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Chapter Fifty-Nine—A Maze of Falling Stars

The diary and the cup came to him when Harry called.

He could have done this ages ago, of course. He could have found and destroyed the Horcruxes the moment he let out the secret of his powers to the rest of the world. He could have done almost anything that he wished.

But it would have meant nothing without Voldemort's willing cooperation. Not if he was going to reattach pieces of soul to a person and not destroy them.

The cup whirled to him through walls of stone, somewhere that seemed deeper in the earth than simply under Gringotts. Harry arched an eyebrow in curiosity, but didn't care enough to investigate. And the diary was with him, suddenly, free from a shelf in Malfoy Manor where it had lain in silence and obscurity.

I'll have to do something about the Malfoys in this world, too.

A second later, though, Harry realized that wasn't true. They would have to do something about them, he and Voldemort, and that was only if the Malfoys didn't follow Voldemort's decree of peace. They'd always been more family-oriented than anything else, and more practical than in his first world. Harry thought they would welcome the peace easily enough.

The diary whispered and tugged at him. Harry smiled thinly. Hello, Tom, he thought, and for a moment remembered the basilisk, and the blood-soaked battle in his second life, and the monstrous, dying Inferius of a hyena that had been there, once, fighting to defend the diary.

How did you know my name?

That gave Harry an answer as to whether the Horcruxes could sense Voldemort or his intent. It seemed not. Harry flicked a hand at the diary and made it float on his right, as the cup did on his left, without replying. He faced Voldemort.

The man's eyes were wide, and fear was splashed across his face like blood. Harry wondered for a moment if that would be obvious to anyone else, or if Harry simply knew him that well. In the end, it didn't matter.

Voldemort feared pain, perhaps not much less than he feared death, and yet he was still willing to go through with this.

For that, Harry honored him.

He extended his hands, and brilliant white light sprayed out from him, forming the pattern of tree branches that had once lived here, and the pattern of leaping deer that had met their end in this clearing, and a boar that had turned at bay to the dogs, and great creatures that had stalked here when ice sang across the land and all the world was different. Harry had never seen them in life, but they had died here, and so he knew them. "Are you ready, Lord Voldemort?" he asked, his voice a sigh that he knew mimicked the winter wind.

Lord Voldemort looked at the web of life stretching in front of him, and swallowed back nervousness as he had not had to do since he was young. This was the moment when he must reject decisions he had made long before he killed Jeremy, even before he graduated from Hogwarts.

But the blazing being in the center of it all—Harry was letting his human guise slip as he concentrated on the Horcruxes—would accompany him. Voldemort would not have to do this alone.

He stepped forwards.

The web of light immediately stretched to encompass him. There were dark trunks circling past him, and the bones of elephant-like creatures, and the stroking wings of vanished birds, and rocks that had once been shaped differently. Lord Voldemort felt a moment's rebellion flicker through him. He did not want to be so common. He feared the nothingness that he thought would come after death, yes, but a large part of his rejection had also formed around not wanting to do things that everything in life did.

"I have died, too."

Lord Voldemort jerked his head up. The being of radiance in the center of the web craned its neck to look at him, and Lord Voldemort was pinned by lights that had everything shared with dying stars and nothing to do with eyes.

"I have felt the pain as my life left my body," the voice continued. "I can be what I am and feel as much compassion as I do only because I have died."

"You did not stay dead." Lord Voldemort's eyes darted off to the side, to where a shape like his younger self was forming from the shadow of a black book. It was glaring at him, sneering. "You have no reason to fear that nothingness, or being like anything else in the universe."

"For centuries, I thought I had no choice," said the voice, and the sound of a bone pipe being played lingered in the background, driving up Lord Voldemort's spine and filling his skull and heart with ice. He had a heart again, he could feel it, driven to beating fear like the heart of any lowly rabbit. "And now I know I do. At any time, I can surrender the Hallows to a willing owner, and pursue the path of ultimate death."

"You will not." Lord Voldemort tried to put a tone of command in his voice, and heard the universe laugh at him.

The laughter echoed from every corner of space, from between continents and under mountains and through the darkness among the stars. Lord Voldemort clenched his teeth and stood before it, although he had had nightmares when he was young of the universe itself turning on him. His whole spirit wanted to wither and shrivel.

He would not let it.

"Good," the being whispered, and the laughter ended as though the darkness had filled with light and the mountains had parted and the continents had assumed new configurations. "You are stronger than you were. You will have the chance, after all, to walk the path of true immortality and prove that you are worthy of it."

"I am worthy."

"You are now, but you were not originally," the voice said, and suddenly the web of light that Lord Voldemort had almost stopped seeing pulsed and the cup appeared in front of him. "Are you ready to feel remorse for the murder that you committed to create this?"

Lord Voldemort stared at the cup, and nodded. He knew, with part of himself, that Harry had chosen the easier target first. He would find it incredibly hard to feel remorse for the murders of his father and grandparents.

And that stung him, at the same level where he had thought his heart comparable to a rabbit's. That should not be the way the world was. He should have nothing that he feared to face. He should march forwards with a fearless, triumphant smile on his face and make others look at him in awe as—as—

As they would look at Harry. As he looked at Harry.

"I am ready," he said, when some moments had passed and the cup continued to hover and he realized that Harry must not have taken the nod as enough assent.

"Then watch," said the voice, and the cup seemed to fly towards him. Lord Voldemort's hands trembled with the longing to reach up and protect himself from it, but he would not shield himself from an inanimate object.

A second later, the cup smashed into him, and he lost consciousness.

Harry watched from a whirlwind of stars and bones as a younger Voldemort gripped the cup and leaned over a dying woman on the ground. Only the broken wand next to her hand proved that she had been a witch. She screamed like any Muggle as Voldemort plunged his foot into the wound that cut across her stomach.

"Pathetic," said Voldemort, with a long sneer that reminded Harry of the ones in other worlds that he had spent so much time fighting against. "But you will serve a greater purpose despite yourself, and keep Lord Voldemort alive long past the point where the world has forgotten your name."

The woman worked her throat as though she was trying to come up with enough liquid to spit at him. Voldemort only sneered again and then aimed his wand at her, whispering the Killing Curse.

Harry reached forwards and touched the mental memory image of the piece of soul as it soared away from Voldemort and towards the cup, and at the same time, encountered unexpected resistance. For a moment, he thought it was the Horcrux resisting, although the others hadn't done that.

Then Voldemort's voice said, still vibrating with the tones of arrogance, She tried to kill me!

"And you were justified in defending yourself," Harry said aloud, or so it sounded like to him, from within the whirlwind. "You were not justified in killing her so that you could tear your soul apart."

I could have died that day!

"But you didn't," Harry said. He thought he knew the source of the resistance now. "Sometimes you refuse to face the past, as you did when you thought about the day you murdered Jeremy, and sometimes you can't let go of your justifications. Do it this once, Tom. You should."

Something like a lash of dark power coiled through the darkness around Harry and snuffed out one of the falling stars. I do not wish for you to address me by that name!

"Then prove that you're Voldemort," Harry said, and spun a tendril out of his being to meet and touch the dark lash of power. It grabbed on greedily, but it could no more drain him than Voldemort could drink the sea dry. "Not the young man who was so afraid of death that he thought creating Horcruxes was a good idea. Show me Voldemort."

There was a long silence. And then the memory of the witch appeared again, and this time it was her as she had fought Voldemort, twirling in the middle of a cascade of lights. Harry watched, truly impressed. He had never seen a spell like that in any of the worlds he had lived in.

Pay attention to me!

Amused, Harry switched his attention to Voldemort, and saw the way he backed up, with his eyes wide and his wand spinning in front of him in an ineffective defense, until he used the Cutting Curse that must ultimately have felled her. But this time, the picture was changing.

Voldemort was altering his memories of the moment, or maybe bringing something forwards that had been buried; Harry wasn't entirely sure. He admired the witch. She would have made an excellent Death Eater. Someone who knew such magic might even have been someone he would have wanted to converse with in the years he had spent traveling the world and learning about Dark Arts.

And that admiration was the key to his remorse. He imagined all the knowledge that had been lost when the witch died, each thought shimmering around his head in a cloud of colored lights of its own. And then he regretted killing her.

Harry saw the shimmer of soul, at once the soul in the memory that Voldemort had hidden inside the cup and the real one flying now out of the cup. Voldemort reached out with cupped hands.

The soul-shard might still have escaped, or even challenged Voldemort for control of his own body, if Harry hadn't wreathed it in his own power and pulled it into contact with him. For a moment, the soul piece hovered.

And then Voldemort drew it into his body, and screamed through the pain as the join healed.

Harry lifted his voice in song, one he had learned from the last dolphin alive in the world where Voldemort had tied the life-force of the planet to himself and it had begun to die when he did. The song twined out and eased the pain with its haunting, alien cadences. Voldemort calmed as he listened.

The moment was past and over then, and Harry brought forth the hovering diary, and the shade that he had trapped as it tried to emerge.

This would be the most vicious of the battles, Harry sensed, both because Voldemort would regret killing his relatives less than he did most of the others, and because the diary had been made to actively ensnare someone in a way that the locket or diadem hadn't. Only the ring was probably comparable in its power.

Harry stepped back, though, and let Voldemort face Tom Riddle. It was the only thing he could do.

"Voldemort." Tom Riddle's voice was anything but respectful. Voldemort, still reeling from the moment when he had joined with the piece of his soul from the cup, didn't reply, but stared.

Had he once truly looked that arrogant without anything to back it up? Had he spoken with that brittle sound in the back of his voice? Had he truly been so young?

"You are weak," Tom said, and he laughed, and the sound seemed to pluck at the stitches that tied the new piece of soul back into Voldemort as though someone was playing them like strings. "What have you done? Sacrificed your Horcruxes? And for what?"

"A new way to be immortal." Voldemort started at the sound of his own voice. Perhaps it had been like that before he made his fourth Horcrux, or the second one, but he had no memory. He only knew it was not how he had spoken right before he stepped into the web of light, or even during the battle with the cup Horcrux.

"No," Tom said. "For a companion. Someone who can't even speak to you the way you want, because he isn't human. I could understand if you were using him for his power and his secrets, which you pretended once that you wanted to. But for love? You are weak. Pathetic. A shadow of what I was."

Voldemort opened his mouth, and then closed it. He had not named the emotion that, or not for more than a moment in the back of his mind, but yes. The name made sense. And it made him wince.

Tom felt that once, of course. He took a step closer across a shifting dark ground that was less defined than either earth or air, and smiled. "Have you thought about it? That he could be lying about this way of immortality? He's destroyed your form in every other world. What if he's lying this time? What if this is only a way to get you to destroy yourself, a new game for him to play when he's got bored of doing it himself?"

Voldemort stood frozen, and the words fell on his soul like a chill. He found himself looking wildly around, waiting for Harry to deny that.

But no answer came. Harry seemed to have pulled back as suddenly as he had spoken in the first place.

Tom laughed again. The sound hit worse than his words had. "And can you truly regret your own choice? Your father didn't deserve to live after abandoning your mother, you know that. And your grandparents! Enjoying all the wealth that should have been yours! You did the moral thing when you killed them, because you punished your father for a crime and you took away your family's ill-gotten gains. You would reverse the one moral decision you ever made?"

Voldemort said, and he did not know where the strength came from, "Not the only one."

Tom paused. "Then what?"

"The decision to spare Harry's family. To seek him out and reason with him. To compromise and accept his decision and take the Horcruxes back. Those are all moral decisions."

Tom laughed, and the sound did not split Voldemort's soul, but once again he felt the new join tremble. "That is hardly a moral decision. You made it to take advantage of him and his power."

And Voldemort saw the trap, the flaw in the logic, the way he had once done when he sat next to the fire in the Slytherin common room and debated those who had tried to assign him a place as a Mudblood and no one worth paying attention to.

"You cannot have it both ways, Tom," he said, and saw the younger version of himself start and bristle at the name. Another weakness. Voldemort smiled, and he knew that the darkness in him surged to the surface as he spoke. "Either I love Harry and everything I do is for love of him, making me weak because of that but my decisions concerning him moral. Or I am merely using him, in which case I do not love him and do not have that weakness."

Tom stared at him with his lips slightly parted. That, at least, was familiar. Voldemort remembered the way he had looked when he was in his first year and one of the seventh-years had outdueled him with words. It had been years, but he knew again.

In fact…

He felt as if he could look at Tom and see himself. The shadow of some unseen future and past trembled around him, and Voldemort faced his failure.

Yes, he regretted the death of his father and his grandparents. It had been crude and unjust. He should have blackmailed them into giving him the money he needed, or even exposed them to their neighbors as the father and grandparents of a freakish child. And he had cut short lives that could have done something else.

The pain bathed him, rushed into him. Voldemort cried out. It was like willingly stepping into fire, and he would have stepped out again, if not for the green eyes that opened in front of him, in the middle of a maze of falling stars.

Voldemort didn't know why they hadn't been there, why he had been left alone to deal with the diary shade. But Harry was there now, and he smiled, and Voldemort stepped forwards and took the pain.

He could hear his younger self shrieking, telling him to stop, that nothing was worth this, and that he would never be immortal while he had to depend on other people. He should yield, he should forget about Harry, nothing would ever be worse than this, nothing could be worth it—

And then the moment blew past, and Voldemort found himself kneeling on the ground of the clearing, trembling. He looked up and found himself staring at a patch of starlight that thickened as he watched, becoming silvery and curved, and then he was staring at his face.

He looked perhaps thirty years old. His hair hung, shaggy and dark, to his shoulders, in dire need of a cut. His nose was longer and straighter than it had been, and his fingers, when he raised his hand before his eyes, had more flesh to them than they had had in decades. His face was—a face, perhaps the way he would have looked had he grown up as Tom Riddle, perhaps not. The curves to cheekbones and chin were softer than he would have liked. He hoped no one would look at him and think his soul soft.

His eyes were a brilliant red, gleaming in the dark like the eyes of a predator catching the light.

"I don't think there's anything anyone can do about that. I'm sorry. I wish I could."

Voldemort shook his head and looked up. "I think it perhaps a price to be paid," he said, voice hoarse, as if he had been screaming for hours. Perhaps he had. He could remember very little about the time he had spent under the pain. "And this is a minor one."

Harry had formed into a perhaps half-human being, his child's face and the green eyes that had smiled at Voldemort floating in the middle of a dark mist that trailed off into the night around the clearing. He nodded. Then he said, "I'm proud of you. It was the right thing to do."

And he smiled.

For that smile, Voldemort would have risked far more fires, far more darkness, far more agony. He held out his hand.

And if he felt the cold of the wind that clasped it in return more keenly than he would have when he still had Horcruxes, it was again a small price to pay for the knowledge that Harry would be walking this path with him.