongue shall not betray me, neither shall the work of thine hands, nor the products of thy mind. Will you take this vow freely?"

"I don't suppose I could have this in writing so I can forward this to my legal department before I agree? No? Just out of curiosity, what happens if I break this little pact?"

"Your brains begin to leak out your ears," Hermione said dryly.

"Really?" Tony asked, looking more enthusiastic than that threat had a right to produce.

"No," Hermione said, rolling her eyes. "All the really nasty consequences for breaking vows of this kind are saved for the ones forced upon someone. If you agree, you'll just find it difficult to accidently mention something you're not supposed to. And if you try to do it on purpose, it'll be like having a severe speech impediment."

"In that case, why didn't you just ask me not to tell anyone?"

"In general, because I'd be breaking an Oath of my own. In specific, you, Tony Stark, have a love affair with shock value that makes you really untrustworthy when it comes to things like this."

"Hey, I resent that. I've kept quiet until now." Hermione stared down at him. "But I see you point. Alright, I agree to your terms and conditions user agreement."

Magic accepted his light-hearted agreement and Hermione felt the Vow take. She released Tony's hand. "You can get up now," she said in a voice approaching exasperation. "Not that you needed to in the first place."

"It felt more dramatic," Tony protested as he stood. "Alright, you've got my vows, now I get the payoff. Off with it."

"I hope that not the speech you have planned for your wedding night," Hermione retorted as she complied, sloughing her glamour. "How did you managed to spy on us anyway."

"I want a full-body scan," Tony ordered the room, leaning forward to tap at her gauntlets. "You could have crushed my hand with these. What kind of metal is this? And, please," he said. "Magic is just an energy source that we haven't discovered how to use yet. In my humble opinion."

"You don't have humble opinions. And, in this case, wrong, although you and Jane Foster would probably have a very interesting conversation attempting to convince yourselves of that."

"Uh-huh. Hold that thought for a second. Has anyone seen my sclerometer?" A robot rushed to press the instrument into his extended hand. "So, alien life form. You as old as Thor?"

"No. But I am in my thirties."

"Average life expectancy?"

"Back in the '90s it was a little over 137 years, though that can vary. The oldest natural age reached by a Wizard-that's what we call ourselves-was 755."

"And the oldest unnatural age?" Tony queried as he tried to do something with the odd-looking tool. Scratch the metal of her gauntlet, she suspected. "What did you say these were made of?"

"I didn't, but they're steel."

"I hate to tell you this, sunshine, but whoever sold these to you lied, because we're fast approaching diamond-level hardness."

"Magical steel."

"Which probably shares very few properties with real steel. I am curious though. How in the world do you long-lived types keep yourselves from just overrunning your planet? I mean, if Thor's a thousand years old, the number of his potential offspring is, well, pretty much astronomical. We only live, what, seventy, eighty years and we managed to make a population chart that looks like your learning curve in the past two or three generations."

"I don't know about Asgard, but magic regulates our population size."

"Like, your government has the equivalent of the one-child policy in place and they have a better way of making it happen? Because we could market that."

"No, I mean that we've always been a small population and the figure has stayed fairly constant throughout our history. Most families have very few children, because the magic seems to sense when the population drops and it needs to replenish itself. So, we don't have generations in quite the same way that Mu-nonmagical humans do. When the population drops abruptly, more children are born, but when the population is stable, most Witches find that they can't reproduce. And if they try to force the issue, the rate of incidence of miscarriages and stillbirths rises so sharply it's almost a guarantee that the child will die before they reach the age of three. And if they do live, they're Squibs-not capable of using magic."

"On our planet, we're the minority. Nonmagical humans outnumber us, but they're also necessary for the survival of Wizardkind, whether all of us think so or not. Eventually, with such a small pool of choices, everyone would be related to the point where not even magic might prevent some nasty birth defects. So we're capable of, ah, I guess you might call it spontaneous generation? Wizards can be born from nonmagical humans."

"Interesting. Not quite as interesting as this metal. Just imagine the suit I could make with this," he said to the room at large.

"I'm certain it would be spectacular, sir," JARVIS replied. "Although you ought to consider a different design scheme."

Perusal of her gauntlets finished, she found Tony abruptly closer than was really comfortable to her face. "Is that glass?" he asked.

"Shrapnel from a mirror," she explained.

"Last I looked, shrapnel doesn't melt glass so that it can look like you're wearing heavy mascara."

"Magical shrapnel propelled from something made to forge things to other things can."

"Was it a magic mirror too?" Tony teased.

"Yes," Hermione remarked, "it was."

"Okay. Make a note, JARVIS. We're going to assume everything from here on out is 'magic'."

"Noted, sir," came the reply.

"So, now that I've been sworn in to your little secret society, can I hear what happened on Asgard? And then we'll move back to me quizzing you and you answering 'magic' with that deadpan look on your face."

So Hermione explained briefly about the Aether and their subsequent task to retrieve Balther.

"And you don't just have a spell for that?"

"Necromancy is a Dark Art and no one's ever been successful in fully resurrecting someone. Bodies, yes, souls, yes, but never together, or at least not perfectly."

"So you could totally raise a zombie horde?"

"We call them Inferi, but technically, yes. But it's a Dark Art."

"And you're a white witch? Do no harm and all that?"

Hermione shuddered. "Please don't use Wiccan terms. I respect other's lifestyles and religions, I really do, but magic as I know it has nothing to do with being in balance with nature, goddesses or gods, and I would be very much in trouble if any harm I did rebounded on me threefold. And, well, while most of them seem sane enough, there's certainly a fringe element to it, isn't there? On reflection, I would be very much dead if their threefold rule held true. Not all Dark Arts are evil, but they are illegal, which means that I'd need a very compelling reason to use them. And I can't think of a single situation that would call for a zombie horde."

"True. Zombies are inefficient."

Hermione scowled at him.

She'd intended to spend only the morning with Tony, but it was very late when she successfully escaped his clutches, feeling faintly like a runaway laboratory experiment. Though during the course of the afternoon her school issue had been taken care of, Tony verbally manhandling some poor soul from the administration building.

But once she left Stark Tower, she found herself at loose ends. She had a further two days she could spent on Midgard, but she'd never really been good at building personal relationships, though her professional relationships were exemplary.

With the exception of Tony, she didn't have anyone on this Earth that she could casually call upon. It was a startling, empty realization, how trapped she'd been by the past. She'd wanted to return home, which was only understandable, but it had been years and yet it was as if she'd lived in an emotional stasis, spending every day promising herself that this day on this Earth would be her last.

Would she have wanted Ron to do the same? Did she want him to have sacrificed everything that was unessential to the pursuit of an answer, the sterile, miserable little apartment that she and Harry had shared?

The answer to that was a very firm no.

She felt something shift inside her, something that had been tightly bound in chains and locked away. Hermione was exhausted. By the constant, fruitless searching, by the constant wariness, by the sensation of being trapped.

An odd coincidence of timing occurred to her as she mulled over the date and by extension how long they'd been on this Earth. She'd noted it when they'd finally managed to enter Muggle society without alarming anyone, but the calendars of the two Earths weren't in precise agreement with each other, unless the journey between worlds had been much longer than even her pain-wracked brain could acknowledge. Tonight, even without the recovery of their bodies, they would be dead to the Wizarding world.

And that explained, better than anything else, why Harry had simply said he wouldn't be staying at the apartment before Disapparating abruptly.

If you could choose where to die, where would you go? Hermione asked herself. Because, after this night, there would be no more excuses. Not for her. Harry had explained why he'd made the decision he had, how he thought that the Asgardians were their surest path back. And perhaps they were. Hermione simply couldn't forget, after all.

But there had to come a time when she really accepted that the probability that they could return was so slight as to be nonexistent. And what would happen if in ten years they discovered that path? Would it be fair to their partners to intrude upon their lives, when they'd accepted their deaths and moved on? What if they'd remarried? Had children?

There was a motto, in the Hit Wizards, to warn against that continual worrying that could wear down a soul.

"We must do what we can, before we must, while we're able," Hermione murmured. "So that we can leave regret behind."

Hermione Granger as she had been, Hit Wizard, Beings Rights advocate, wife of Ronald Weasley, would die tonight. The question would become who would rise in her place, but for now, she would seek the desert where she'd begun life here, bringing her existence full circle.

Casually walking into an abandoned alley, Hermione felt the compression of self that was Dissaparation and for a moment imagined it continued indefinitely, until her consciousness was compressed into a single point that might blaze up bright as a star before disappearing entirely.

But she was only faintly sad, not suicidal. As she gazed across the empty sands, she thought quietly that she had expected this to be a more dramatic moment, the emotions involved more intense. But it was like putting away a beloved blanket or stuffed animal from childhood. It wasn't unexpected. It was something that, subconsciously, she had been preparing for for a long time.

She wasn't like Harry-her wedding band had disappeared sometime during her forging. There was nothing on her person she could discard as a material gesture of the death of her old self. But, for once, she would do something reckless. Her glamour had fallen with her Apparation, so she was as she truly was on the sand. But her clothing was Muggle. She retrieved her purse, pulling things from it until magical artifacts lay tumbled on the sand. Not the unique, powerful things that Smelt had collected, but enchanted items meant to entertain and amuse. Harry and Ron both had accused her of traveling with the contents of a second house, but it had only meant to her that she was never unprepared.

And now it only meant she'd carried with her a tiny slice of the Wizarding world.

She changed out of her clothes into proper robes, not the battle-robes of a Hit Wizard, but the full-sleeved and flowing robes that had characterized Wizarding society. This set was a deep, velvety black, which made it appropriate garb for a funeral, but it was also so elegantly hand-embroidered in thread of gold, tiny jewels worked inconspicuously along the collar and hem, that it was really only suitable for grand state occasions.

One of the artifacts in the sand was a small music box, it's lid well-worn. Hermione opened the lid and grey-blue smoke seeped out until a large mock-phoenix blinked at her sleepily. There was no magic in its song, but the sweet, lingering notes that began to fill the air had magic enough of their own. Her heart felt lighter as she sorted the part of her collection that she'd unearthed, tucking away most of the ones that would be exhausted after a single use. Even for her own funeral, she wouldn't waste them so recklessly.

But she did toss into the air a handful of WWW's Moonlight Conflagration fireworks, which were guaranteed to blaze bright as burning magnesium throughout the night as they intertwine, multiply, replicate, rejoin in an endless abstract of beauty that it so short-lived that they were a smaller kind of heartbreak.

Hermione, taken by a sudden attack of practicality, marked off a wide stretch of her desert with the strongest warding spells she's capable of before returning to her pack.

She was young, but not a fool. Hermione had considered what sort of things she might like at her funeral and though most of them were well beyond her reach, she could still use magic to conduct a funeral on a grand scale. In her mind, she'd thought it would be a somewhat more solemn affair, simpler, but tonight she felt more like celebrating the life she'd lived.

Brandishing her wand, she channeled the power of the Elder Wand recklessly, the sand at her feet exploding upward as she directed. And when she was satisfied, she transfigured her house of sand to a mausoleum of glass, clear and perfect enough that the glimmer of the stars was only enhanced as they were reflected and refracted on the delicate angles.

The platform for her body was in the center of the room, proud and imposing. A plain cloak tossed over it was changed into an embroidered brocade splendid enough to suit an empress, spilling down across a floor that became marble mosaics as she walked toward where she would spend the night.

Easing herself onto her place, Hermione laid back, watching the fireworks as they wheeled through the sky, the stars, and invisible to all but her, the memories that she would always treasure, but that she would no longer be shackled by.

And, sometime before the dawn, she felt her Marriage Vow wink and die out, like a shooting star.

Hermione Granger was dead. But she was also free.