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Chapter Thirty-Five-Fated Now to Part
"Mate, I think they're starting to get suspicious."
Harry nods as Ron stares at him anxiously from the fireplace. "Well, we knew that might happen. Would you object to starting your part of the plan a little early?"
"Bloody hell, of course not!" Ron sighs and glances over his shoulder. "You want me to, what? Tell them to go to Diagon Alley? Or is that too close to people they could harm?"
"We do want a little bit of an audience, or no one is ever going to know what happened to them," Harry says thoughtfully, sitting back on his heels. "All right, how about this? Direct them to the Forbidden Forest. Then go to Professor McGonagall and tell her to close the gates and raise the protections around Hogwarts as high as she can."
"Are they going to respect those? They intruded on the grounds once before."
"Trust me," Harry says dryly, "when they see what I appear to have waiting for them, then they're not going to pay any attention to mere students."
He waits until Ron nods and shuts down the Floo, and then turns and gets ready to Apparate, himself. He was thinking the original plan would require them to get into the middle of Diagon Alley, but Ron's right. Way too many innocent people around, and the more of them there are, the greater the chance that one of the ones he wants to trap will get away from the fringes of the crowd and be more tempted by one of the living than the souls Harry intends to call forth.
Well.
The souls Harry will pretend to call forth, he thinks, amused, as he straightens with the Resurrection Stone in his hand.
By the time Harry has Apparated to the edge of the Forbidden Forest, the sky is darkening and the air around him is already cold. Harry shakes his head and begins to walk briskly until he arrives at his destination, a clearing not far from the one where he and Luna met the centaurs. They're out of sight now, hidden safely behind Luna's inventions.
But there will be eyes enough for what he's going to do, and even more once the Dementors start to arrive.
Harry places the Resurrection Stone on the ground and closes his eyes, reaching for all his power. He reminds himself of the plans that he and Ron and Hermione spent months working on. Other than the slight change of venue from Diagon Alley to the Forbidden Forest, they are still workable. Harry begins to cast the first of an incredibly complicated chain of spells.
The magic writhes up around him, spreading out in a cool net. Harry can't see it, but more to the point, the Dementors won't be able to sense it. It should mingle with the shining air of the Forbidden Forest and spread itself out, harmless unless triggered. Unless called.
Harry will be calling it.
Then he casts spells that will prevent Dementors from leaving the area, spells that will warn any watchers who might wander too close of Dementors heading towards them before they can be felt, spells that will make his illusions more attractive, and spells that will conjure apparent flesh from rocks and soil and leaves. Those last spells won't hold out for long, so Harry casts a contingency spell, too, one that will make it wait to come forth until the Dementors begin to appear. Like the net in the air, Harry can summon it by a simple effort of will.
The third-to-last spell he casts is one of the most difficult. When it's hanging in the world around him, sparking and waiting, Harry feels the faint, far-off cold of traveling Dementors.
Harry smiles and casts the Patronus Charm.
He almost goes to his knees when he does; the effort of all this magic has taken a lot out of him. But the effect is worth it. The charm that was waiting in the air combines at once with the Patronus and doubles it, then quadruples it, then multiplies it again. Harry casts the last spell, and the many versions of Prongs speed away, trotting up the paths that the Dementors will follow into the trees, waiting to show themselves until the Dementors are in the right position.
And the vile things won't be able to sense the Patronus, either.
Harry then kneels and holds his wand, reaching for the Resurrection Stone. It turns three times in his hand, almost too easily, and souls glimmer into life. Harry averts his eyes a little from his parents. They come because the Stone won't give him a bunch of random souls; they have to be connected to him in some ways. At least the souls that come from dead Aurors and criminals he's known since he started working for the Ministry are easier to deal with.
The Dementors start pouring down the paths into the clearing.
Harry lifts his will in front of him like a shield. The Transfigured flesh spins into being, clothing the souls in apparent bodies. At the same time, the net that was his first spell pops into existence and descends on the trails behind the Dementors, and the many versions of Prongs spread out further into the Forest, herding any Dementors lagging behind into the clearing.
There are two hundred. There are more than two hundred. Harry watches as they descend on the apparent feast, forcing open the Transfigured mouths of the "victims" and bending their heads to suck up the souls.
Which they can't. Harry watches as Dementor after Dementor tries and tries to Kiss the soul out of each victim-something they can only do with the living. Free souls in what only appear to be bodies are beyond their reach.
The souls still scream, thin, high-pitched sounds that make Harry wince. But the Dementors can't consume any of them, and it's only going to be a few minutes more. Dementors pour into the clearing, and if it's not the entire population of them that guards Azkaban, it has to be close. They've been talking with Ron for months, and Ron has promised that he and Harry are going to unleash them on the enemies of the revolt and give them all the souls they want as payment. That's a bargain the Dementors understand.
Harry wonders idly for a moment, his thoughts slow in the despairing cold that fills the clearing, if the Dementors ever thought about betrayal. Probably not. They're too used to wizards using them for their own terrible purposes.
It only takes a few seconds more for every Dementor in sight to be trying to suck out a soul through a "body," and Harry knows he's ready. He waves his hand, watching the skin chill with frostbite as he does.
The net boils and then snaps out so that every Dementor is entangled within its meshes. When it sharply pulls back, it binds them to the bodies of their "victims." Harry watches with satisfaction that pulses in him deep as lust while the meshes wind their hands and faces and "cloaks." Most of the time, Dementors can get out of traps by simply passing through solid objects like ghosts. Not this time.
Not ever again.
When the net is done, a few of the Dementors are beginning to wake up and realize something is wrong. Harry smiles as he watches their heads turn back and forth, their mouths opening and closing.
Their momentary suffering is never going to be adequate revenge for all the souls and happiness they've taken over the years, but he'll take what he can get.
He gestures one more time, and the many versions of Prongs come galloping into the clearing. They're there for two purposes. First, as the Dementors start fighting madly to free themselves, the Patronuses can herd them back into the traps. If they manage to free themselves at all.
None do. Harry smiles as he watches them writhe and wail, all soundless. Which means the stags can be there for another purpose.
To terrify the shit out of the Dementors in the time they have left.
The stags prance around in circles and jab their antlers towards the Dementors. In time, even their writhing stops and they simply cower in the meshes of the net, as far away as they can get when they have nowhere to go. That continues until one of them abruptly faces Harry and opens its mouth, pointing him out to the others.
Their black faces turn to face him one by one, eyeless and soundless. Harry smiles at them. The sensation of cold despair is still present, although constrained by the net he's woven and the Patronuses, it's nothing like it otherwise would be in close company with this many of them.
Harry is magically exhausted. He can't cast another Patronus in response as the Dementors begin to surge towards them, dragging the "bodies" along, and it wouldn't do any good against a thousand Dementors anyway.
But he doesn't need to. He only needs to pick up the Resurrection Stone and turn it three times in reverse.
There is a soundless impact that makes it feel as if all Harry's ribs have broken at once. He gasps, and the soundlessness dashes inside him. He's wrapped in the void, falling into it, and it's not the void of a Dementor's Kiss.
The world vanishes around him.
Harry blinks and finds himself in the midst of a gleaming white space. He glances around in interest. It doesn't resemble King's Cross this time, but then again, that was the projection of a much younger, less cynical mind. If anything, this looks like the walls of the Janus Thickey Ward at St. Mungo's.
"You have destroyed my Hallow."
Harry turns around. The voice echoes inside him, but it's not overwhelming, maybe because of where he is, or maybe because Harry is just out of shits to give about overwhelming experiences. The cloaked figure has a dark void of its own spreading out around it, and in the waves of that darkness, Harry sees struggling fish, and deer, and rabbits, and people-all forms of life.
Death isn't Death just for humans.
Harry tilts his head a little. It's as much as he's going to give in and bow to Death. It's possible that this experiment will have killed him, but he won't know that until he tries to return to his body. "I did. I wanted to."
"You have gifts that no other wizard has ever had."
"And not the one that would have mattered. The power to change the Ministry for Muggleborns and magical creatures," Harry adds, when Death stares at him with something that feels like incomprehension. "So in the end, I decided the only way to achieve it was with the power of the Deathly Hallows. And I'm doing that."
"The power was never meant for that."
"Oh? Are you going to take it away?" Harry thinks Death could do that, but if it's right about the Resurrection Stone being destroyed, maybe not. Harry has no idea whether the rest of the Hallows can be removed from his possession if one is of them is gone, if it would even mean anything.
"It was meant to make you strong."
"I am strong. I finally realized that I'm strong enough to defeat my enemies, and if I'd been willing to use the Hallows before, then I would have done it earlier."
"Why were you not willing to use them?"
"Because I assumed the same thing you're telling me now. That it would have been making myself personally powerful instead of changing the world for other people. But then I realized that none of the legends actually say that. They just assume it. I'm done assuming that what other people say is the truth."
"You could have had protection for your friends. Power beyond imagining."
"I did tell you why I didn't want that."
"With one Hallow destroyed, the power will pass out of your hands forever. You will not be able to do anything with the Invisibility Cloak and the Elder Wand but what you have already planned to do."
Harry shakes his head. "That's fine. I never wanted more than that. I hoped that this would destroy them, and it sounds like it's working."
Death vanishes silently. If it's Death and not a hallucination that his brain crafted. Harry has come to accept that it's entirely possible he made up Dumbledore when he spoke to him in King's Cross, and maybe the same thing is true here.
But he knows one thing. He turns his head and fades back into his body, back into the world.
He opens his eyes. The clearing is empty except for jumbled piles of rock and soil on the ground. Those are the remains of the partially Transfigured "bodies" that he created to house the souls he summoned.
The Resurrection Stone sent those souls back where they belong. And it sent the Dementors with them.
Harry rolls on the grounds and laughs until he thinks he's going to sick up. Then he stands, brushes himself off as calmly as he can, and starts walking back towards Hogwarts.
He notices the signs of people who were pressing up against the outer limit of the trees of the Forbidden Forest, and presumably got herded firmly out of the way. The Headmistress herself is waiting for him on the path that leads to Hogsmeade. Harry pulls up and regards her with a smile that he knows must look slightly insane, from her distressed look.
"Mr. Potter. No, I can't call you that. Harry. What happened?" She swirls forwards and touches his arm.
"The Dementors are gone."
"Yes, we thought they must be, we felt their despair fade-" McGonagall stops and stares at him. "You don't mean it like that."
"No. They're gone, Minerva." Harry wavers back and forth for a second, and leans heavily on a tree that's growing near the path. The leaves loose soft drops of rain on him. Harry turns his face up to them. It feels remarkable, still, to contemplate rain as something that exists in the world. That's falling on his face, and that he can walk through. That he won't spend eternity in that white reality with Death, or flinching away from Dementors. "I promise. Gone forever."
"What have you done?"
Harry winks at her. He doesn't believe there's any way that people can figure out his plan to act as a fake Dark Lord, or the use of the Elder Wand, from this part. Hell, it's not like he even intends to tell Minerva about the Resurrection Stone. "Come up with a way to make sure those foul creatures are banished forever."
Minerva hesitates. "You didn't destroy them?"
Harry shrugs. "They're gone." He honestly doesn't know what the Resurrection Stone or the realm of the dead that it pulls souls from will do to the Dementors. Maybe they're still there and someone using the Resurrection Stone-if it still existed-would call them forth. Maybe they're dissolving as he and Minerva speak. Maybe the Dementors are being reformed into fairies.
He doesn't care. He doesn't have to care. It feels great.
"Perhaps it would be better, if you didn't destroy them." Minerva speaks in a troubled voice, eyes on him. "If you were not responsible for the genocide of an entire species."
Harry can't help it. He laughs. Minerva's eyes widen, but don't move away from him. "Genocide? Have you never really looked at a Dementor and felt what it's like, Headmistress? You should know that they would slaughter us in a second if they had any chance. I think it was the bargain that the Ministry made with them that kept them in check, myself. Better to devour souls on a regular basis and suck up happy emotions without being troubled than have to fight the humans."
"Even if they wanted to kill us, it would hardly have made us moral to return the favor."
"I don't have to care about morality."
"Yes, I saw those articles about you becoming a Dark Lord. I didn't believe them..."
Harry shakes his head. "You can believe as much as you want to, Headmistress. I simply wanted to tell someone what was going on." He smiles and Apparates. It stuns him, a little, that someone might think he was a Dark Lord because he got rid of Dementors. Surely proper Dark Lords use them? But it's not his concern now.
There are only a few steps left in the plan, and he thinks that he's going to enjoy not being the Master of Death any longer. Death is right. Those Hallows did give him ultimate power, even though it isn't the kind anyone else would have envisioned.
The power to claim his freedom and change the world.