"If dreams are like movies, memories are films about ghosts."
Films About GhostsChapter 22: Anti-Magic
When the Daily Prophet covered the accident the next day, it seemed so simple, so straightforward.
Someone had set off a violent spell. It was not something usually seen in England due to the suicidal nature of what was within—it was a magic-eating spell. This anti-magic attacked and 'canceled' magic and those who had it. The most noticeable issue when the spell went off was the fact that the barrier to Platform 9 ¾ closed and couldn't be reopened, leaving the witches and wizards on the platform stranded and prey to the anti-magic that spread like a noxious gas.
To Ariane, it seemed as though the world had gone mad.
Mr. Weasley had abandoned the stalled van, and seconds after that awful yellow cloud began to rise in the air was running full tilt towards Kings Cross. Ariane, Harry, and Ginny were left to struggle out of the van, while all around them cars honked and drivers swore and between platforms 9 and 10 came a dreadful howl of a hundred voices. Ariane broke into a dash and was neck in neck with Harry as they vaulted over the ticket barriers, past guards who yelled rude things at them, past tourists and fat women and baby carriages until the whole world became a blur in her eyes with an epicenter around the growing crowd around the platform.
No one knew what had happened. There were some people who stood back, astonished at the explosion and the panic and the fear, there were others who were panicking, some as still as statures, others shaking uncontrollably, and a third group that tore at a brick barrier with their bare hands, screaming the names of loved ones and friends. It was apparent that the Muggles at the train station had seen the explosion, but just assumed that someone had set off a smoke bomb or something equally harmless. The ticket taker was nearly in a state of apoplexy screaming at everyone to remain calm, there was no harm done, but then someone punched him in his jaw and knocked him silly.
It took five minutes for Ministry Wizards to show up, but it was long enough for the anti-magic to eat its way through the barrier. Even the Muggles had to notice when a very solid, very large brick barrier began to evaporate like water on a July day. They also noticed that as the barrier began to vanish, people began to fall out of it in various stages of panic or injury. The air took on the indescribable odor of rotting and burning flesh.
Ariane was nearly squashed by a fat man as he stumbled into her, but she was pulled aside by Harry, who looked pale green, as though he were going to throw up. The fat man was still half-normal, but all over his body were patches of dry, burnt flesh that looked like charcoal, in his eyes and on his scalp and pitting his thick belly. Around the burnt charcoal parts his fatness swelled and bulged, as though it were trying to bridge the gap eaten away. Chunks of his curly hair began to fall out even as they watched, replaced by more burned flesh, his left eye swelled in its socket and then began to collapse like a balloon. The smell was awful, a mix of burned meat and of rotting. With a sharp exhale, the man died, his body collapsing in on itself as the something ate him away from within, sagging and bulging as though he were dissolving.
Turning aside, Ariane threw up everything she had eaten that morning. Next to her, Harry was doing the same, swearing in between heaves.
He finished first, wiped his mouth on his sweater sleeve, and looked around frantically. "Ron and Hermione!" he gasped. "Have you seen them?"
Ariane shook her head, swallowed down the rest of her bile, and ran after Harry as he sprinted away through the crowd. She was a quick runner, but she knew that fear had given her feet wings. Disjointed fragments of faces she knew and faces she didn't flashed by in an endless macabre filmstrip. Ariane tried to stop herself from looking at those who were dying, their bodies consumed by the something, but she saw and memorized each one. She saw no one she knew well and no one from the Burrow.
Were they safe? Or still trapped on the other side of the barrier?
Or, said a nasty voice in her head, are they nothing but a puddle of ash and ooze, like that man? The thought nearly made her throw up again.
Ministry wizards were trying to get through the crowd without much success, as most of the people were trying to escape.
Ariane lost Harry as he darted around a group of Muggles who were looking small and shocked, and one who was snapping pictures. "Harry!" she screamed. He didn't reply, but she hadn't expected him to. She redoubled her pace and fell over a body, crashing to her knees on the ground. Don't look back, she told herself. Don't look at her, don't look back, and don't look.
She looked. She couldn't help it.
"Oh God," she whispered as the world whirled and screamed around her. The young woman was nearly all gone, most definitely dead, and the only part of her that Ariane recognized was that short gray hair, left over from Tonks' favorite disguise. A tweedy old woman. "Oh God," Ariane murmured again. Something had paralyzed her, leaving her mind empty except for that stark whisper. "Oh, God."
At first Ariane thought the icy cold was shock, creeping up her arms and the back of her neck and through the tears in her jeans. Then she felt a new something, as palpable as sheets frozen on a winter wash line. It was coming, and she would have bet her life that it was nothing she wanted near her.
Shock made her slow. Ariane turned like a fool, staring gape-mouthed at seven black, hooded creatures slid into the station like shadows with nothing to cast them. At the edge of her numb perception she felt Harry's busy mind freeze, and Ariane suddenly knew what these were.
"Dementors," she murmured. As though it had heard her faint whisper above the chaos, the nearest turned its hooded face to look upon her. It moved so fast she couldn't follow it, but suddenly it stood in front of her. The smell of its robes, a thousand times worse than that of the disintegrating human flesh around it, made Ariane's senses flail blindly.
It reached down two huge, scabbed hands and gripped her shoulders in a grip that was strong and yet squishy, as though its decomposing flesh was held on by only its own will. One hand was more than enough to hold her shoulders as the other passed over her loose hair, the silky strands making deep creases in its puffy rotten tissue. Taking a grip on her hair—it had betrayed her once again, first with Lucius Malfoy and now—it tilted her head back.
Ariane looked up into its hood, her breath freezing on the air as she addressed it. "My brother created you, I think," she murmured, her mind frozen solid. Salazar had always had a flair for the dramatic, and big, black, swooping demons were just his style.
The Dementor didn't reply, instead fixing its awful soft, rotten hands on her face. Ariane felt her skin try to jump away, but she couldn't move as the Dementor drew her nearer to it, lifting her face up to its hood.
I must be dreaming, Ariane thought suddenly. This is another possibility. I'm asleep at the Burrow, or in the Weasley's car, and Mr. Weasley is driving and its making me dream odd things, and I can't be dying because I've got to help Harry kill Voldemort and Salazar has to be there or I'll never exist and I just don't know why I'm not waking up yet, this can't be happening, I'm dreaming, I've got to wake up. Wake up Ariane, WAKE UP! I've got to wake up because I'm dreaming I'm dreaming I'M DREAMING!
A scream that nobody heard escaped her mouth as the Dementor's pulpy, lipless mouth closed on hers, shooting down the Dementor's throat just in front of her soul.
Percy had just settled down in his office and was finishing clearing out his In tray when all sorts of alarms began going off. Judging by the weird, wailing quality it was an alarm from the Department of Mysteries, and it sounded urgent. With a sigh of irritation—alarms from the Department of Mysteries were not particularly unusual—he poked his head out into the hallway and looked up and down it for any sign of what this was about.
"Hey, what's all this?" he directed at his next-door-neighbor, a short, wheezy man named Charles Allenby.
"No idea," Charles mumbled, petting his bald head with a handkerchief. "Is it another attempted Time Turner theft?"
"Probably not," Percy dissented, looking the other way at a pale man with glasses much thicker than Percy's own. "What do you think, Jasper?"
Herman Jasper shrugged. "Probably nothing we need to get worried about."
"Bastards!" came echoing down from the floor below, followed by a deal of rushing about and some very worried voices.
Percy frowned and went down the hall to punch the elevator buttons and curse at the disobliging elevator until one of the doors sprang open. He made towards it but it immediately closed and went downwards. Scowling at the door, he went and punched more buttons, waited until the next door opened, and darted inside before it could slam closed on him again. It caught the hem of his robes and with a snarl of irritation Percy pulled them out.
Work chafed him now, as it never had before. He sat at his desk and daydreamed for hours about Ariane; thought about talking to her, thought about kissing her. Percy had no trouble keeping up with his job, of course—he rather fancied he'd gotten better at it just so that he would have more free time. Ginny, in one of her uncomfortably accurate moods, had given him a picture of Ariane that she'd taken just after Ariane's switch to Gryffindor.
It wasn't a very good picture, but it was her, smiling shyly and waving from the left-hand side of his desk, her short silver curls tucked behind a black ribbon and a quill in one hand as she looked up from some half-finished essay. The picture didn't always show it, but behind her some second-year boys had held up a sign saying 'Slytherin Slut' with a curling arrow pointing down at the top of Ariane's studious head. The reason the picture didn't always show this now was because in a fit of rage Percy had inked out one of the second-year boys' faces, and the two now spent more time stumbling around blindly than holding up their nasty sign.
The door opened with a small chime on the Atrium, which was chaos. Percy took a step back automatically as a rush of voices flooded the elevator, but got out right away when he realized that the elevator would go down with him if he didn't get off.
"I say, what's going on here?" Percy grabbed the nearest person, which turned out to be Rita Skeeter. He let go of her at once. "I'm sorry," he said politely and tried to fade back into the crowd, but she lunged at him, trapping his arm in her talons.
"You!" she crowed in a voice that somehow seemed much louder than all the chaos. "I'd just like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Weasley, just a few."
"Sorry, I'm busy," he snapped as he tried to find an escape, but everyone around him was preoccupied.
"Is it true that you've made the acquaintance of Ariane Somerled?"
"I've heard of her," Percy said in as bored a tone as he could manage to shout. The trick with Rita, he thought as a kind of mantra, was to be bored about anything she asked. Anything at all.
"Can your department confirm that she's currently one of those on Platform 9 ¾?" Rita demanded, prodding him in the chest.
Percy made himself shrug. "I suppose she must be, since she's going back to Hogwarts," he told her. "What on earth does this have to do with anything?"
He was saved the trouble of worming the information out of Rita by the arrival of a very harassed man in a bowler hat.
"Dementors!" he half-screamed. "Dementors have been sent to prey on the survivors!"
"Survivors of what?" Percy asked the room at large in the shocked silence that resulted, feeling his guts plummet five stories without a pause.
A few voices in the room blended as people whispered: "Anti-magic." It echoed through everyone: "Anti-magic, anti-magic."
The echoes never reached Percy. He was already gone.
It was a curious experience, losing her soul.
Normally Ariane would have been quite upset indeed, as she usually saw her soul as something other than demon-fodder, but she couldn't seem to attach herself to that blast of emotion pouring from her. Every memory, past and present, rushed from her mind, all her fears and loves and loathings and passions—gone. It didn't take very long before she rocked away from the Dementor's grip. She looked up at this thing—what was it? —and saw within its hood a small something, glowing with many colors, bright and really very interesting to look upon.
It was hers.
She knew that. She didn't know her name, her past, her future—but that…that thing, whatever it was, was definitely hers.
"I want it back," she whispered in the long silence before her knees hit pavement with brutal force—had she ever felt that before, that rattling sensation of concrete and bone—and, with a soft noise, she laid down at the edge of the things robes and rested her face on the rough ground and wondered, if one could call that examination of a void a wondering, what had happened.
The Dementor took the soul from its mouth, held it like a marble in the palm of its scabby hand. It had never had a soul like this before, now twice removed from the body of its owner. It was a scarred soul, but a lovely one. The soul was too good to consume all at once. The Dementor cradled it in his hand and examined it. Perhaps, it thought, by removing some of the scars, smudging over some of the cracks, it would be even better when he did eat it at last.
Percy appeared in the parking lot outside Kings Cross right next to a batty old man with a paper bag over his head, crouching down behind the wheels of his car. "What in hell is going on?" Percy demanded, yanking him to his feet.
"'S what they told us to do if the end of the world came," the man mumbled, keeping his paper bag tightly over his head.
"God, what good would that do?" He let him go and ran towards the station, going through his head what he knew of anti-magic. There was only a bit of it in the world at any given time, due to the fact that it was often eaten by demons like Dementors or Apeps. Whatever it was, scientifically speaking it 'neutralized' magic. In reality, when anti-matter 'neutralized' a witch or wizard's powers, it killed them. It killed them horribly. Usually the deaths were so uncommon they could be blamed on a strange tropical disease that nobody had heard of. Ebola was a favorite.
But if someone had collected enough anti-magic in one place like the Kings Cross station, where there where quite a lot of wizards, the deaths would be very noticeable. And if all those wizards had gotten just a bit of anti-magic on them, or inhaled it, or rubbed up against someone who had it on them, they would at the very least get sick. More likely was they would die as the magic in every atom of their bodies that made them a wizard or witch was destroyed.
People bounced off Percy as he charged through the crowd, uncaring of what became of them. He saw the Dementors and felt his throat close in terror. The scene was as awful as he could have imagined, and worst of all he couldn't see Ariane anywhere. There were men, women, boys, girls, Muggles, Wizards, and Dementors everywhere, but Percy's eyes couldn't pick out a flash of silver hair from anything.
He spotted Harry, standing with a horrified look on his face, boxed in between three Dementors and a group of wizards dissolving from anti-magic exposure. Percy knew that Harry could fend off Dementors perfectly well, but couldn't fathom why he wasn't. "Harry!" he shouted, hoping to wake him up. Percy didn't want to witness a Dementor's Kiss. They were said to be unbearable to see performed. Harry didn't move, so Percy took a chance, lunging through a space between two Dementors and hitting Harry rather hard in the shoulder.
"Percy?" he said, confused and angry, then looked up and registered the Dementors. "Oh."
"Do something!" Percy told him, realizing that he'd put himself right in front of a Dementor and having no desire to be Kissed.
Harry looked at him sidelong, still very white and shaking, and mumbled, "Can't you?"
"No!" he snapped. "Do something or you'll die!" The nearest Dementor was close enough to freeze the hem of Percy's robes.
Numbly Harry raised his wand. "Expecto," he began, his face screwed up. "Expecto Patronum." Nothing happened. "Expecto Patronum!" he said again, with more conviction. He didn't look as though he were thinking of something happy, though. Harry looked as though he couldn't imagine what happiness was.
Percy pushed back his memory of trying to learn this spell and failing miserably, the only one he'd ever not been able to learn. Happy memory, he thought. I've got to think of a happy memory. Percy discovered that this was exactly like when one forgets the answer on a test. The harder he tried to think of one, the harder it was. Oh, come on! he shouted at himself, I've got to have loads! All that he could think of, however, were all the times he'd been picked on by his brothers or overlooked or mistaken, all the times he'd done something he knew he'd regret later, all the things he'd done to his family and friends and girlfriends.
It made Percy wonder how many people had happy memories of him.
Then, unbidden, a memory rose to his head. He was standing in front of Ariane, and she was wearing a blue dress that made her eyes look bright violet and she was smiling at him, nodding an answer to a question he had asked, and she just looked so very pretty then, and so very, very happy. Percy realized he'd never seen Ariane look that happy before or since.
When was that? He pushed the question out of mind.
"Expecto Patronum!" Percy shouted in unison with Harry, and two bright silver shapes blasted forth from their wands at the Dementors, chasing them away. He squinted into the light, seeing a stag and a…was that a dog? He didn't have time to contemplate it, because the light had thrown into relief a lanky, slumping shape with long silvery hair.
"Ariane!" he murmured under his breath, vaulting over and around people and sliding to the ground beside her. She was facedown, but mercifully unspotted by any anti-magic.
Percy grabbed Ariane and turned her over, surprised at how light she felt. Her hair, which had always been shiny silver, a shade between pewter and white gold, was now a dull ash gray with broad white streaks in it, like a crone's. The face beneath it was nearly the same color, white with insipid bluish undertones as though she were underwater. Her once-purple eyes were now the deep no-color gray of an infant's, glassy and half open; they were sunk into deep purple-gray circles. Ariane's fragile ribcage was moving, but irregularly, as though she were having trouble remembering how to breathe.
He didn't shake her, afraid of breaking her. "Ariane?" he asked loudly. "Ariane! Ariane!" Briefly those sunken, infantile eyes rolled towards him, but there was no recognition, no flicker within those glass depths, and they slowly rolled away. Percy looked her up and down, her body seeming so small within Ginny's too-large trousers and the blue sweater she'd adopted over the holidays. The only injury he could see were scrapes on her knees, but those weren't enough to render her this washed-out and unresponsive.
Harry knelt down on her other side. He was very white, his hair looking sooty against his pale face. Almost as though checking to make sure she were real, he reached out and felt her forehead. "She's alive," he whispered.
"Why wouldn't she be? What happened?" Percy demanded. There were red spots boiling in his vision, and he reached out and shook Harry as hard as he could. "What's wrong with her?" he cried.
"Get off me!" Harry replied, a weak version of his usual brusque self. "I—I think a Dementor got her." He went still paler, but continued. "I got ahead of her and I felt the Dementors come near and I turned and—and one was holding her, looking down. She said something to it, but then it sort of leaned down and…and Kissed her." He swallowed very hard, Adam's apple bobbing. "I couldn't move, I just felt frozen…and then…and then…" he stopped talking and shook his head.
Of course, Percy thought numbly, Harry saw Ariane being Kissed, and that's why he was in shock. He looked down at the small, sad pile of flesh and clothing that had once been a human girl named Ariane, a sister to Salazar, daughter of Arsinoë and Tom Riddle, his only true love. "We have to get it back," he said, surprised that his voice didn't crack.
"What?" Harry asked, startled.
"Her soul. She needs it back. She has to—she has to keep dreaming," Percy faltered, his voice sounding small and far away. "We don't know where to go—when to go. She hasn't had the right dream yet. We need to get it back so she can—so she's able—keep dreaming."
It would have been so unkind for Harry to point out that Ariane didn't exist any longer, though her body was still breathing, that he bit his tongue and stayed silent until he thought of something to say. "Take her out of here," he said heavily. "I've got to find Ron and Hermione."
"No need," said a hoarse voice from behind them. It was Hermione, dirty and sick looking, one hand wrapped in a bandage that looked quite bloody. Ron was leaning on her shoulder, also very exhausted, his freckles livid against his skim-milk skin. "We're here." Ron made a confirming sort of noise.
"What happened to you two?" Harry asked, jumping to his feet and moving them away from Ariane. "Were you behind the barrier?"
"No," Hermione replied, letting Harry take Ron from her. "Just in front of it. I got a bit of that stuff on my hand, but I think I got it off before it spread. Ron might have breathed some in, he's been looking worse and worse." She smoothed her bloody bandage, still shaking a bit. "I had to cut off a bit of my index finger to get rid of it."
The world stopped making noise for Percy. He ran a finger over Ariane's cold face, tracing her jaw and cheekbones, running a finger down her nose. Her eyebrows had faded to invisibility, making her face look either peaceful or incredulous; he couldn't decide which. Maybe both. Whatever it was, it was a glassy calm that Percy could only believe came from approaching death.
Percy leaned his head forward and rested it at the base of her throat, listening to her heart beat slowly beneath his ear. With a deep breath he closed his eyes and thought a sort of prayer to whoever might be listening. Percy had never really believed there was a God, but he thought that if there was he could really use some advice from Him. The prayer didn't have words, really, but the idea was 'Help me. Please, please help me.'
There was a sort of response, or maybe it was an echo from Ariane's empty body to Percy's desperate ear:
He had finally talked Godric around. He had her guardian's permission, the support of a few friends of his as well as hers, and all he needed now was to find the perfect moment to ask her. Though he'd caught glimpses of her going in and out of the Great Hall, cheerful in her favorite blue dress with her silver hair loose down past her elbows, he hadn't been close enough to speak to her yet.
If he hadn't trusted Godric, he would have thought Salazar knew something. Ariane's older brother had always been fiercely protective of his sister, going as far as turning the headman of the village into an ass when he'd dared to ask for her hand in marriage. He had no desire to spend any of his time on earth as an ass, so he was being much more careful about it. But still, Salazar had been lurking in unusual places today, like Rowena's house, where the leader of Slytherin House almost never ventured.
It made him nervous, but finally he saw Ariane ahead, one hand on the door to the outdoors, luminous pale blue and silver.
"Ariane!" he called, speeding up his walk.
She turned to look at him, and smiled. "Laramy, hello," she said happily. "How were lessons today?" Ariane waited until he caught up, then pushed open the door.
It was a brilliant spring day, so green and sunny that it seemed surprising that the air still held a faint cool breeze, winter's dying breath. He supposed that they talked, because he saw her listening to him attentively—she was a good listener, but didn't withdraw completely, which he liked—and heard his own voice. They walked around the walls four times, and not once was there an awkward pause. Salazar was on top of the western wall, scowling south, his soot-black hair tied back from his strongly boned face. He glared down at them, his purple eyes smoldering with hatred.
Ariane didn't notice it, but then again he knew that Salazar could never look at his sister with anything but love. He knew that the hatred was all for him.
Finally, he stopped walking across the grounds from Salazar. The sun was beginning to set behind them, throwing a golden light on her and turning her skin the color of cream.
"Ariane, I love you," he blurted, grabbing both her hands in a thoroughly ridiculous way and lifting the right one to his mouth. He pressed a kiss into her palm. "I've loved you for quite awhile."
Her face shifted for a moment, to something almost like fear. "I know," she replied, but she couldn't keep herself from smiling a little at the expression on his face. "I've known."
"Will you marry me, Ariane?" he asked her, thanking all listening deities that his voice didn't crack when he asked.
Again something rather like nervousness flickered in her eyes, replaced by a shining delight that made their corner by the wall so much brighter. "I'd love to. Nothing could make me happier."
He thought that his heart would explode in ecstasy. Instead he kissed her hard and lifted her up, spinning her around as she laughed, and he could feel her smile while they kissed and he laughed as well, putting her down and dropping to one knee to kiss her hands.
Above him there was a hiss and a noise like a stake plunged into raw meat. Ariane's hands convulsed in his grasp and she toppled to one side, a thick arrow protruding from the left side of her chest, her face shocked, blue dress swiftly turning rust-red.
"Ariane!" he cried out.
Someone tapped Percy on the shoulder and he jumped, startled out of this—this memory? Vision?
"Percy," said Dumbledore very calmly. "I would like to see Ariane, please." His old face was deeply creased with sorrow, but a steely rage burned in his blue eyes. Percy nodded, still numb, and lifted her, supporting her lolling head as though she were a newborn.
Dumbledore gripped her shoulders and raised her up so that he was looking straight into her blank gray eyes. "Where is it?" he asked her in a very sharp voice. "Tell me where it is."
She murmured wordlessly, her eyes rolling off at all angles.
He gave her a firm shake. "Tell me where it is," he said again. "Look at me. Tell me where it is." Ariane's eyes caught his and she whimpered like a child, her blank eyes filling with tears. She shook her head very slightly, shuddered, and once again fell limply backwards, tears running up her cheeks into her hair. "No, don't you look away. Look at me. What happened to it? I know you can talk. Tell me where it is." He locked eyes with her as tears ran down her face. "Where is it?"
"Stolen," she whispered. Percy started at the sound of her voice. It was childlike, as though she couldn't remember how to make her tongue fold around the words. "Stolen from me."
"Where is it now?" Dumbledore demanded. Ariane hiccupped and started to look away again, but he shook her so hard her teeth rattled. "Tell me!"
"Don't do that!" Percy shouted, trying to wrest her skinny body away from Dumbledore's steely grip. "Don't hurt her!"
"Don't know where," Ariane murmured, her eyes starting to roll back in her head. "Lost it."
"It isn't lost, and I know you know where it is. It's yours, isn't it?" Dumbledore ignored Percy's attempts to free her and shook her again. "Isn't it?"
Her eyes opened all the way, gray and blind. "It's mine, and it isn't gone yet. He has it." And she fainted, her body going as pliant as a rag doll's.
Author's Note: This chapter took FOREVER to write, for no apparent reason. I kind of developed a block on the antimagic until I saw Constantine, which heavily influenced my descriptions of the dissolving people. Sorry it took so long. Hope it's worth the wait.
Review and let me know I'm being read.