For a long, frozen moment, Harry had no idea what had just happened or what to do.
Then the green dragon backwinged, cupping the air with massive leather wings, and looked down.
"Harry Potter!" it roared. "Come out and die!"
The voice was different, deeper and louder, but everything else about it was so familiar that there was only one person it could be.
Harry started moving almost before he'd started thinking, and it felt like his claws were leaving marks in the stone as he bolted for the exit of the Great Hall, but he was only halfway when he realized that everybody else who was meant to be in charge might not yet know what was going on… or be missing.
"Sonorus," he said, as he reached the doorway, then took off with a powerful flap of his wings. "Hogwarts is under attack by Voldemort – everyone get to safety!"
He passed through the great front doors of Hogwarts eight feet off the ground, whipping over the head of a startled Third-Year, and cancelled his Voice-Amplification Spell as he turned to fly up into the sky.
Towards Voldemort.
Harry didn't know how it was that Voldemort was now a dragon – it might have been the same way he'd become one – and he couldn't say exactly how it was that he was so sure, but there was no doubt in Harry's mind.
This was Voldemort, back again, and he was Harry's responsibility now.
"Bombarda!" the bigger dragon called, exhaling as he did so, and an explosive curse came smashing at Harry before whipping past without hitting as Harry swerved to the side. It exploded when it hit the ground, and Harry replied by finding an extra burst of speed before snatching his wand out of his pocket and pointing it at his much bigger opponent.
"Incarcerous!" he shouted, not sure if he was speaking English or Dragonish and not caring either way, and cords formed out of thin air around Voldemort's legs and wings. Then the ones on his wings tore apart again, followed by the ones on his legs, and Harry watched Voldemort's head as it rolled around to try and target him – then cast a Protego shield just as Voldemort launched a wordless Blasting Curse.
Even with the shield in the way, the impact of the spell hurled Harry backwards several feet, and he barely evaded a follow-up gout of flame.
"I admit it, Harry," Voldemort said, as Harry corrected his tumble and began to gain height again. "When last we met, I did not expect you to be so powerful. I should have – I admit it – but I had not realized how much stronger it makes someone to be a dragon. A true dragon, one with wit, not the mere beasts the Wizarding World knows."
Harry was trying to keep track of everything at once. Voldemort, what Voldemort was saying, the castle below – he realized with a start that there were flashes of red and white light around the entrance to the castle, and he could see hooded figures casting all kinds of spells towards Hogwarts itself – and a glimpse of two centaur and a warg galloping and loping into the Forbidden Forest as fast as they possibly could.
"But now, Harry," Voldemort went on, sounding pleased. "Now I am a dragon as well. Expulso!"
Harry saw the spell coming, saw Voldemort's jaws open as he directed the jet of explosive magic, and flared his wings to shed speed – just in time, so the spell went whipping past in front of him.
The second burst of magic hit him in the side, sending Harry rolling bodily through the air, and he recovered only just in time to avoid slamming straight into the Whomping Willow.
It lashed ineffectually at him as he swept past, and Voldemort cast two more Explosive Curses down at Harry – though this time Harry saw how the trick was done, because Voldemort had his wand out as well, and Harry saw both curses coming so he was able to roll out of the way.
Wings pumping, Harry climbed higher – enough that he wouldn't end up crashing if he caught the wrong end of another spell – then closed his eyes and flicked his wand. "Solaris!"
Harry had first seen that particular spell in First Year, and while it had been far too advanced at the time – Professor Dumbledore had cast it – he hadn't forgotten to go back and look at it later. It prompted a roar of rage from Voldemort as he was suddenly looking directly into a brilliant flare of light, and Harry kept it up for three seconds before cancelling the spell and opening his eyes again.
To see a wall of flame.
Voldemort hadn't bothered casting a spell with his breath, this time, just spat out a long stream of oily red-black flames, and Harry just about managed to get a Flame-Freezing Charm off before going straight through the flames – not to protect him, necessarily, but because his wand would have been in for it.
"Surrender, Harry, and I'll make it painless," Voldemort offered, sounding amused, but there was a throttled rage to his tone which he couldn't quite conceal as Harry flew higher. "I can be merciful."
"I don't mind the pain," Harry shot back. "I mind everything else."
"Your parents were different," Voldemort told him, flying after him, occasionally lazily throwing a silent curse up at Harry – though even Voldemort's silent curses seemed to be as vicious as the sort of thing Draco or Su cast with a full incantation. "They didn't mind dying. Your father didn't even have his wand with him, and he died for his family… your mother died for you… I wonder if you'd be willing to die for your friends?"
Harry knew he would be – he knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt, because they were his and they were friends and everything about how he processed both of those words meant it – but he wasn't sure if Voldemort was serious or not, and either way it seemed as though there was something fundamental that the other dragon-ified wizard wasn't quite getting about the whole idea of self-sacrifice.
As if it was just something people did, instead of why.
"Sectumsempra!" Voldemort incanted, slashing his wand, just as Harry rolled onto his back and pointed his own wand – aiming squarely for Voldemort's.
"Expelliarmus!" he called, and the two spells collided, and suddenly everything was white and golden light.
Harry's wand was connected to Voldemort's by a blazing thread of golden light, and his wand was trembling and vibrating – both wands were vibrating, Harry could see – and he suddenly felt lighter, as though the force of gravity itself was astonished by what had just happened.
Both dragons were lifted, and Voldemort began struggling against the pull – wings beating hard, trying to wrench his wand away from the strange connection, and Harry didn't have any idea what was going on but he thought quite strongly that if Voldemort wanted something to stop then Harry should want it to continue.
"What are you doing?" Voldemort demanded. "What is this?"
The golden thread shivered and splintered into a thousand strands, with the central one still forming a cord between their wands but all the rest of them spread out and wove into a tight cage of beautiful, shimmering light.
Then music came, phoenix song, resonating through every strand of the golden web, and Harry knew.
It was something about how his wand had the same core as Voldemort's.
It had to be something rare, if Harry had never read about it happening before, and while Harry had all the information he needed to work it out Voldemort actually didn't – because it was only really Mr. Ollivander who knew about the brother wands thing.
And Hagrid, Harry supposed. But it hadn't been in the news, anyway.
Beads of white light coalesced on the thread, and the vibration of the wands got worse, and the beads slowly started to slide up and down. As one slowly slid towards Harry, he felt his wand trembling in his grip, growing hotter, and he knew he didn't want the bead of light to reach him… and, by a ferocious effort of concentration, he managed to slowly force the bead backwards.
Towards Voldemort.
"I… do… not…" Voldemort growled, the words falling like stones, "...intend… to…"
The first bead made contact with Voldemort's wand.
Harry had been wondering if the other wizard's wand would catch fire, but instead a coil of smoke issued from it. It showed an explosion, turf flying away, then dissolved in a moment.
Harry hadn't concentrated on anything so hard in his life. There seemed to be nothing but the golden thread and the wands and the phoenix song, thrumming in his bones and racing over his scales, and a second bead connected with Voldemort's wand.
This time the smoke was an explosion knocking Harry to the side, and it dissolved in moments just like the last.
It was the spells. The last few spells Voldemort had cast, or properly cast, or… some way it worked out what counted, Harry didn't know, but he could recognize the pattern… no, it was the spells the wand had cast.
His momentary slip had sent the beads sliding back towards him, but then Harry focused again, and the golden lines of light seemed to pulse in time with the phoenix song echoing all around them. Another bead of light slowly made its way towards Voldemort's wand, and this time there was a coil of smoke that became a dragon… a chained dragon… and Harry had no idea what it meant-
"Depulso!" Voldemort roared, and the magical blast knocked Harry away and the connection broke.
The globe of light disappeared and the phoenix song went silent all in the space of a second, and Harry flared his wings to avoid tumbling out of control. The shock of the connection breaking seemed to have stunned Voldemort for a moment as well, but then the green-and-silver dragon recovered and glared at Harry with hating red eyes.
Then he turned towards Hogwarts far below – Harry could see that a major fight was happening on the ground, with weird curses and charms going back and forth – and dropped into a dive.
Harry followed, wings folding back, but while he was getting the sense that he was at least as fast as Voldemort – and considerably more manoeuvrable, anyway – Voldemort was bigger and heavier and could pick up more speed in a dive.
"Confringo!" Voldemort incanted, pulling up a moment later, and the Blasting Curse he'd fired smashed into the side of Hogwarts and blew off a chunk of stone bigger than Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's house. The Arithmancy classroom was revealed inside, and after a moment some of the Death Eaters – they had to be Death Eaters – started moving around the castle to get in through that entrance instead.
Harry raised his wand and gave it a flick, casting the fire whip spell, but doing it silently instead of giving the incantation. It lashed out towards Voldemort, having to reach a long way because of how fast both dragons were moving, and Harry managed to snag the leading edge of Voldemort's wing – only for his opponent to incant something that Harry didn't quite catch, and the front of the fire whip turned into the tail of a snake.
The rest of the whip changed as well, fire-to-snake rippling up it like a lightning bolt, and flaming fangs snapped at Harry as it detached from his wand before falling into the air below them and dissolving.
Voldemort wasn't content with simply neutralizing Harry's spell, though, and barked a few sharp syllables which conjured a pane of glass twenty feet wide – then hit it with another massive Depulso, shattering it into hundreds of wicked shards that spread out to fill the whole of the air Harry was about to fly through.
"Sabulofors!" Harry shouted, and the glass turned to sand and grit – less dangerous for him, and much less dangerous for whoever was on the ground – then waved his wand at the cloud once he'd passed through it. "Aves caterva!"
"Bombarda!" Voldemort shouted, and Harry dodged away – only one spell whipping past him this time, not two, and he wondered what that could mean – before flicking his wand and directing the cloud of vaguely bird-shaped rocks he'd created.
Voldemort blew them to pieces with two quick spells, but it was something. And Harry used the time to turn almost within his own length, wings hammering the air as he dove to try and help out on the ground himself.
The air seemed chill all of a sudden, nothing like it should be in the middle of the afternoon in early summer, and as Hogwarts got larger below – and Voldemort came down after him – Harry wasn't sure at first why that could be happening.
Then he noticed a flicker of white mist inside the exposed Arithmancy classroom, a clear sign of someone not quite casting the Patronus properly, and realized that not all of the robed figures wore masks.
That was how the Death Eaters were here. Voldemort had somehow got the Dementors on his side, and they were attacking – and while a lot of Harry's classmates had learned the Patronus Charm, it was probably a lot harder to cast it in the middle of a fight while there was a Dementor actually in front of you.
"Expecto Patronum!" Harry shouted, forcing himself to think about the happiest memory he could, but he could hear someone screaming down below and Voldemort's high, cold laugh. A flicker of white came from his muzzle but fell apart, and Harry closed his eyes for a moment to remember the best memory he could.
Sirius at their first Christmas together, exhausted but happy. Ron trying not to let his pride show enough for his mother to think he wasn't taking her scolding seriously. Everyone's first Animagus transformations, in a lightning-lit room in Hogsmeade. Nora, earnestly trying to invent new traditions for Hogwarts dragons.
"Expecto Patronum!" Harry roared, and this time a bolt of white and silver light shot from his muzzle.
Ruth hit one of the Dementors square in the back in an explosion of light, before circling around and letting out a silent cry of challenge, and a moment later half-a-dozen more Patronuses blossomed – a cat, an otter, a doe, and then Harry had to pull up in a sharp turn as Voldemort tried to cast an Incarcerous on him.
Most of the spell missed, with only one set of cords forming around Harry's hind legs, and he glanced down before incinerating them with a focused jet of flame. Then he rolled out of the way as Voldemort tried to set him on fire again, not just with flame breath but amplifying it with a roared Incendio that exploded just to Harry's left – setting the edge of his robes on fire for a moment.
Vaguely, Harry remembered that Voldemort had been born in the nineteen-twenties, and so he'd been a young adult around the time of the Second World War. So maybe he'd seen anti-aircraft guns.
Then there was an entirely different roar that came as a complete surprise, because it didn't come from behind and to Harry's left – it came from below.
"Stop trying to hurt Harry!"
Two jets of flame flashed up, well to Harry's side, and he banked around to see that Nora and Sally had heard the commotion and come to join in. Below he could see Ollie as well, flying down towards the Death Eaters trying to get through the entrances, but he couldn't see the other dragons right that moment.
"Silence!" Voldemort replied, turning and breathing flame back at the two conventional dragons, and Sally shielded herself with a wing in a way Harry remembered from when she and her siblings had been fighting all the time. Then she threw herself sideways as Voldemort got close, and grabbed onto his leg before breathing an intense jet of blue flame directly at him.
Voldemort half-roared half-howled in mingled rage and pain, kicking out with his other hind leg, then smashed his tail into Sally's side. "Get off me, you insolent beast!"
Harry pulled up and flipped around in a turn which he didn't know a name for but which got him moving in the opposite direction in a matter of seconds, but by the time he was flying in the right direction Voldemort had already taken hold of Sally's head in one foreleg and was pointing his wand at her eyes with the other.
"Ava-" he began, and Nora hit him with enough force to knock Sally out of his grip and send both Sally and Voldemort tumbling towards the ground.
Harry managed to squeeze out a bit more speed, and inhaled for a moment. "Aguamenti! Depulso!"
The jet of water he'd breathed out accelerated suddenly as he Banished it, hitting Voldemort, but not hard enough to stop him from recovering from the tumble by casting his own spell – an Arresto Momentum which he held for long enough to damp out the rotation, then dispelled and began powering back into the air.
Even as he did, he pointed his wand in Sally's direction. "Incarcerous."
That time, unfortunately, the spell did what it was supposed to. Sally didn't know what it was meant to do and didn't know how to react when the conjured rope snarled her wings, and she crashed with an audible whud near the crest of a grassy ridge around the front door.
She wasn't the only dragon having trouble – Vicky had a damaged wing, and Ivor had just knocked three Death Eaters flying before backing away with a whine as a Dementor focused on him, only to be protected by a darting flash of white from a Patronus too small to clearly identify – but there was a Death Eater with a big axe approaching the downed Short-Snout, and Harry switched to diving down in case he could help… at least, before Voldemort was ready to get involved himself, which should take a few more seconds.
Nora got there first, though, landing behind Sally just as the Death Eater reached her.
"Get off her!" she shouted, and the Dark Wizard went flying backwards – losing his grip on his wicked-looking weapon and landing on the grass at least twenty feet from where he'd started.
A flash of light caught Harry's eye, reflected in the lenses of his somehow still-worn glasses, and he swerved to the left just before a vicious-looking orange curse connected with his back.
"Relying on help isn't very Gryffindor, Harry," Voldemort told him. "What would your father say?"
Pumping his wings, Harry pulled up, then banked to the right just enough to point his wand straight at Voldemort. The Dark Lord's own wand was out, but the moment Harry's was pointing at him he lowered it – then snarled, apparently upset at his own reaction.
"I think he'd first be surprised that his son was a dragon," Harry replied, feeling it only polite to answer the question. "Apparently I'm a bit of a trend setter. Ebublio!"
"Finite Incantatem!" Voldemort retaliated, and Harry's jinx collapsed before it hit.
Then there was an almighty hissing shriek, and a fox the size of a house and made entirely of sparks came soaring up from the Astronomy Tower and hit Voldemort in the side – before exploding in a cloud of green and silver light.
It took Harry a moment to process that one. Voldemort seemed surprised for longer, probably because he hadn't been spending the last three years dealing with the Smiths, and the bigger dragon had only really begun to react when a second firework shot up and exploded right next to him. This one created a huge yellow-and-black wolf when it went off, engulfing Voldemort entirely for a moment, and Harry drew back his wand.
"Inanimatus Conjurus," he said, flicking it, and conjured a big steel-chain net at least twenty feet wide and aimed towards Voldemort. There were big heavy weights on the ends, and while Harry wasn't sure if it would actually work he thought it was worth trying.
Voldemort's wings swept the smoke aside, and he was initially focused on the Astronomy Tower – then something, perhaps the sound, warned him about the approaching net and his head snapped around.
"Depulso!"
The Banishing Spell hit the net hard, sending it flying back towards Harry himself with an unmusical crash, and Harry gained height to avoid being caught in his own trap. It was the sort of thing he was used to, though – it wasn't as fast as a Bludger – and the time and effort required to do that cost Voldemort, as a big silver-and-green griffin-firework lit up the sky over Hogwarts.
It was hard to tell if any of them were hurting Voldemort, but Harry was grateful enough for the distraction, and he tried something else this time – just about the simplest harmful spell he could think of, a Knockback Jinx, but silently point-casting it from his wand several times a second.
Knockback spells flashed off Voldemort's wings, and he laughed before turning his wand on the next firework – dispelling it with an almost-casual flick, though Harry did notice that when he cast the dispelling charm he made sure his wand wasn't somewhere Harry's Knockback Jinxes could intercept it.
Then the firework reacted to the Finite Incantatem spell that had hit it, erupting into a cloud of dozens of brightly-coloured blue-and-bronze selkies which spread out every which way and began repeatedly exploding.
"ENOUGH!" Voldemort roared, wings flaring, and a wave of magic rolled out from him. It was the sort of thing Harry had only ever seen from Dumbledore before, a spell cast with such skill and power that you didn't even need to direct it with anything other than pure force of will, and the firework – and the next one, which was trailing red and gold sparks – dissolved away, like they were rotting from the inside out. "CONFRINGO!"
His Blasting Curse blew the side off the Astronomy tower in a spray of masonry, and it leaned impossibly to the side for a moment before slowly collapsing as the mortar gave way.
Several more fireworks went went off all at once, sphinxes and wargs and centaurs and dragons filling the sky with multicoloured fire and light, and Harry dove down through the chaos to try and spot Tyler or Anne… but there was no sign of either of them.
He hoped the two kitsune were okay.
Then he banked around, wings throwing him through a sharp turn, and focused on Voldemort.
"Depulso!" he bellowed, casting a wordless Bird-Conjuring Charm through his wand at the same time, and the Banishing Charm turned the birds into a hail of high-speed projectiles which peppered Voldemort all along his belly and neck. Then Harry shot past before the bigger, less manoeuvrable dragon could react, and pulled up ready for another attack.
"Fragoria!" Voldemort snarled, producing a nasty orange curse which hit Harry's back ridge a little way behind his wing spars as he flipped over, and the blast shredded that part of his robes as well as throwing him another twenty feet into the air. "Interitus!"
Harry recovered in time to avoid that second curse, not wanting to see what the jet of sickly brown light would do to him or his things if it connected, and flipped around before trying something a second time as he whipped past Voldemort. "Ebublio!"
This time the charm worked, encasing Voldemort in a shimmering spell-bubble that looked like the film on a soap bubble amplified to the translucency of a bathroom window, and the bigger dragon was trapped inside for several seconds before shouting something and smashing the whole spell to pieces.
There was an explosion down below, almost perfectly synchronized with the bursting of the bubble, and a low rumble as several tons of masonry avalanched down the side of the castle. It hadn't been Voldemort that time, and Harry wondered for a moment who'd done it, then saw a glitter of light inside the breach – and inside the other hole, and marching out of the main doors.
Harry had seen the suits of armour around Hogwarts thousands of times. They'd been a fixture for his entire time at the school – and, as far as he knew, anyone's entire time at the school – and even seeing Neville practicing against one hadn't really changed his basic assumption that they were mostly decoration. Or the sort of thing that you just got in a castle.
Now they were all on the march, forming glittering ranks, and while he saw one of them get hit by a nasty red curse which made the helmet immediately start rusting away they were surprisingly durable against a lot of the spells the Death Eaters flung at them.
Someone shouted an order, down below – about forty feet from where Horst was trying to fend off three wizards at once, occasionally shooting flame – and a pair of big, burly trolls came lumbering up towards the castle. One of them got hit by a spell from inside, which made it stagger backwards, but the other picked up a suit of armour by the head and started using it to smash at the other ones.
"Relashio!" Voldemort called, and Harry picked a direction at random and pulled up – letting the spell whip past just below him – then, as he turned, he noticed that Voldemort's wand was out.
Acting on a guess, he flicked another silent Flipendo spell at the Revulsion Jinx, and while he didn't hit the mere act made Voldemort flinch slightly.
"You seem a bit stressed," Harry said, wondering what Dumbledore would do in a situation like this and deciding to try his first guess. "I know the feeling. I'm in the middle of exams."
Smoke leaked out of Voldemort's muzzle.
"Atque Flammarum!" he roared, suddenly exhaling a wave of fire that seemed to fill half the sky, and Harry turned to fly away from the attack. Voldemort's flames kept spreading, though, twisting and changing and turning into a gigantic flaming serpent that chased Harry as he flew, and Harry's wings ached as he sprinted as fast as he could go – then rolled over, turning so all four limbs were facing upwards, and levelled his wand.
"Frigore Flammare!" he incanted. "Hyacinthum Flammare!"
The Flame-Freezing Charm hit the serpent like it had run into a brick wall, and a moment later the largest wave of Bluebell Flames Harry had ever produced crashed into it. Harry had put so much power into the spell – one he'd been using for over six years – that it won the clash decisively, sending a wave of lukewarm lilac flames raining down over Hogwarts.
The drifts of flame also hid Harry and Voldemort from one another's view, and drew Harry's attention to movement – a whole troop of centaur, galloping towards Hogwarts with their weapons ready and what must have been every adult warg in the forest loping ahead of them.
Magorian bent an enormous bow, then loosed it, and the shot flew across to hit a troll in the arm. Then the drifts of flame cleared, and Voldemort threw a Blasting Curse at Harry, and Harry rolled away before countering with a Scouring Charm.
He wasn't sure what it would do to Voldemort, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
A sickly green light caught Harry's attention among the fighting below – a Killing Curse, he thought – and it hit a shield borne by one of the animated suits of armour, blasting a hole in it and sending the suit crashing to the ground but stopping the spell itself.
It was only the flash of lurid green magic which had drawn his focus away from fighting Voldemort, however, and he cast a smoke-making spell before flying through it and turning sharply to the left the moment he thought he was on the other side.
The problem with that trick, he discovered – the sort of thing he'd read about several times before – was that the smoke cloud wasn't big enough to disguise Harry's position once he'd actually turned, and he could see Voldemort again only a second or so later.
Voldemort made a sudden slashing movement with his wand, and purple fire splashed off Harry's scales – some of it leaving a smouldering tear in his robes, which left Harry a little worried.
That spell had been much faster than the ones from before.
Voldemort did it again, and this time Harry pointed his wand back at his opponent. "Stupefy!"
The spells connected, and – for the second time – there was a flash of golden light and phoenix song. Voldemort wrenched convulsively, pulling the connection apart with every bit of strength he could, and the golden globe dissolved before it had properly formed.
"Accio!" the green-and-silver dragon hissed, and Harry's wand slipped from his grasp.
Harry immediately cast a wandless Summoning Charm of his own, exhaling a Blasting Curse at Voldemort at the same moment, and the Summoning Charms cancelled out – leaving Harry's wand falling, out of his grip.
"Sectumsempra!" Voldemort added, slicing his wand at Harry, and the slicing attack scored a line along his robes – and made Harry half-flinch half-dodge, since Voldemort's attack was worryingly close to his face. "Deflagare! Pondus Addendi!"
That third spell hit Harry's robes as well, and they suddenly became as heavy as lead – yanking him downwards, and cutting the manoeuverability he needed. His wings hammered the air, but it didn't help quite enough, and Voldemort came diving down towards him.
"Relashio!" someone shouted.
A purple jet of light hit Voldemort from above and knocked his head to the side, prompting a roar of rage, and Tanisis flew past Harry at high speed before beating her snowy white wings and throwing another curse at Voldemort.
"Thanks!" Harry called, inhaling before shooting a Revulsion Jinx of his own at Voldemort, and then a peregrine falcon shot up and over before dropping Harry's wand for him to catch.
Taking it with a grateful nod, Harry dispelled the Weight Charm on his robes, and pulled up out of his dive – noticing that he wasn't much higher than the top of Gryffindor Tower at this point – before straining his wings again to get back up and join in the fight. Ginny went ahead of him, gaining height in a blur – it looked like she was using a wandless Summoning Charm to pull on the much heavier Tanisis and speed herself up – then blurred into human form for long enough to conjure a metal chain from thin air and fling it at Voldemort.
"Deflagare! Bombarda!" Voldemort bellowed again, hitting the chain with his first spell, and the whole thing exploded. Ginny had already switched back to bird form, though, weaving around the second curse, and Harry glanced up for a moment to see where Tanisis was – before combining a silent, wanded Depulso with a breathed Incendio to create a stream of high-velocity flame that exploded on contact with Voldemort's hide.
Then Voldemort hit him with a blasting curse that knocked him backwards, but both Tanisis and Ginny attacked Voldemort before he could try and follow up.
"Stand aside and let me kill him!" Voldemort snarled. "Exsanguinae!"
An odd black-and-purple curse jetted from Voldemort's muzzle, aimed straight for Tanisis, and the sphinx curled her white wings around her as a shield. They looked like a frail defence – and the moment the curse hit them they shattered in a burst of light – but they absorbed the impact, leaving Tanisis falling through the air until she recast her spell and pulled up out of the dive.
"Petrificus Totalus!" Harry incanted, aiming for Voldemort's head, but the other dragon ducked out of the way before blasting another sheet of black-edged red flame towards Harry.
Then a Bludger hit Voldemort squarely on the chin, closing his muzzle with a snap and sending dark red flame bursting out of his nostrils and the sides of his mouth.
Two more followed it, these ones smaller and redder and looking an awful lot like cricket balls, and then a swarm of about fifty very small dragons.
One of them went close enough to Harry to see that it was riding a broomstick.
He looked down, and saw a familiar shock of red hair – two of them – coming up the road from Hogsmeade, along with the equally familiar shapes of Sirius and Remus and most of Remus' pack as well. It was far too far away to hear what they were saying, but Harry saw a red jet of light flick out and hit one of the Death Eaters, then a giant white wolf Patronus bowl a Dementor aside.
"I will burn you all alive for this!" Voldemort roared, catching the larger Bludger in both forepaws. He did something to it, something which set Harry's teeth on edge, and it crumbled into metallic dust – then all of the smaller Quidditch-Harry miniatures and both Cricket Bludgers exploded in little flashes of light and sparks. "INFERNUS!"
"Get out of here!" Harry told both girls, inhaling, then threw everything he could muster into his own spell. "Hyacinthum Flammare!"
Voldemort's surging, roaring wall of Fiendfyre reached out for Harry, seething hungrily – seeking to devour, and roaring wide to snap closed on his much smaller opponent. But Fiendfyre was something Harry knew, and understood, and it was something he knew how to fight – meeting it with a powerful blast of his own Bluebell Flames, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth in a way he hadn't know he could do before but which suddenly seemed terribly natural, his wings beating steadily as he hovered opposite Voldemort and marshalled warm, safe, controlled fire against Voldemort's destructive gout.
It seemed like everything else that was going on faded away, the sights and sounds of the battle below barely registering, as Harry's flame and Voldemort's flame met and hissed and seethed back and forth along the boundary between them.
Harry couldn't say how long it had been, but ultimately there was an almost audible snap, and when he finally stopped breathing there was no bluebell flame left – no Fiendfyre left – just Harry, and Voldemort, and wisps of smoke curling on the breeze.
Then there was a crash, one loud enough to be heard even as high as they were, and an enormous green shape slithered out of one of the holes that had been blasted in the castle wall.
For a moment, Harry didn't make the connection.
Then he did – this had to be Empress, who he'd never actually seen before and who was even bigger than he'd guessed – and was about to close his eyes when he noticed that he couldn't actually see the front of Empress' head. Instead he could see the sides of her head, and her body, and then he could see part of the rubble underneath her.
It was a bit weird.
Voldemort had already dropped into a dive, shedding height in a trice as everyone else on both sides recoiled away from the giant basilisk, and Harry was dropping into a dive himself to protect her when the green dragon landed right next to his friend.
He wasn't attacking. In fact, he seemed extremely satisfied with himself, spreading his wings for show and balance as he reared up on his hind legs.
"They all run," he said, voice rolling out over Hogwarts and the grounds. "As they should. For am I not the true Heir of Slytherin?"
Voldemort laughed, a high, cold sound. "And to think that everyone believed it was that oaf Hagrid," he went on. "As if a half-giant could ever be Slytherin's true heir."
Empress wasn't saying anything, and as he examined her Harry realized that there was something familiar about the transparent effect.
It was an Invisibility Cloak.
"Now!" Voldemort said, his voice charged with barely-suppressed glee that made Harry feel uncomfortable. "Kill anyone who resists, starting with Harry Potter!"
"No."
The single word hissed out into the tense silence, and then – less than a second later – Empress lunged, sinking her enormous fangs into Voldemort's leg. She had a whole mouthful of fangs, not just two, and as she bit deep Voldemort roared with pain and absolute outrage.
"RELASHIO!" he screamed, and purple light exploded all over his scales. The blast hurled Empress backwards, forcing her to release her hold and sending her crashing back into the castle hard enough to make a section of wall avalanche down as the impact jarred the mortar loose, and Voldemort panted slightly before flaring his wings and taking off again.
Harry was trying to pay attention to everything at once, wondering how Empress was doing – wanting to reassure people that she was friendly, if that hadn't been obvious from how she'd just taken a chunk out of Voldemort's leg – watching Voldemort as he took off – looking at the other Death Eaters in case they tried to capitalize on the distraction.
It seemed as though having an enormous basilisk appear out of nowhere – with absolutely no warning, Harry had to remind himself, since he'd known about Empress for years but most people hadn't even had an inkling– had shocked everyone into silence, but then someone cast a Stunning Spell and someone else blocked it with a parry and the fighting started up again.
Harry lingered a little longer, partly to see if there was somewhere he could help out and partly to check on Empress, then breathed a sigh of relief as he saw her tail shifting a little. She seemed to be stunned or perhaps out cold, but still alive.
He hoped the rest of his friends were as lucky.
"You know, the terrible thing about you," he overheard Draco saying, in his customary drawl, "is that you're so dreadful at being Anti-Muggle that you've actually managed to make me rethink deeply held beliefs. I didn't want to do that."
"Insolent boy!" someone replied, and Harry had to do a double-take at that – it was Dolores Umbridge, under one of the concealing Death Eater outfits – and a moment later Draco flicked a silent spell at her which forced her to duck behind a fallen piece of masonry.
Then the masonry itself animated, grasping at her ankles, and Voldemort roared from overhead.
"Potter!"
A flare of brilliant light came out of the bigger dragon's mouth, a single spell as big as a man's arm, and Harry rolled to the side rather than take a chance on his spell resistance. It looked like that was a good call, as halfway between the two dragons the spell completed and turned into a four-foot-long silver spear.
The spear missed Harry, and everyone else, and hit the ground with a crash that sent splinters flying off in all directions.
"I don't know how, but you did this!" Voldemort went on, this time sending a gout of fire issuing forth – one which Harry evaded by pulling up and around, then turned into it when the sheer amount interrupted his escape.
"Flipendo!" Harry replied, focusing his spell both on the fire itself and the air around it, and blasted a hole big enough to fit through. The flame curtain tried to close around him but failed, and he accelerated before glancing behind him to get another look at Voldemort.
There was something unusual about the wound.
Harry knew basilisk venom was intensely dangerous – a poison so potent that Flamel's textbook had discussed it as a possible example of natural alchemy – but he didn't think it would do more than just kill its target, if the target was vulnerable. And yet the dozens of puncture marks were hissing, and there was a tarry black ichor oozing out.
An ichor very unlike dragon blood, but which still seemed familiar.
"Come back and die!" Voldemort roared. His triumph from before had completely flashed over into rage, and when he sent his next blast of flame Harry wove just between Gryffindor Tower and the Owlery as the only place he could go to dodge – Voldemort rolling sideways to avoid crashing into both towers, then following as Harry turned towards the sky and kept climbing.
There was a lot more noise coming from down below, now, shouts and jets of red light, and he faintly heard Nora describing someone as Mr. Heron.
"Give me back my basilisk!" Voldemort demanded.
"She's not yours, and she never should have been anyone's but her own!" Harry shot back.
"Infernus!" Voldemort roared in response, and – all at once, as Voldemort's Fiendfyre reached skywards – everything fell into place for Harry in a single deductive leap.
Umbridge at the Creatures department. The missing dragon egg Charlie had been looking for. Ichor.
A chained dragon.
The Fiendfyre that was surging up towards Harry from below was hungry, grasping, already half-forming into a hydra's nest of serpents which reached up towards him, but it was also useful simply from being there – Voldemort couldn't see through the fire, so he couldn't know quite what Harry was doing.
Pulling up and wrenching himself through a flip, wings closing for a moment as he continued to drift skywards, Harry inhaled sharply through his nose and then exhaled a blaze of Fiendfyre of his own. There was no time for the incantation and Harry didn't bother, sending down an initial blast of orange-yellow flame which spread wings and plunged into Voldemort's reddish mass.
Harry hadn't been moving quite vertically upwards, and all of his concentration was on the fire. His flame warred with Voldemort's for a long, singing moment of total focus, one which reminded Harry of the phoenix-core wand connection, and even as he thought that a pair of golden wingtips emerged from the swirling conflagration of mixed flames.
Feathered wingtips.
Then the golden phoenix born from Harry's fire keened, throwing off the flickers of Voldemort's Fiendfyre like shrapnel, and Voldemort flinched violently as he lost control entirely and Harry's fire absorbed everything that was left – and spatters of golden flame spread away from the construct's feathers as it whirled and dove straight at Voldemort.
He had enough time to dodge, barely, and only a few of the fragments hit his scales. They hissed like it was acid on limestone, and Harry's wings snapped out again as he followed Voldemort down.
Harry could have had his Fiendfyre construct just attack Voldemort, but he didn't want that. Instead, he wanted something slightly different. So he directed it to bank around, fast enough to attack but slow enough to dodge, and Voldemort rolled to the side – his gaze fixed on the phoenix as it circled him.
Following it around, until he was looking at Harry… from a distance of less than ten feet.
"Confundus!" Harry roared, not so much firing a spell at Voldemort as turning the entirety of his breath into a single spell with all the power he could muster – aimed at the one place that was vulnerable on any dragon.
The eyes.
Harry's aim still wasn't perfect, and the centre of the spell-blast hit Voldemort about halfway up his muzzle. But the spell blast had been so wide, and so powerful, with a strength Harry hadn't really known he'd been able to manage, that Voldemort's head snapped back with a roar of mingled shock and fury as the attack slammed home.
Harry pulled up, flaring his wings and hammering them as fast as he could, and avoided colliding with the larger dragon by less than six inches. The Fiendfyre phoenix dissolved as he lost the diamond-edge of concentration he'd managed up until that moment, sending wisps of golden light into the air, and as Harry recovered his equilibrium he saw Voldemort dropping out of the sky – then crashing through one side of the Quidditch pitch walls, touching the ground with a slam, and his wings flapping twice to try and recover before hitting for a second and final time.
Halfway through the process he went over in a tangle of limbs, with turf and soil rising as his claws and wingtips dug in before he eventually skidded to a halt.
Harry was in a dive before Voldemort had stopped moving.
He was the first one there, but only by seconds. Ginny arrived only moments later in peregrine form, followed by at least a dozen wizards in Ministry robes on brooms, and Issola accompanied them before landing and blurring seamlessly into Percy Weasley with his wand out.
Older students and a few teachers were showing up as well, some of them injured, and Harry had just caught sight of Padfoot loping up when Voldemort snarled and rose to his feet.
The Ministry wizards all pointed their wands at once, but after rearing up Voldemort wasn't actually facing them – or Harry, really – as he beat his wings and ripped at the grass with both forepaws and let out a high, keening screech that was halfway between roar and scream. His head thrashed back and forth, smoke and then flame coming out, and after several long seconds he began to shout.
"No!" Voldemort snarled. "You are not – you are mine! I was never yours – nobody should be – you are – I am not-"
"What's he saying?" Percy asked.
"It appears he is having an argument with himself," Dumbledore answered.
Even with Dragon Voldemort snapping and snarling right in front of them, that made everyone look around.
Dumbledore looked distinctly the worse for wear, with what appeared to be a broken nose and one arm in a sling. Even more worrying for Dumbledore, he was wearing ordinary black robes, and robes which looked at least six inches too short at that, though there was a hastily added patch on one shoulder upon which Fawkes was seated.
"Though I admit I am still working on Dragonish in my spare time," the Headmaster went on. "Which, you appreciate, I do not have very much of."
"NO!" Voldemort roared. "I killed you! I – do not-"
His wings flared. "I – want – my – body – BACK!"
Fawkes began to sing, lifting off from Dumbledore's shoulder in that same moment, and the enormous green-and-silver dragon's entire body arched like it was in rigor mortis. Then a faint grey-green-white shade boiled off his scales and coalesced over the midpoint of his back, lipless mouth open in a silent scream, and evaporated in the afternoon sun.
The dragon collapsed, every muscle going limp at once, and Fawkes alighted on his flank. His eyes were shining, and great pearly tears rolled down his feathers before falling onto the terrible wounds the battle had left – which, one by one, began to close.
"I have a great many things I could say, Harry," Dumbledore informed him. "But, on reflection, I believe that 'well done' will do, for now."
Harry agreed with Dumbledore on that – there was a lot that needed to be said – but the sight of the woman next to Dumbledore reminded him of one of those things.
Professor Marchbanks had a grip on her wand that was turning her knuckles absolutely white, and there was a tear in her robes around halfway down her leg. She looked like she'd been thoroughly unready for what the afternoon had brought, and as Harry turned to her she returned his gaze fixedly.
"That was Lord Voldemort, Professor," Harry said, not wanting to leave her question unanswered. "But it was also the dragon he was sort of possessing, so I'm not sure which answer you're looking for."
Professor Marchbanks looked at him, then at the dragon, then back to him.
"Outstanding," she said, and fell sideways in a dead faint.
AN:
Well, there you go then.