When Time Stands Still (At the Iron Hill)
Bellatrix looked back out over the lake from the hotel on the shore in Van. A terrible storm had begun to buffet her. Lady Tamar had already confirmed from the met station that it had no discernable source, and was focused below the base of Damawand, of Ararat. The stupefied Nagini lay sprawled out in all her mass behind her, on the lakeshore porch of the hotel. Ahead of her, the flashes of gunfire were silhouetted against the black clouds and whipping wind of the storm. It was starting to rain, hot and acrid rain.
This was no natural storm. She could feel that in her bones, feel it in her magical core. Riddle had returned from The Door. He had made his pact. There were soldiers fighting over there, and sailors on the gunboats in the lake. They would be in the heart of the storm now.
And Riddle had already gained the power to deal mass death, solely through the magic lent to him. He's going to destroy them all.
For some unconscionable reason, Harry and Larissa's group was late, and so was Hermione's. Hermione would be dangerously close to the mountain, or even on it, and in that moment, she was struck with fear, turning back to Tamar. "You know, he could leap over and retrieve Nagini from us. We don't have the Water of Life yet. Neither of the other two teams has yet returned to us."
"He could," Tamar acknowledged. "What are you thinking of, Bellatrix?"
"I must go and hold him at the mountain, until the others have returned, with the water and whatever else they have learned, and can destroy the Horcrux inside of Nagini. They can come up to us as reinforcements, and join us in the battle, as soon as that work is done," Bellatrix answered, almost distracted, looking to the distant swirling vortex of the storm, growing and building in power. "If I do not, then he will come against us. I can feel his newfound power probing the wards around Van already. Stay here, tell the others, guard Nagini. I'm going to go forth, and hold him off."
Tamar stared at her for a moment, looked at the storm.
What the devil is she thinking? Bellatrix wondered. We don't have much time.
Tamar called over to the group of MinKol officers who had mustered near the hotel, and then pointed imperiously to Nagini. "That snake must be kept insensate until Councillor Granger and Councillor Naryshkina return. Against any enemy attempt to seize that snake, the entire city, if necessary, must sacrifice themselves; the entire garrison down to the last man. Is that understood—Councillor Takarian?"
The Senior Councillor in command, from the Armenian ministry, to his credit asked no question—the orders were brutally clear—nor made any complaint. He came to attention, and saluted. "God go with you."
Tamar turned back to Bellatrix. "If there's anything else they will need from us, Nagini in human form will provide it, either willingly or by the Imperious or Legilimency. Come on, Bellatrix, we're going together."
"Well." She shook her head. "You know.."
"I know perfectly well what our chances are, Bellatrix. Now, before we run out of time…"
"Just one thing." Bellatrix turned back to Councillor Takarian, before he could walk away.
"Have you got anything for us, Councillor?"
The man grinned, rubbed at his moustache, and turned back, producing a flask. "Oghi," he offfered.
"Thank you." Bellatrix took the flask, and held it between herself and Tamar. "No surrender, and no retreat," she offered, and the two women drank one swig each, in their turn.
It was a moment for thinking. A moment for acknowledging that after all these decades, after her slavish service to him, after the child, the imprisonment, after the disillusionment—the war over the entire world—the romance, the 'strategic turn', it finally came to this. In the flesh, wand to wand.
Many times, Bellatrix and Riddle had duelled, to improve their skills. She was his finest Lieutenant. They had matched each other time and time again, and she knew very well that she could not match his power. She would try today, anyway, on this last, dread day of death, when the world hung in the balance. It was time to see if all those years and decades had given the smallest edge, the slightest insight into his tactics and ability. And to see if her own skills, the electric magic, the things she had long suppressed, would make it possible for her to surprise him with her skill and talent, and overcome him in this battle.
But that was all the time they had for thinking, and he, too, had gained some new power in this moment, and like as not, she was signing her own death warrant. She would never see Delphini again… But if it all worked out, Hermione would be there to raise her. So be it. They'll forget your whole career of evil, if you hold him off today.
It was time. Bellatrix handed the flask back to the Armenian Councillor, and faced forward again across the lake. "Let's go!" Hand firm on her wand, settled into a stance from which she was ready to fight in a heartbeat, and with Lady Tamar firm at her right side, Bellatrix disapparated.
With a snap, she appeared in the pomegranate orchard, before the ruins of the temple. The Earth rumbled, the artillery thundering toward them from the lines of the Morsmordre, while their troops rushed forward, locked in close combat with the 25th Corps.
Tamar appeared at her side. They could both clearly see him there at the very centre of the storm. The ground shook again, and Bellatrix changed her assessment, it wasn't artillery, it was some other artifice. It originated alongside the storm at Voldemort's position, where the Rabdos of Koschei was grounded to the earth.
Dolohov was the only Death Eater with him, and he turned abruptly, pointed, called. "The bitch is here, M'lord, with a friend."
"Antonin we used to be friends. Do you really think this is sane? He will consume you just like the whole world, he has made a deal with a power greater than even he can control." It was not quite true, but it was all she could think of saying.
"Hold her off, my good man," Voldemort instructed, turning around. Tamar sucked in her breath, but Bellatrix just grimaced in disgust, at the writhing, living snakes that had emerged from his shoulders.
"M'lord, she has the Actual State Councillor for Georgia with her—Lady Tamar Dadiani. She is a legendary witch in Eurasia. It will be a real trial for me."
Bellatrix did not let the discussion continue. She ended it with a Confrigo aimed at Riddle. Dolohov met it with a Bombarda right back at her, which for a moment surprised her—she was expecting him to shield Riddle—but she met it with a Protego and Tamar returned one of her own, freeing Bellatrix to spin back and attack Voldemort again.
The two women quickly pressed the attack, with an assertive battle-tempo, exchanging shields to cover each other and attacks, focused on Voldemort. At last, with a look of irritation, he brought forth a shield of tesseracting black and red geometric shapes, which stayed in place around him, resisting their attacks. At the same time, the winds, whipping at them, grew so fierce as to tear up chunks of rock and gravel from the ground and blow dust in their faces, forcing them to tune their Protego casting to protect themselves from a bone-stripping sandstorm just as much as from Dolohov's assault. After an initial few minutes, they were pushed back on the defensive.
Only for a moment.
A third figure joined the battle, dressed in fine Persian court robes, up on the top of the hill, where the Temple once stood—over the spot of the dead Room of Requirement of the Temple. Rabdos firmly held in hand, and long dark hair whipping in the wind, the tall, lean figure in Parthian boots had a sword buckled to one hip, and laughed with a shrieking delight so intense over the wind that even Riddle looked up.
"Tom Riddle, my pleasure to introduce myself, I am Elahaïs, the last guardian of Ararat. You have invited yourself to a wizard's duel, and so I will repay the favour: Here is how we fought, in ancient days."
Speaking words of power in Old Parsi, Elahaïs cracked the ground under Voldemort's feet with a flick of her Rabdos, and then conjured forth spinning glyphs of glowing ancient runes in the air, into which Dolohov's Confrigo counterattack dissipated with a sharp snap of magic hissing in the air.
"Don't bother with those curses, Dolohov!" Voldemort snapped, at last turning away from his work, and casually blocking a Sectumsempra from Bellatrix as he did, his own Rabdos now raised for battle. "The Eunuch is dead. The power is in the ground!" He turned toward Elahaïs and drove as Rabdos to the ground, crying out incomprehensible ancient words of power, creating a thundering furrow of red energy which tore deep into the bedrock, and split the Earth, tearing toward Elahaïs with the speed of lightning.
Elahaïs, laughing, snapped about in response, Rabdos striking the ground and carving a glowing line of blue power across the dirt, glowing, searing to glass. When the red furrow slammed into it, there was a hideous explosion of sparks and shaking of the ground, but Elahaïs and whatever gave her the power to fight on after death remained.
Bellatrix unleashed a barrage of hexes against Voldemort at the same time, just for him to block them with a lazy wave of the Rabdos, spinning back to face Bella and Tamar and laughing. "The eunuch has evened the odds some, but the matter is not in doubt, my dear ladies." His Rabdos flying, he unleashed waves of power that bent and shook the ground, made it swell and roll like the sea underneath their feet.
Tamar spun her wand in a circle, countered the magic, evened out the ground under the like a boat on a pond, whilst Bellatrix blasted fire straight back at her former master.
Despite his lack of attention to it, the storm had not stopped, and if anything, it seemed more intense, as if he were maintaining it by thought, by wandless magic alone, at this point. Not really a good sign.
"Bella, Bella, you idiot, you traitor. You should have never bet against your Master," Voldemort laughed, and from that moment of stasis, whispered words in his voice, that seemed like the sliding of tentacles across the void of space. The sky grew even darker, and Bellatrix felt a strange tugging at her very soul.
When Hermione and Tonks and Luna returned to Van with the Water of Life they had collected from the caldera lake, in military packs, she immediately had a terrible sense that the situation had worsened dramatically. Hidden inside the caldera, it had been impossible to see anything except the ominous sky overhead.
Now, with a flick of her wand to use a magnification charm, she could see the swirling black clouds of the horribly intense storm, with Lake Van churned to an unimaginable level by the power tearing across it. The storm seemed as intense as that they had faced on the day they had destroyed Azkaban, on the North Sea, but the auxiliary cruisers and gunboats still tried to hold position despite it. Their fire, both from their guns and the wizards on the deck, had become intermittent, and the booms of the shells impacting against the hills to the west of Ararat were muffled by the storm. The conditions for the men, manning open mount guns modified from Army pieces on the deck, must be awful, yet they still fired as fast as they could.
"Hermione! Nagini is already here!" Tonks was calling from the porch.
Hermione tore herself away from the sight along the lake, just to see that Tonks was right—she was standing with Luna on the porch, and there were MinKol officers milling around, and the massive form of Nagini, stunned and stupefied in coils of green. And no Lady Tamar. No Bellatrix.
No Bellatrix. Fuck.
"Come on, Hermione, we need to apply the Water of Life to Nagini!"
Hermione ignored Tonks, and turned back to look at the heart of the storm, and the evidence, the flashes of light and energy, the disturbances humming through the air, which spoke of a terrible magical battle on the spot. Gods. Great Gods above.
In that moment, all that she could think about was Fingolfin, having ridden out to face Morgoth.
I wait thee here. Come! Show thy face!'
Hermione shuddered in horror. I have to be there. I have to be there. She imagined Bellatrix, and raised her wand.
Then she was interrupted, by Tonks shaking her. "Come on, Hermione, don't be a fool! Lady Tamar is with her, and she is one of the finest Witches of Eurasia. Come on, Hermione, didn't Elahaïs promise to you in such pride that she even wanted to fight Voldemort alone, to humble him, I mean come on! Crazy Auntie Bella is not alone. We've got to use this time and use it smart! We've got to get Nagini back and be ready to go in there and fight to win! Come on!" Rain lashed at them, from the growing storm.
Hermione shook herself convulsively in her friend's hands, and nodded. Hand in hand, they ran back to the porch of the Hotel. Luna was already preparing measures of the Water of Life. She settled in alongside of her friends, forcing herself to ape a calm that she did not really feel, that did not really reach her heart.
Tonks prepared a curse-breaking spell, as Hermione lowered the Water of Life carefully, with a funnel, into Nagini's insensate mouth. Luna covered them.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, as the water descended into the snake's belly, Hermione could feel the curse emerge for her magic, and directed her power against it through the spell. The curse of the Maledicta, utterly unbreakable; but a healing magic of impossible power was directed against it.
It shattered so quickly that Hermione doubted her spell had any part in the working.
The body of the snake seemed to melt and shift away, shimmering like water, rolling and oozing like liquid glass ready to be blown. Hermione was thankful she had not let her speculation get the better of her; the snake's whole body became that of the woman. But Avicenna's wisdom, from centuries prior, held; just like Bellatrix had predicted. It was the essence of snake-ness that had been imbued with the nature of a horcrux. Ichor dripped forth, as if out of nothing, as the snake rolled and melted and disappeared…
...And the naked form of an attractive woman of Malay or Javanese extraction was left behind, sprawled across Hermione's lap. There was a snap, a crack of electricity in the air.
A booming roar echoed from the heart of the storm across the lake.
"He felt that," Tonks muttered in satisfaction.
Nagini blinked and looked up. Hermione had a brief inane thought about the entire thing.
Help. I'm turning into Bellatrix.
She smiled down. "It worked."
"The Water of Life," the woman's dry, hoarse whisper cracked, confused, desperate, needy, and alight with wonder.
And then the others returned.
Without Ginny.
This was the worst of the War. Gas choked the flank of Nemrut Dagi. In any normal storm, with any normal, muggle gas, this should have been flung away by the winds. But unnatural, almost demonic, this thick green-black ooze hung low to the ground, and simply swirled and remained in choking clouds. It was both corrosive and flammable, and the only protection was to remain fully suited. They had spent more than a day with only water in their canteens to drink, and it was running thin.
Alexandra lay low around the decimated remains of her command staff. The enemy wizards and troops were pushing up, surging along the slope of the mountain, covered by a hail of artillery fire. The shells were continuously exploding around them, a storm of steel that whipped through the screaming winds, shrapnel wounds often spelling death from gas exposure, ricking up a continuous sleet of broken rock from the scree and shale of the mountain's exposed flanks.
Their slit trenches barely provided any protection for them at all. Spells swept up the flanks from the advancing Morsmordre wizards, blasting craters into the flank of the mountain, rock tearing up toward them and falling back down, crushing and burying some of the defenders. The enemy surged on, braving their own attack gas under orders that terrified them too much to hesitate.
Alexandra lay lower in the rude shelter of the trench, and fingered the Dragunov she held, picked up off of a dead body of one of her own soldiers. We can't stay here any longer, she thought, exhausted, thirsty, desperate, the continuous pounding of the shells hammering their nerves into a senseless state of agony from the endless interlocking roar of the cannonade. She couldn't even remember the last time she had slept, now, alive in a soiled NBC suit for how long they'd been forced to wear them without respite, against the hideous magic gas.
And the storm was bearing down against them, more horrible and more awful all the time, while the Morsmordre troops clawed their way up around the north flank of Nemrut Dagi, trying to reach the shore of Lake Van, to cut them off in revenge for their own counteroffensive, to support whatever mad scheme of the Dark Lord's had brought them all to fight at this terrible place.
But if we can't stay, where can we go? To go down to the crater lake inside of Nemrut Dagi, a reproduction in miniature of Ararat with a shattered side facing the greater mountain to the North, was madness—when the Morsmordre gained the ridge, they'd rip the Russian troops along the lake to pieces with mortar fire. Her unit decimated, her body raw aching, orders unclear through the jamming and chaos, they had simply held, and held, and held. As long as they held Nemrut Dagi, the enemy couldn't bring artillery up the slopes to hammer the rest of the Corps in Tatvan. They had to hold. But the enemy wanted them gone, so they could push through to the north and reach Lake Van. The death or survival of the 25th Army Corps and the 16th Mongolian Infantry Division was incidental to the Morsmordre push, but to Alexandra and her comrades, it was their lives, struggling to the bitter end. And the merciless gas had them pinned. She received requests for reinforcement, for more ammunition, for instructions from men clearly desperate to fall back, and she tried to manage them, occasionally popping up as she did now to try to get a look down the crater-pocked flank of the slope. The fury of the cannonade drove her quickly back each time, and from those glimpses, she tried to direct a battle where she was now in command of the better part of a brigade, mixed together from the survivors of five units.
At the crest of the ridge behind her, on the rim of the crater, a radio aerial mast had been appropriated for use as a flagpole. The flag of the Russian Federation was still flying there, the end was shredded by the whipping wind of the storm and hung in rags, and there were holes through it from shrapnel and rocks kicked up by the artillery, but the flag still flew.
As long as your men can glance up and see the flag flying, they won't break, the thought ran through her head again. Perhaps it was the only thing keeping them there. By this point, from the notes on the half-folded, half-torn map, flecked with dust and rock, which served as her sole reference for commanding the ragged bands that formed her unit, she could not see how else they held. You have not taken us! Fifty thousand soldiers could look up from Tatvan and the southern flanks, the hills around Orenlik, and see that the Nemrut Dagi had not yet fallen to the enemy.
If there were even fifty thousand of them left.
What can we do? We hold on until our last dying breath, that's what.
If she was, by some luckless trick of fate, the last one left, she resolved to take the flag and leap down the cliffs of the caldera with it, to deny it to the enemy. It was a thought that came from nowhere, that suddenly seized her with the savage impulse of a lunatic's despair, a fanatical determination that nobody would ever have a claim to shame them for this stand, that nobody could ever say they were beaten—destroyed, but never beaten.
And then Zoë the Palmyran leapt down into the trench with her, her robes flowing, flicking out behind her, ignoring a spatter of rock from a nearby shell-burst as she landed, blood licking at her cheek. She had no protective gear; she relied on a bubble-charm to keep herself safe from the gas, and Alexandra felt a moment of envy. The uncounted hours in full gear had been agonising.
The woman raised a canteen to her lips, but before drinking, slipped a vial into it, and sloshed it around. Then she drank from it—and offered it to Alexandra.
My God, but I can't take my mask off.
But, suddenly, the wind changed direction, and the gusts became so hard, or the wizard controlling the magical gas was distracted, and an open spot appeared and spread down the ridge. Trembling, Alexandra seized the chance; she ripped her mask off, grabbed the canteen, and unquestionably slammed down what was inside of it.
In a moment, she felt an impulse of manic glee. "Zoë," she exclaimed, "what the fuck is this?"
"Liquid luck," Zoë answered. "They've reached the shore, they're distracted by victory, and it's our last chance to hold the mountain. We can't stay, we can't run. But liquid luck? I brewed a vial before this battle, I thought it would be the last. I kept it for the moment we'd need it. And you're the commander. Your luck is your unit's luck. So you drink it with me." She grinned. "We can't stay, we can't run."
Alexandra was laughing. It felt like mania. The gas was still away from the mountain, though perhaps it was only from how close the enemy was, that whomever it was controlling it was finally acknowledging the risk to their own troops. But regardless, it was an opening. And Zoë was right. They couldn't stay, they couldn't run.
"Amplify my voice, make sure everyone in the entire unit can hear it," she instructed urgently.
A wave of a wand. "Done."
"Soldiers! Heroes! We have been torn apart by the enemy artillery, we have been choked in their gas, oppressed by their spells, brought to close quarters with their picked murderers! Still we are undaunted, and hold our ordered positions! The enemy has worked past us, they have taken the lakefront. We are cut off. They know their triumph—but we are not dead, so we are not defeated! The moment is now—the only way for us to hold is to go over onto the attack! The entire Corps did it days ago, now we will do it as a regiment! Damn their power and damn their Dark Lord, I hold them in contempt. Come on, Lads, we're Russians!"
And in the 21st century, in the aftermath of a nuclear war, where technology and magic dominated the battlefield, where wizards and artillery could kill by the thousands, in those ragged lines of gas-choked and exhausted soldiers fighting along the rim of a high mountain, staring down at crater-scabbed slopes stretching before them and groups, knots and bands of Morsmordre troops continuing to struggle up-hill through the flickering tracers of their defending machine-gun – then, then, in June of 2004, six years after the war began, these soldiers, a mishmash of five units, wizard and muggle fighting side by side—the muggle troops, hearing their commander's voice, began, all without orders and quite impulsively, to reach down and grab something at their sides.
Draw it.
Fix it to the barrels of their rifles.
The hot acrid rain lashed at her face, and felt good despite its ill portents. Zoë held out another canteen—Alexandra drank from it, tasted that it was Iranian style Chai, and felt like she had been given the ambrosia of the Gods. She handed it back with a laugh, and content, pulled her gas mask back on and secured it. "Charge!"
She flung herself over the lip of the trench, covered by the Arab witch. Exposed to the fire, she quickly levelled the Dragunov, and snapped off a shot toward one of the Morsmordre wizards who, turned to the side, trying to deal with some other feeling or sense, had exposed himself and didn't see the abrupt single round loosed from a position empty a moment before.
He fell as she watched his head blossom and explode in a streak of red from the shot. In the wizard protection battalions, their snipers used dum-dum rounds, to make sure of the job.
She waved her arm in a universal gesture and called out again. "Forward! Forward!"
It was no great massed charge down the slope. The machine-guns and mortars continued to fire, covering them. Alexandra and Zoë led the way, dashing down toward the next crater, and then the next. Running as hard as they could, flinging themselves into cover, rolling up, firing at opportune targets, and then charging again. But in groups and knots of dozens or a few hundreds, in disciplined leap-frog tactics, with their bayonets gleaming as a lethal promise at close range, with grenades dangling at the ready to be ripped from bandoliers and hurled in the lethal knife-fights that quickly developed in the occupied craters, they swept down hill with momentum and desperate courage behind them, and did not let the enemy reach them, but took the fight to the Janissaries, hugged them, attacked them point blank, with knife and grenade and bayonet, and forced them to pit their superior numbers as paid mercenaries against the fanatic courage of a band of soldiers who faced their fate as free soldiers, dying on their feet, dying on the offensive, for the freedom of their Motherland.
Alexandra rolled up from another crater, took down an enemy officer with another shot. "Forward! Forward!"
And as long as the luck would hold—they attacked.
He had pushed down onto their very souls, trying to suck them out of their bodies. For a moment of horrifying, disconcerting nightmare, Bellatrix thought he might well succeed, and they would disappear like a flash into the nightmare of the God of the Dementors.
Then she had remembered her own magical innovation. Electricity hung in the air, the wonder of waves and currents, very well charged by the storm. She could feel it around her, making her hair stand up on end through the storm.
Snapping her wand through a complicated set of oscillating motions as she spun like a whirling dervish, chanting out variations on the name of the Goddess Elektra, she alternately snapped a Protego to defend herself from physical attack, and weaving in to the defensive working, she snapped into the electricity in the air, and extended outwards, and grounded her soul, and caught and tightened fast magical bindings, tamping Tamar's soul down like to electric cleats in the sky, until it held steady against her body.
Elahaïs cackled. "Lightning witch! You're fighting a lightning witch, Riddle! As it was said in ancient days!" The eunuch flung a handful of sewing needles to the wind, and propelled them with a crazed burst of magical energy—riddling Voldemort and Dolohov with the common woman's tool turned magical weapon, wounding both.
The eldest Black sister joined her in a wild laugh, a mad rush of magical power straight into the soul, grounding her, giving them the power to fight on.
Bellatrix at Damawand. Even now, in the midst of the most terrible battle of her life, she was cackling with glee. They would remember her forever for this—but only if her side won. So she would have to win.
As Riddle pressed her on the attack, she decided that the time had come, through the roaring winds and the thrashing rain, to show her hand. It would do no good to wait until her allies were worn down or even dead, or until he had received his own reinforcements. At the moment, he had displayed new spells, some of them terrifying, and very vocalised, but no great or especial power, except for this storm which continued to lash them, slapping them with dust torn up from the ground, turned to mud to flick and sting them in the air. She, on the other hand, had already played her hand. He knew about her electric magic. She needed to press the advantage as hard as she could to have a chance to win outright, if it was even possible, and it probably wasn't, but she needed to try.
"Tamar, I'm going for a kill!" She warned, and spun once more to face her former master. She whispered words of power in the oldest old Celtic tongues, and appealed now to Taranis.
Her wand left her hand, and centred in front of her heart, hovering in the air. It began to spin in circles. Speaking words in a voice that was now laced with power, and drenched in magic, booming unnaturally from her tiny form, with her wand spinning before her heart like a buzzsaw through the air, she reached out to the natural lightning of the air, the atmospherics of the enormous, magical storm that Riddle had called forth.
It was a case of magical Judo. She did not have the strength of Azi Dahaka behind her. But he had created the storm, pumped it with his own energy, for some nefarious purpose. Now, she took some of that energy, she bled it, she leached it from his creation, and adopted it for her own purpose.
Pulses of red lightning erupted out of the black clouds of the storm, in masses and masses. Bolt after bolt, too many bolts to count, searing eyeballs of those who looked at them, and lighting the horrible dark of the day of doom with their power. She converged a cluster of lightning, she chained ball lightning together and sent it hurling to the Earth, she directed bolt after bolt, she subtly altered their impulse to reach the ground as quickly as possible, she converged them onto the position from which Riddle and Dolohov stood and fought.
Even Voldemort, with all the power given to him by Azi Dahaka, was forced to crouch low to the ground, as the lightning bolts hammered his shields to the very bitter limit. Those new shields, like she had never seen before, spinning glyphs and glowing radiant tesseracts, held up to the barrage, but he was driven into the ground, forced to kneel before her power, to contract his shield as far as he could possibly could. Where a few minutes before he had the upper hand and had nearly ripped their souls out of their bodies, now she had driven him to ground.
The Brightest Witch of Her Age.
Elahaïs joined the assault, she brought down her own power, bolts of energy summoned by speaking words in the air, and the ground shaking under Voldemort's feet. In the midst of it, Dolohov was completely undone. He had to turn his shields against a series of sharp attacks from Lady Tamar.
When he did, a single column of red lightning flashed down and touched his body, overcoming his shields. Dolohov had been her closest friend among the Death Eaters. They were the closest to intellectuals in their ranks. There were decades of memories there.
But in the end, time and fate and circumstance had trapped them in this moment, and with one word of power and the terrible red lightning from above, Bellatrix seared him away in a flash.
Perhaps it was the distraction of feeling that. Perhaps Riddle had just been mustering his power. But the seeming edge of victory disintegrated almost as soon as it seemed like it had come.
The ground erupted below her feet. She had to featherweight herself to avoid falling into a chasm. The spell she was using had been totally offensive; she had defended herself only through the fury of her blows. She had to recall her wand to her hand. The lightning stopped.
Voldemort rose from the ground, laughing, as a single imperious gesture of Koschei's wand sent Elahaïs staggering back, too. "Did you think it would be so easy, Bella? It soon will be over! Your very soul will cease to exist. But I will not give you the pleasure of losing it quickly. I will not give you the pleasure of continuing to exist, in some fashion, as a Dementor yourself. No, I will keep your husk, for as long as it lives, as a living monument, a trophy to my victory."
Voldemort's troops, struggling through the intense violent of the combat around Nemrut Dagi, had finally reached the lakeshore, just south of their position. It would have been best for them, if they had been pinned by the Russians, for what happened next.
Tendrils of living smoke extended from Voldemort in all directions. Elahaïs, head bowed, reached out and halted these from reaching them, leaving Tamar and Bellatrix the opportunity to defend themselves from the physical manifestation of Voldemort's power, as he lashed curse after curse at them even as he worked the more subtle and horrific magic of the servant of Azi Dahaka.
Bellatrix reached out and called to the storm again, but Voldemort had corrected his mistake, he held a firmer grip on the power in the air, he denied now her attempt to call upon it, while he constricted them within his power.
His own troops had no such protection against the black could. The tendrils snaked among them, and turned their triumph at reaching the lake into confusion and fear. They could not understand the tugging against them, they could not understand the feeling of confusion as the living black cloud engulfed them.
Suddenly, the entire regiment dropped down dead. Voldemort was uncaring of their loyalty to him, uncaring of whether they lived or died, even uncaring of their support in that moment. He simply needed them.
Just not as living men.
Now, he was fully given to Azi Dahaka, and now, he had the full, horrible power of his sacrifice at hand. The men dropped down silently dead, as if cords had been cut in their bodies, invisible cords, as their souls vanished without a whimper.
What rose up in place, from each and every one of them, was a Dementor.
Seeing the cloud rising, coming toward them from the south, Bellatrix was frozen for a moment in apoplectic horror. "Tamar, he has turned his own men into Dementors, to attack us!" She cried, forcing herself to conjure a shield just in time to protect them, as Tamar too looked south.
Tamar glanced to her. "Well, you know what to do!"
"I can't—Death Eaters can't!" Bellatrix screamed, with fear, real fear flashing in her eyes.
Voldemort heard that, and erupted in shrieking laughter. "Ahh, my dear Bella," he batted away another attack from Elahaïs with a casual smirk, "you will know the Kiss of the Dementor."
Tamar held herself cleanly and firmly in place, and conjured forth a tremendous roaring she-Lion of a Patronus, that drove back the massive horde. Her eyes were locked in concentration, but she was remarkably peaceful. "I will cover you, Bellatrix! Attack him! Give him all that you can!"
The Dementors recoiled from the two women, forced to fight shoulder-to-shoulder by necessity. They did not recognise Elahaïs as alive, and so the eunuch pressed the attack alone, hammering Voldemort with curse after curse by whatever strange power in the Room of Requirement could be called forth to the ghost's purpose.
For a moment, Bellatrix thought that they could rally, and continue the fight, despite the Dementors. It filled her with a surge of hope, and her wand was singing in her hands, as she fought the greatest battle of all of her days.
And then fire erupted around them. Voldemort tore through them with a conjuration of Fiendfyre as no other. In the midst of it, he intentionally let it go, to tear at them wild and uncontrolled, as it burned the very soil at their feet. Around them, Dementors flashed through the Fiendfyre, pushing them to the very limit, hard-pressing Tamar's Patronus.
And then a series of savage cutting hexes ripped through the fire. In the end, it was just all too much, as the Dementors loomed overhead.
Bella's shields faltered. In a single moment, Lady Tamar Dadiani died, as she was torn to pieces by four savage cutting curses in short succession, flaying and separating the flash from her body, leaving her to topple dead.
The fire washed over Bellatrix and vanished. Voldemort was laughing. She managed to shield herself enough to survive, as the Fiendfyre dissipated, and able to see Elahaïs again, she looked desperately to her left. "Elahaïs, I need a PATRONUS!"
"Forgive me, Bellatrix—I am a ghost, I cannot!"
Suddenly the surge of a horde of Dementors descended upon her.
Bellatrix recoiled from them and fell back down to her knees, trying to gain herself a pathetic half-second longer of life. It only made Voldemort laugh harder.
Patronus, Patronus…
She knew the spell. She had practiced it, once, in Hogwarts, a long time ago. She had only conjured a few bitter blue sparks, once. She had put no more effort into it; Bellatrix Black had long walked a dark road, and had little to be happy about. That one effort had been a memory of herself and Andromeda and Narcissa, all together, playing on a lake.
She doubted it would be the same, now.
Bellatrix thought—the happiest memory she had—sitting on a couch at Ancient House. Delphini in the middle. Hermione on the other side. Cuddling together, reading, kissing her wife-to-be in love, kissing her daughter's cheek in affection. Simply being a family.
The determination to go back, and create more memories just like that one.
A glowing blue field erupted from her wand, to her own wonder and delight. It coalesced and formed into an impossible form, a Patronus, a great Patronus, a Dragon Patronus, a Patronus of a magical creature, almost unheard of, sometimes thought impossible. The huge dragon of glowing blue light loomed over the battlefield, and even Voldemort seemed to recoil from its presence, as it drove the Dementors back in fear and terror, scattering them from the field.
No, Elahaïs was laughing. Voldemort didn't seem to recoil. He was recoiling. He knew fear, and he knew shock, just like a mortal man still. Bellatrix pushed herself back to her feet as her Patronus loomed over the field.
"Tom Riddle, you may still beat me and kill me, after all the years you kept me as your slave. But you'll do it with your own damned wand and hands, and not with a cloud of Dementors. Are you scared? Are you scared of that!? Come on, have at! I will die on my feet, you bastard! And you will have to do it yourself!" Her Patronus looming over her, Bellatrix once more went over onto the attack.