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Night of Naught
"You bring the accusation before the clan, Harry Potter Doomgiver amaraczh, that the stairs up to your dormitory room in Ravenclaw Tower at Hogwarts were manipulated by the Horcrux, Nagini?"
"I do."
Harry stands with his hands on his daggers in the middle of the Coal Courtroom, the room with dense, polished black walls where formal accusations must be made. He wouldn't normally have been permitted to leave the school on a weekend, but Dumbledore took one look at his face and let him go.
A murmur fills the Coal Courtroom. Harry ignores the eyes all fastened on him. He is telling the truth as he understands it, and the stairs which transformed into a ramp have sent their own testimony ahead, ringing from stone to stone, to arrive with him here.
If Harry is mistaken, he will, of course, accept that, and also the consequences.
"You believe that the stairs could not have been transformed except by a manipulation taught to Nagini the Horcrux by a goblin?"
"Yes."
"And you believe that a goblin could be corrupted into giving a Horcrux such a gift?"
"Yes." Harry meets the gaze of the goblin who stands in front of him without flinching. Her name is Nadir, named after the cavern where she works at the bottom of the Realm of Song, at the bottom of the world as Harry understands it. All goblins who work in that cave take on the name, and all of them have their eyes and their claws turn black. She is entirely neutral, made so by her office, and won't be swayed by either Harry's human persona or the reputation he has gained among the clans.
Nadir's head sways back and forth for a moment like a pendulum. "What reason do you have for believing that a goblin might be corrupted like this?'
"It happened once before, with the cup Horcrux in the Lestrange vault, which corrupted the vault-keeper Graveltooth."
A tide of noise swells and dies away. None of them will ever forget Graveltooth, or the price she paid.
"Very well." Nadir turns to the other goblins of the clan. "How say you? Do we have enough room for an investigation of another goblin corrupted by a Horcrux, knowing what a grave accusation it is to make about one of our own people?"
Claws rise all around the room, and voices shout. Harry carefully keeps back his huff of relief. If the others voted against him, he wouldn't be punished for bringing the accusation—he has told the truth, and he has committed no cowardice or other offense—but they wouldn't investigate, and meanwhile, Nagini could go on corrupting someone else.
"It is spoken," Nadir says, and turns back to Harry. She sweeps a gesture that looks like a bow, but leaves gleaming flakes of what seem to be black diamond dust behind on the air. "We will investigate. First in the investigation—"
"Let it be me," Harry says, stepping forwards. "As I brought the accusation, and I have been close to Horcruxes, and could have been corrupted myself."
Nadir considers him in utter silence. Harry knows it won't be because she's wondering if he's sincere. She doesn't wonder such things like that. No goblins do, who take that name. She's considering whether it's worth violating the official order of such an investigation to acknowledge him first, when Harry is not a suspect or a prominent member of the clan.
"Very well," Nadir says at last, and flicks her claws. The flecks of black diamond dust turn and fly towards Harry.
Harry inhales them, and feels them bouncing around his lungs. They're irritating. They search him out for any trace of corruption left by Dark magic.
Harry does wonder what they'll say about his casting of Fiendfyre. Then again, if that's too Dark, he'll just turn over the casting to Dumbledore the way the Headmaster asked him to.
The black flecks whisk out of Harry's lungs again, and Nadir inclines her head. "Clean," she says.
The other members of the clan line up in front of Nadir. Nadir goes through them, diamond flecks bouncing around her and rotating around her head when not in use. The goblins step aside as Nadir decrees them clean one after the other.
Gorgeslitter comes up behind Harry, studying the process. "Do you think the guilty one is really a member of our clan?" he whispers.
Harry raises and drops a shoulder. "Maybe not, but we're the clan closest to the center of British magical activity. If she traveled abroad and corrupted a member of another clan, though, we'll find them."
"There's sense in that," Gorgeslitter allows.
Nadir walks slowly down the line. Harry can't help his tension when she and her diamond dust investigate Toothsplitter, Blackeye, and Ripclaw. But all of them come away clean, and Harry relaxes.
It's hard to imagine a Master Smith, a Master Healer, or a fully-trained warrior being corrupt anyway. But then, it was equally hard for some of his people to imagine that Graveltooth had been corrupted.
"And now," Gorgeslitter says, "my turn."
Nadir turns around and gestures the black diamond flecks towards Gorgeslitter. He swallows them and they bounce around inside him for a moment. And then they scream, and fling themselves out through his mouth carrying a dripping black venom with them that looks like the blood Harry saw come out of the diary and the locket Horcruxes.
Other goblins spin to face Gorgeslitter. Nadir is already standing in front of him, a stronger black light dancing between her claws. Harry knows that it can tear apart a criminal who tries to fight back, if that's necessary.
He knows it intellectually. The rest of him, the real part of him, is staring at Gorgeslitter in shock. The old goblin gives the people around him a weary smile.
"Why?" Nadir asks, in her crystalline voice.
"Voldemort keeps the snake with him at all times. I feared we would never finish his destruction without a means to lure the Horcrux close to Harry, or at least a wizard who could cast the Fiendfyre. I sought her out and met her and…shared the information I thought she would need to be brought into close contact."
"You tried to kill me," Harry whispers.
"No," Gorgeslitter says, and he seems to think that he's telling the truth. "I promise, Harry. I may have bargained with your life, in part, but it was only to make sure that you stood a better chance of defeating her."
Harry simply closes his eyes and shakes his head. "That's the way that the Horcrux corruption manifests in you," he whispers. "Convincing you that what you did was sensible, and not a betrayal."
"I didn't betray you. You're alive, aren't you?" Gorgeslitter has an odd tone in his voice, edgy, as if he expects Harry to believe him, but calm at the same time, as if he knows that won't happen.
"It is not a matter of bargaining," Nadir says, her voice all one uniform tone, as distant as the stars. "You are corrupted, Gorgeslitter. We will try to purge you, but you will be executed if we cannot."
Harry feels cold. He knows that they couldn't purge the corruption from Graveltooth.
He watches as Nadir's black lightning crackles and flickers around Gorgeslitter. Gorgeslitter keeps his head turned so he can watch Harry. Harry wants to avoid his eyes, the eyes of someone who betrayed him in the guise of helping him, but that would be cowardice, and he is not a warrior for nothing. He meets them.
"He is too corrupted," Nadir says when the black lightning has done its seeking work. "He would betray us again and be convinced that it was for the good of the person he was doing it for." She turns her head and looks at Harry with those black, nightbound eyes. "Do you wish to say your goodbyes?"
"Yes," Harry says, and stares hard at Gorgeslitter, remembering the goblin who helped teach him Gobbledogook, one of the first of his people he met when he was still human, one of the goblins who taught him what it was like to be a goblin. "I hope that you find peace in the realm where you're going, Gorgeslitter. Goodbye."
"Will you miss me?" Gorgeslitter asks as Nadir draws back her hand.
"Yes," Harry says, not lying, not hiding from the truth like a coward, and watches as the black lightning lashes forwards and consumes the taint. Gorgeslitter doesn't scream. It's too fast for that.
And afterwards, Harry goes to the forge and hammers until his arm feels like it'll fall off and Toothsplitter makes him sleep, and wakes with another checkmark on the tally of the debts Voldemort owes him and his people.
Crowned Him With the Living Light
"I'm sorry, Harry. That must have been very hard."
Harry sighs and leans his head on Luna's shoulder as she deposits a crown of grass and daisies on his head. "Thanks, Luna." He touches the crown and adjusts it, so that it leans on one of his ears. He doesn't want it too tight around his head. He knows it would remind him too much of the crown of black light that gripped and held Gorgeslitter's skull in the moments before he died. "I just…"
"Yes?" Luna is making another crown when Harry looks, braiding grass together quickly as they sit on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
"I just wish someone could have killed Voldemort a long time ago," Harry whispers. "So that he couldn't have corrupted Graveltooth and Gorgeslitter and made me have to take the Horcruxes down. I wish he had left Nagini alone, and the objects he made into Horcruxes."
"Yes," Luna says. "I wish he had taken the wrong turning on a path in the dungeons and been entombed in the stone."
Harry blinks. "Hogwarts can do that?" It's something the castle has never confessed to him, if that's true.
"Yes," Luna says serenely, and reaches out to pick some clover to braid into the crown of grass. "When she wants to defend herself. But she must not have thought Tom Riddle was that much of a threat."
Harry sighs. "I can understand that." Tom Riddle wasn't a threat to the castle at that age. And asking her to think of him that way would have been asking a castle to have a degree of foresight that adult humans didn't. Even Dumbledore, who seemed to have been the most suspicious of Tom Riddle, never stopped him from making a Horcrux or murdering a student with the basilisk.
Harry's people were sort of the same. They didn't pay enough attention to human politics to realize that Voldemort would be a threat, and it would have been easy for the clan to have stopped him in time, or even figured out what he was doing with the Horcruxes when there were only a few of them.
Harry feels his mouth smooth out in a grimace. He thought maybe he would stop interfering in human politics once Fudge stepped out of the Minister's office (which ought to be soon, given the way that he's been reduced to relying on the charity of others).
But maybe he has to stay involved. Maybe protecting goblins means protecting humans, too. Protecting artifacts means protecting Hogwarts. And he'll probably always have human friends, even if Ginny gets adopted by the clan someday and Luna is sometimes a Crumple-Horned Snorkack.
"Do you feel better?"
Harry blinks and looks up. Luna has a shimmering silvery crown on her head, even though a few minutes ago, it was grass and clover. Harry smiles. "Did you ask the crown to transform?"
"Yes," Luna says. "Do you feel better?"
"Yes," Harry repeats, and leans up to touch his own crown. It's made of soft gold. It makes him smile, thinking of Toothsplitter invoking the blessings of silver and gold to go with him on his journey to the Inner Halls.
Harry doesn't know when it transformed, especially since he didn't ask it to. But this is an afternoon of miracles, and maybe he doesn't need to know. What matters is that he has some insights now, and he won't let his own mourning or Gorgeslitter's sacrifice be in vain.
With Burning Brow
"You know what you are doing is more dangerous than allowing a wound to turn to gangrene?"
"I know, Blackeye. But I also know that you're a Master Healer, and I want to stop this. He corrupted Gorgeslitter. I don't want him corrupting any more goblins."
Blackeye nods. Harry can see the conflict in her face. This goes against her Healer training in that she's putting a patient in danger. On the other hand, Harry is doing this so that others can be safe and healed in the future.
Blackeye knows, as all Healers do, that sometimes you have to do something like drink a nasty-tasting medicine or be bathed in the cold of the winter wind to be stronger in the future.
"Very well," she whispers. "I will be here, and the stones will be here." She taps her claws on the silver railing of the healing bed next to her, and the blue stones that she often uses for healing rise and begin to whirl around her head. "And we will pull you back if we feel you dying, no matter what your wish is."
"Thank you, Blackeye." Harry inclines his head to her. He doesn't have the right to extract any other promises from her. He can no more ask her to go against her nature than she can ask him to go against his.
He lies down in the healing bed, surrounded by the silver railing. His daggers are in his hands. The crown of gold that Luna made for him is lying on his chest. Harry takes a slow breath and draws in the whistling air of Blackeye's healing cavern.
Then he concentrates on the gap behind his scar, the one where the shard of Voldemort's soul once lingered before it was removed.
Harry was sincere when he told Voldemort that the space left behind is like nothing so much as a discarded sweet wrapper. But sometimes you can look at a wrapper like that, and tell where it came from, such as because the name of the shop that sold it is written there.
Or who dropped it.
Harry twists, and the daggers are with him, Stargazer buzzing with all the power of his mother's soul, his mother who defied Voldemort, and then he is gone.
The trail of light stretches behind him, connecting him to his body. Blackeye and the healing stones wait behind that. If she senses the light going dim, she will pull him back to his body, and Harry will probably lose this chance to track Voldemort. Voldemort is mental, not stupid (unwise, not stupid). He will seal the connection if he thinks it could be a danger to him.
Harry pushes on, his whole being feeling as grim as the look he wore when Gorgeslitter died. He can feel the cold and hatred of this in-between place, this connection that is the footprint of a Horcrux, eating at him, but it doesn't matter. Blackeye is watching his back. Harry's mission is to track down Voldemort.
And then abruptly, he has a location.
Harry can't pinpoint it on a map or anything like that. But he dives down, feeling as if invisible wings guide him, and envying birds for the first time in his life. He touches down outside a harsher-feeling space that he knows houses Voldemort's mind.
Not far from it is a dagger-edged thing that is probably Nagini's. Harry closes his eyes and touches his own daggers.
He has one chance. That's all. And he can't guarantee that he's going to kill Voldemort, not when he has to kill Nagini to do that, and he doesn't think he can use Fiendfyre on her, certainly not here.
So he has to disable Voldemort as much as possible, and to make sure that he can't sense how Harry used their connection and work out some means of closing it.
Harry smiles.
Coma it is.
He flings himself forwards, and explodes like a meteorite landing inside Voldemort's skull.
Voldemort is screaming.
The noise and the sensation of pain are everywhere around Harry. He ignores that and takes his daggers, or whatever sense of the daggers has accompanied him, and starts to carve apart Voldemort's mind.
Memories and thoughts go fleeing and whirling past Harry like confetti in a snowstorm. He kicks and slices at them. They try to overwhelm him, a memory of his mother's death overlaying the creation of the ring Horcrux, but Harry refuses to allow them space inside his own brain. He refuses to allow the pain to send him fleeing, either.
Cut and jab and pierce and puncture.
Further on and further in, he moves, and Voldemort's thoughts are dying before he can stab them, as if the poison of the basilisk-fang blade runs ahead of Harry and spreads its venom. Or maybe that's the sense of his mother's soul. Harry remembers with vicious pleasure that his mother was the kind of warrior who sent Voldemort fleeing from his body for thirteen years.
If Harry can do that, he will be humbled and awed. But he doesn't think he can. Driving Voldemort into a coma, meaning that he is vulnerable and has to stay in his current location for a while, will have to be enough.
At one point, Nagini's mind dives past his, hissing and crying out in Parseltongue tinged with madness. But she can't find a way inside. Harry has a connection with Voldemort that is not telepathic or the familiar bond that unites Voldemort with Nagini. This is entirely based on the Horcrux that once existed behind Harry's scar, and that Horcrux is different from the one that exists in Nagini.
Harry kicks and cuts until he feels Voldemort's mind beginning to darken around him. Harry isn't entirely sure what would happen if he's caught in Voldemort's coma, but he doesn't think he wants to find out.
He leaps back out and along the connection, back out of Voldemort's mind, away from Nagini's hisses and Voldemort's screams, and looks back just in time to see the connection start to darken from Voldemort's side.
The darkness chases Harry through the already-dark space that the Horcrux has left behind, and Harry flees. It helps that maybe halfway back "home," he feels a tug that can only be Blackeye and her healing stones, and goes reeling so hard that he slams into his own body with a gasp of pain.
Harry opens his eyes to see Blackeye leaning over him and studying him with a careful gaze. Then she nods and lifts her hand, and one of the blue healing stones flies down and smacks into Harry's chest.
"Ow," he complains, and winces as another one seems to almost embed itself in his forehead, over his old scar.
"You're lucky to have a whole mind right now, considering that you were in the middle of one you were cutting to pieces," Blackeye says in a crisp voice that warns Harry they can do this the easy way, or he can spend a few days chained to a bed while Blackeye tells him exactly what she thinks of him.
Harry leans back in the bed and closes his eyes. His head does hurt, he thinks, but not exactly like any headache he's ever had. This pain comes from the inside and radiates from what seems to be a hollow hole in the center of his head.
He tries to explain that to Blackeye, who only grunts and says, "I've long suspected you had some hollowness in your head."
Harry grins at her and leans back into the healing, thinking as he does so that if she has to hollow out his brain to treat him, he has an excellent excuse not to study for his NEWTS.
In the Darkness Lit
It turns out Professor Flitwick is not impressed with this excuse.
"You deserve a future in both the goblin and the human worlds, Harry," he says firmly, during a time when they're in his office and drinking copper-filled tea. "You know as well as I do that Blackeye and Toothsplitter would agree with me. You should have the fullest range of choices. And that involves doing well on your NEWTS."
"But I need to make sure that I can follow the connection and locate Voldemort's actual physical hiding place," Harry points out, and tries the effect of a winsome smile. It bounces off Professor Flitwick like a hammer off a blank. He sighs. "But maybe I could do a little studying, too," he volunteers unenthusiastically.
"Tell me, Harry." Professor Flitwick kicks his feet out in front of him so they're closer to the fire. It shocks Harry, a little, to remember how old he is. Older than Toothsplitter, certainly. "Why do you care so little about the NEWTS and your schooling here? I know you do well in Charms to please me, but the other classes are ones that you either barely attend or dropped after your OWLS."
"Because a lot of the magic is dull," Harry says. "Because the teachers ignored the fact that Snape bullied everyone for years. Because some people are still sneering at me for being a goblin. Because it seemed like it didn't matter what I did when I had the Tournament to wreck and the Stone to save and Horcruxes to kill. If those were the most important things, why did it matter how well I did on the NEWTS?"
"Ah. You felt as if others barely valued your education, either."
"The human part, at least. Yes."
Professor Flitwick hums under his breath. "Unfortunately, I can't speak well for Severus's teaching or for some of my other colleagues, either." From his grimace, Harry thinks that he's thinking of Trelawney. "But I will ask that you do some studying on your own outside of class, at least. And do the best you can."
Harry sighs. "All right, but if I have to choose between hunting down Voldemort and Nagini or doing well on the NEWTS, then I know what's going to suffer."
Professor Flitwick smiles. "Understandable."
One morning near the end of May, Harry calls Fiendfyre, and it turns and stares at him and crouches down and–
Doesn't spring.
Harry eyes it, wondering if this is some trick, but as far as he knows, one bout of Fiendfyre is separate from another bout, and they aren't capable of learning from each other or planning to ambush him by taking him off-guard next time. It might be that he's achieved the mindset necessary to call and work in partnership with Fiendfyre at long last.
He extends his hand, and holds still as the flame-colored jaguar pads over and extends a long, whiskered muzzle, which grows thinner and thinner and more and more fiery as it stretches out from the body. He doesn't flinch, despite his anticipation of pain, as the muzzle comes to rest in his palm.
And the jaguar purrs, and then turns and romps around him in delight. Harry shakes his stinging hand—it feels as if someone slapped it, but it's not burned or blistered—and turns in a slow circle to play with the jaguar, smiling. The Fiendfyre yields easily when Harry calls it back into his wand.
So. Now he can use it easily.
And now he has no reason to put off seeking out Voldemort through the mental connection, pinpointing his location in the physical world, and tracking him down to kill him and Nagini any longer.
And it's before the NEWTS, too. Professor Flitwick ought to be happy that I'll be able to concentrate on them fully.