'Well I suppose Draco's braggarts tendencies don't come from a complete stranger.' Narcissa noted to herself in a distant manner as she walked towards the area most of the families were hosted. Her husband had unwittingly given the information she needed to know when she had to act.
A few whispered words to the Goyle matriarch, an elderly lady who was deeply disappointed to see her intelligence had not gone to her children and grandchildren, would get the ball rolling. A few innocuous looking talks later and Narcissa knew that everything was going to her plan.
'The first dangerous phase is over. Now only the escape and the talk with Bones are truly dangerous things for me.' Narcissa mused. If she would have to sell out each and every single one of them to keep her own skin and that of her son intact, she would do so. Her husband would be saved if she could afford it.
"So Luna foresaw something and you didn't press her for more information?" Cressida asked, exasperated that it was all that Harry knew. Following Luna's hint Harry had opened the map on the table late in the evening and then explained to Mia and Cressida why he did so. "She told me enough." Harry defended himself. "Something is going to happen tonight and she thinks it's not aimed at the students."
"So that leaves you or the staff as targets." Cressida filled in. Mia looked at the map with a focus that would make a laser envious. "You keep the sword Mia, I'll fight with my wand." Harry told his knight. Bringing forth her sword inside the castle would cause trouble for the wards. Which in turn could cause more trouble later on.
"It's most likely Voldemort behind the trouble… so it could be both." Harry mused out loud as he kept an eye on the map. "I just wonder how he plans to get in. Dumbledore isn't that lax with actual entry into the castle. Even the hidden entrances are shut during the night. Sirius only managed to get in because he slipped through one before the curfew.
"I suppose he could be hiding them in the chamber of secrets." Harry said with a frown as his eye wandered to the perpetually broken girl's loo. "There aren't many targets nearby. It'll take them a few minutes to get anywhere interesting from there." Mia observed calmly. "And we'll have an easy time intercepting them as well." Cressida agreed.
Harry grinned in agreement as his blood started to simmer in anticipation. It was a flurry of movement on the seventh floor that drew his attention. "Why are people pouring out of nowhere.. Lucius Malfoy?!" "A secret entrance on the seventh floor?!" Mia blurted out in surprise wondering what kind of crazy magic could enable that. "Nevermind how, let's go!" Harry all but shouted as he shot out of his seat.
He snatched up the map and started sprinting, the portrait usually blocking the way had already been left open. "They seem to be heading to Dumbledore's office." he shouted to the girls as he slowed down to take the corner to the main stairway.
The end of the school year could not come quickly enough for Minerva McGonagall. She had drawn the short straw to patrol for the night with Umbridge. The pink loving woman managed to make the mostly silent patrol somehow unpleasant with just her presence.
"Oh my, there is a group of naughty students out and about." said women simpered as they turned a corner and in the distance, near the headmaster's office saw several cloaked figures. McGonagall tensed before she was fully aware of it. It then hit her that the group members were too tall for students up to mischief. Despite the poor light from the torches and cloud covered moon she saw the white of a mask.
Her body was already moving out of the way when a chorus of 'Avada Kedavra!" rang out. A trio of acid green bolts roared downrange. As the transfiguration professor's instincts had her moving she was out of the line of fire. One bolt however was heading straight towards Umbridge.
The woman watched the bolt of death like a deer staring into a headlight. At the last moment her wand shot up and she cast the protego spell. 'That is the most pathetic protego I have ever had the displeasure of seeing. I fear for the end of year results of the students.' the teacher part of Minerva's brain noted while the rest was busy figuring out how she would escape this dire situation.
Then the bolt flew through the shield and hit Umbridge. Who collapsed like a puppet who had her strings cut. Minerva did not stop to mourn her fellow teacher. Every bit of her focus turned towards transfiguring whatever she could get her wand on into action. She could not summon the suits into action, as they made a poor internal defense mechanism against infiltrators.
So she had to make her own guardians. Which as a mistress of transfiguration was well within her capabilities.
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was displeased with his attackers. The reason for his displeasure was not the assault on his person or the destruction of the guardian statue in front of the stairs to his office. Nor was it the destruction of said office in the spellfire as he was forced to retreat to the loft.
He was not even angry that his former students turned on him while following the path of darkness or the implied insult that Tom Riddle thought his gang of flunkies was enough to bring him down.
No, what had Albus Dumbledore's ire was the destruction of his night clothing, the opening barrage of spells damaging the cloth and enchantments. It was a single piece robe that was a bit of a bother to shimmy into. But it had a menagerie of colorful creatures from all over the world frolicking around it, including several fictional ones from the quibbler; it was eye-soring to all those who saw it.
Most importantly it was a gift from Nicholas Flamel. Who bore Dumbledore's odd choice of clothing in later life with bemused amusement. Had his attackers damaged his clothing Albus would have even forgiven them. But it was worse, every creature emitted enough light to function as a night light, and Albus was forced to destroy that enchantment as it would not turn off so he would not be a beacon to cast spells at.
That was the root of his displeasure. One he once more expressed in a flurry of wand movement that saw another of the masked attackers disabled for the fight. Inwardly however most of Albus's mind was bemoaning the fact he was not sure if he could restore the enchantment that had lit up the creatures and had them frolic around the cloth.
Nicolas' call to fame was his mastery of Alchemy. However a curious man with hundreds of years to his name was skilled in many other magics as well. And Albus was not certain if he had the knowledge and skill in whatever branch Nicolas had called upon to make his nightwear.
A few more waves of his wand had the walls come alive and entrap another of his attackers within them. He made a mental note to fish out the man later before he could run out of air. 'Perhaps I should dramatically fling myself off the balcony and fly away in the darkness…' Dumbledore mused as he withered a barrage of spells on his shield. His attackers had already learned that whoever brought an unforgivable to the fray was bound to receive swift and painful retribution.
'No. That would leave them free to harass my students.' he thought with a frown. There was a sudden clamor coming further down below. "Ah. It appears that mister Potter has arrived." He told the men keeping their head down on the spiral stairs to the loft. "I am not sure if he will be as gentle to you as I am. He is rather fond of the sword of Gryffindor you see."
There was a sudden blast of wind carrying the sounds of things being broken. "I shall have words with the young campione about what magic is acceptable to use within these halls." he said mostly to himself. His lips twitched slightly at the whispered insults at his sanity. Clearly the young men had forgotten the virtues of staying calm while under duress. Or the wisdom of being anywhere near the opposite side of a Campione on a mission.
Harry dashed past the two knocked out men. By the alterations left behind he suspected they ran into Professor McGonagall and had underestimated the old witch. He hoped his transfiguration teacher was alright. She didn't seem to be the type to let people clad in death eater outfits run wild in her school.
A group of death eaters were huddled around the entrance, at their feet was the dust of a broken statue. "It's Potter!" one particular sharp eyed man shouted and in a moment spells were hurled his way. Time slowed down and for a moment Harry wondered why there was a smaller death eater between the rest before discarding it.
He slid to a halt while he ducked instinctivily and with a vicious swipe with the wand from one of the Death Eater's a cutting curse roared down the hallway like a horizontal guillotine. He heard the sound of a deflected spell off a sword to his left so he hoped Cressida on his right managed to dodge. He raised his wand in reply and chanted the intonation of his favorite wind spell. The smaller death eater tried to block the spell while the rest had the good sense trying to scatter away from it.
The lance of wind cut its way through the shield, a trio of death eaters, including the small one, slammed into the walls with a thunderous roar. Leaving behind a deep gouge and a cloud of dust from the destroyed brickwork. One Death Eater used magic somehow to move the cloud into the hallway Harry was and obscured his vision.
"Why would they…" Mia asked as she peeked around the alcove she had taken cover in while Cressida had conjured a barrier of ice to hide behind. Acid green spells rocketed out of the dust, clearly unaimed as they hit everything in the nearby area. Harry sidestepped to one getting close to him when another hit Cressida's cover.
When a second killing curse came close to hitting her, Harry's patience snapped. "Eurus interauilonem ettelum imperator!" he chanted as his wand slashed through the motions. More spells flew in his directions. He had no idea how many managed to him, but none pierced his magical resistance.
The spear of wind roared down the hallway, sucking up the dust cloud for a split moment before it slammed into the stairway. The explosions tore chunks out of walls that were blasted into the death eaters who thought they were in cover. Harry charged forward before the second cloud of dust could be brought to bear.
The bodies that twitched received another curse to keep them down. Harry hardly slowed down, he put his wand between his teeth and he leaped up to grab the part of the stairway still intact. He pulled himself up and stormed into the office to find whole bunches of unconscious and tied up Death Eaters around Dumbledore.
"Wand between the teeth, how very pirate of you Harry. Although next time you could walk up like a civilised person if you were more careful with your choice of spells." Harry winced at the rebuke first and then gasped out how calm the man was taking a large group of people out for his life. He then did a double take at the odd attire the headmaster was clad in.
"Now since you are so quick. Do you have an idea how they got here?" Dumbledore asked calmly as he strode towards his destroyed staircase. Utterly ignoring the immobilised Campione who tried to comprehend what he had just seen. With a wave of his wand the staircase slowly started to repair itself. "You have been most thorough with your destruction, mister Potter." he said disapprovingly. Harry meanwhile had rebooted his brain and opened the map behind Dumbledore and saw a single dot marked 'Lucius Malfoy' making its way up to the seventh floor.
"The seventh floor, there is someone trying to run away." Harry answered the earlier question as he sprinted past the old man. He jumped down through the slowly repairing staircase and sprinted right out. "The vigor and impatience of youth." Dumbledore said with a shake of his head. He calmly started to walk down the staircase, coinciding his arrival at the bottom with the complete repair of the place.
He cast a patronus "Minerva, if you could be so kind as to call the DMLE. We have a large set of unwelcome intruders." He turned his attention towards the scattered bodies and started to work on those who still lived. 'Such a destructive approach.' he thought, disappointed that Harry had taken lives so easily. He fully believed Harry had the skills to take them down non-lethally. He then saw a smaller body.
He sagged slightly as he removed the mask of the mangled body and was greeted with the visage of Draco Malfoy. For a moment he wanted to blame the rivalry between the two before discarding it. In the heat of battle he doubted Harry had any chance to identify Draco. Considering the young man had attacked with the force of a battering ram he suspected that the Slytherin student died in an instant.
"What a waste of precious life." he said with a sigh.
Harry was surprised that Mia managed to get a small lead on him as they rushed towards the seventh floor. The woman rounded the corner first and barely got two steps in when the sword of Gryffindor reflected a spell back to its sender. Harry saw the flash of light of a spell hitting Lucius Malfoy and hit him with a stunner before tying him up like he had seen in Dumbledore's office.
"I don't think that door is on the map." Harry said as he pointed towards the door he suspected the Death Eaters had used to infiltrate Hogwarts. Wand at the ready he stood slightly off center. With a nod Mia pulled it open and Harry readied himself to attack, dodge or defend.
After a few seconds of tense waiting nothing happened. "I don't think there is a reserve. It looks like a big dump inside." Harry said as he waved his wand to lock the door in position. "Damn it. Not all of us are exercise freaks like the two of you." Cressida said panting as she caught up. "This is their secret entrance?" she asked after catching her breath.
"It must be." Harry said as he took the lead. Unaware that the reflected curse had done its work turning Malfoy's senior into mush and thus expiring. "What is this… Hogwarts lost and found?" he muttered as he looked at sheer piles of chairs and desks. "I wonder what kind of treasures are hidden in here. A thousand years of forgotten or lost things." Cressida mused out loud as she followed Harry deeper into the room.
A glint drew her eyes as Harry improved what they could see by throwing up an orb of light in the air. "Handy." Mia muttered as she kept a wary eye out. It was clear they were following a path of sorts. "Asked Hermione to find me a spell that allows me to see and curse at the same time after the entire zombie incident." he paused for a moment "For you know, in the case like this or when you are not around." he tacked on hastily.
"One moment." Cressida said as she stepped into the piles towards a bust of a female personage. "That diadem…" "What is a diadem?" Harry wondered and he received his answer as the orb flew forward and revealed a silver headpiece with a big blue gemstone set in the middle.
Cressida reached out for it and Harry found it odd that she didn't even bother trying to check it over somehow when he remembered Luna's words. "Accio!" he shouted as he focused on Cressida's robes. The woman was pulled bodily backward. "Harry?" Mia yelped surprised as she half dodged Cressida who was then caught by Harry. "Stab the damn thing!" Harry commanded as he took in Cressida's surprised blinking as she regained her faculties.
Mia acted instantly upon his order and in a few large strides she cut the bust and diadem in half with one mighty vertical swing of the sword of Gryffindor. There was a screech they had heard before as a black mist poured out for a moment before disappearing.
"It was one of Voldemort's…" Cressida gasped in realisation. "Dammit… I got caught. I am sorry." "It's alright. Thank Luna when you see her tomorrow." Harry said instead as he helped Cressida to her feet. "To think one of them would be inside Hogwarts." Mia added with a grimace. "We never did. Now come on. We still need to find out how they got inside Hogwarts." Harry commanded to draw Cressida out of her self recrimination.
They returned to the rough path in the piles of stuff and at the end of it saw a cabinet placed in the center of an opening. "I don't think it's here." Harry said with a frown. "Hold on Harry." Cressida said as she, this time with a bit of magic, reached out to the cabinet. "This cabinet is a magical construct of sorts."
Harry bit his tongue to avoid biting out that they were in a sodding magical castle dedicated to teaching magic and that everything was magical. "Any clue what it does?" Harry said as he looked around for alternatives. Cressida answered by picking up a piece of broken table leg, putting it in the cabinet and closing the door.
She then opened the door and to reveal the piece of debris was gone. "A vanishing cabinet. They are quite rare and hard to make. Somewhere, and I suspect that would be Voldemort's lair, is a counterpart with the piece of table now in it. "They came into the castle through this?"
"Yes Harry, it also explains how they avoided breaching the wards. It's effectively a hidden entrance. I wonder why they haven't used it earlier, however." Cressida answered. "I am no craftswoman. But look at the back here." Mia said as she pointed to the weathered and cracked wood. "I'd say they got a junior Death Eater to repair the thing."
"So he isn't expecting us…" Harry suggested with a grin. "Let's go." "Wait Harry, that is not a good idea." Cressida objected. "And the longer we wait, the more chance there is he'll know something's up and run away. We are going." Harry rebutted, eager to deal with Tom Riddle as soon as he could.
"Very well, but send a message so that Dumbledore can follow us up." Cressida ordered. Harry nodded and conjured the patronus. He hadn't known they could be used to send messages until he started to prepare for the defence class and found that detail. Prongs soon galloped away to deliver his message and Harry joined Mia in the cabinet. With some reluctance Cressida did as well.
The trio were bodily tossed out on the other side. "So it works on Campione… that is a flaw we should have realised before." Cressida noted with a groan as she picked herself up. "I don't think it likes it though…" Mia pointed out and Harry was glad they hadn't landed in a tangle of limbs so he could look around. The old cabinet looked like someone had taken an axe to it from the inside. And Harry suspected that was mostly because it had to endure making a way to transport him.
"Well… let's do what we're here for." Harry said as he pointed to the only door leading out of the room. His second look confirmed that what meager and worn out furniture inside the room was pushed aside to allow as much for people to gather. He pushed open the door and found a long hallway. "No convenient signs of 'Dark Lord here'." he muttered.
"I doubt he needs to mark out for his minions where he has his throne room. " Mia pointed out. "I think that side is the end of the mansion. If he has the ego you told us about he'll probably be in one of the big rooms near the center." she handed the sword of Gryffindor and started to mutter the incantation to bring about her own. With that little guidance they went the opposite way and almost stumbled into the room Voldemort was waiting in. His back turned towards the door while he stared into the night through the window."
"You have returned faster than I expected." Voldemort intoned gravely. "Either you succeeded quickly or…" he turned to voice a threat to find Harry and Mia nearly up his face with their respective swords lancing for his head. With inhuman speed he avoided the double strike and retaliated by banishing a few weapons he had shrank into his pockets for this purpose towards the pair.
Between the reflexes and training the pair batted aside the sudden storm of weaponry. Cressida's pencil thin stream of water relieved the pressure as the Dark Lord was forced to avoid it. The missing attack punched a long ragged line into the wall to the sky outside.
'My own protections are in my way.' Tom Riddle raged inside his head as his options of escape were cut off by his own hand. 'Why are my own followers such damned cowards? I felt they needed to ensure they would not scurry like the rats they are.' He leapt backwards while throwing a powerful exploding curse at Cressida, knowing it would bounce of the Campione and most likely as well on his armoured companion.
The woman dodged but still got picked up by the explosion. She recovered before she hit the wall while Voldemort cast a fire spell that halted the advance of both sword wielders by a wall of fire erupting from the floor. He ducked under the cutting curse Harry sent his way while he blasted a hole into the wall.
His retreat was cut off however as Harry barreled through the fire, his clothes signed but the boy unharmed. Mia meanwhile had run around the wall of fire and he was stuck between Harry, Mia, a stone wall and his own firewall. "It is such a shame you waste your strength for fools Potter." he snarled. "Even if you managed to cut me down here, I will just return."
Before he allowed the young man to rebut his words he dismissed his own magic and blurred into movement. Two blades each nicked one of his legs but he was unhindered as he charged forward, breaking another hole into the wall and leaping through it.
A hammer of water slammed into his legs and he felt rather than heard his bones break. He fully spun on his axis once before hitting the ground. The spin disoriented him enough to make him fail to set up a proper landing. He tried to rise as he heard two pairs of feet landing which told him Harry and the Witenagemot woman had jumped down.
'What is wrong with my legs? Broken bones should not slow me this much!' he screamed in his own mind. He turned to cast the killing curse only to find his wand cut out of his grasp. "You are not even going to duel me like a proper wizard Potter?" he raged out loud in a desperate attempt to buy himself an opening.
"You are just a beast Tom." Harry replied before swinging down the sword of Gryffindor through Voldemort's neck.
The corpse disintegrated from the neck up and down. The head soon disappeared like a malevolent pile of dust. Harry had half expected there to be another ghostly shriek, yet none came. "Is it really over?" he asked disbelievingly. Somehow he had expected more than the short fight upstairs.
"I suspect that is the case Harry. I ask you to stay wary. We are inside the enemy's stronghold." Cressida agreed. "Although I wonder where his guards are. Surely he is not fool enough to stay behind alone." "Or they might be running for the hills already." Harry muttered disdainfully as he took aim at the wall. A spell later they had an entrance.
AN: I know I am breaking one of the rules I set up for the universe, but I have written myself into a corner so badly it would be funny if it wasn't me stuck in said corner. *Readies the dice for an Author Saving Throw*