Thanks for the reviews on the Interlude!
WARNING: This chapter carries a warning for grossness, and also for a cliffhanger that ought to be ashamed of itself.
Chapter Fifty-Three: Tonight There Shall Be No MoonThe night before Midwinter, Pansy climbed the North Tower to its highest point and stood there watching the storm.
It barely rained now. It had become a thing of fire and air, lighting and wind flickering and dancing as if in answer to a question the giants had asked. One flash spoke from a corner of the sky, and was answered by a gust that tore Pansy's hood off and sent her hair streaming behind her. Then the wind coiled around her legs, with a howl like a burning cat, and the lighting answered, arcing from the north to the west.
Pansy wondered who else was watching the storm, if they saw the same things and what they thought if they did. She wondered how Muggles were explaining all this strange weather. Of course, even if one of them thought of the provoked Dark magic as an explanation, they wouldn't be able to feel it.
Lightning and wind talked to each other for hours, until midnight came. Pansy then felt the deep silence of the dead all around her. She had already learned to read those silences, though as yet she heard their voices in little more than whispers. They were in dread of something.
Pansy lifted her head. She could see no light. The moon had gone, of course, and the clouds covered the stars.
From one horizon to the next, from life towards death, from darkness unto darkness, the voice of the thunder spoke, menacing and all-encompassing. Pansy gripped the sides of the North Tower as it shook, the boom resounding in its bones. Somewhere to the left of her, the wind seized a bit of stone from Hogwarts's walls and sent it whirling furiously to the west. Pansy suspected it would hit a wizard or witch in the head and cause him or her to die before the night was out.
In the wake of that thunder, the night went suddenly and ominously still. Pansy could hear the silence of the dead returning to the cool, dry thing it usually was, the empty, expectant quietude of the grave. She looked up, and saw the clouds parting like water troubled by the fall of a stone, slipping down the sides of the sky. The stars shone out overhead again. Pansy wished they hadn't. They were weak, pale things, making the darkness seem all the stronger and the smugger for it.
She closed her eyes, and leaned her head on her clasped hands. She knew the Dark hadn't gone. It was withdrawing its strength, melting to the south and the north, gathering and then whirling around above the sea. It would come back and strike at its chosen location with all the more speed and power for not storming for a day. Pansy suspected it would arrive at midnight tomorrow, or perhaps sunset, the moment when the light yielded the sky.
She shuddered. She was glad that she wasn't going with Harry tomorrow to face the wrath of the wild Dark. She could not imagine how he would counter it.
No, you just have a full day of classes and trying to get used to seeing death, Pansy, she thought, straightening and shaking her hair back. Time to go to bed.
It should be safe to enter the common room now, she thought. The sight that had driven her forth from it, the death she could not bear to see written on the air in letters of fire, should have faded. Its bearer would also have gone to bed.
Harry had a hard time keeping himself from going mad in his classes that day.
He could feel the wild Dark now, waiting. It had been growing clearer and clearer with every day since the first attack by the storm, and now that it was the twenty-first, the first day of winter, the day of longest darkness, he felt it everywhere. When he turned his eyes on the walls of the Slytherin common room, he could see shadows whipping just out of sight, like the trailing edge of a robe. When he briefly stepped outside to see if what the Gryffindor Quidditch team was saying was true and the storms had stopped, he felt it smiling down at him from beyond the steel-clear sky. When he tried to pay attention in Defense Against the Dark Arts, he felt it weighting Acies's words, distorting them and twisting them out of true, every now and then showing him a vision of a blackness as complete as a cave underground.
The wild Dark had come, and Harry did not know if he was ready.
Fawkes, who rode on his shoulder to every class that day, and regularly shifted between scarlet and gold and blue in his feathers, crooned when he thought that. A clear vision formed in Harry's mind, of the sun rising after a long night that no one thought would ever end. Harry managed a smile as he stroked the phoenix's neck.
He would have to be ready. He had made what preparations he could. He would be going to the graveyard when sunset came, with Snape, Draco, and those of his allies who could not fight tonight but still wanted to protect him as advance guards. Augustus, who was serving as focal point for the Light wizard ritual, would follow him in some time later, when preparations for the ritual were complete.
Harry wanted to be there at sunset just in case the Dark chose the yielding of the light for its strike, but he didn't think it would. As the day wore on and the light declined, he sensed it retreating still. To get to Little Hangleton at sunset, it would have had to gallop and tear cross-country, summoning its power from every corner of the sky, and Harry knew that wouldn't happen. The Dark would favor a slow, dramatic, majestic approach.
Still, it made the sky shake with the tread of its strength, and he knew the melodrama it favored wasn't humorous, as it would have been with an opponent of lesser power, as it was occasionally even with Voldemort. This was the Dark's cruel way of drawing out the anticipation, taunting him without words that he could not stop it, that no one could. A storm that could lay waste to the British Isles was coming. What effort of a mortal wizard could stop that?
The efforts of many mortal wizards, Harry thought, as he stroked Fawkes's feathers. That's the answer. It has to be.
And perhaps more than just mortal wizards, given that Acies came to find him after lunch. "Harry," she said, her head bowed so that her hood shaded her eyes, her voice low. "I may be able to bring one of the Singers to your defense. I promise nothing, because they are free and it is not my place to constrain them into an answer. I dare not even persuade. I can only mention the idea, and hope that one of them approves."
"A dragon might come to the graveyard?" Harry breathed.
"Perhaps," Acies said, stressing the word. "And I do not know what kind of Singer it would be, and if she would even arrive in time. I mention the possibility only so that you will not be surprised if it does happen, rather than as something to depend on." She bobbed her head and then stepped back; Harry could sense the curious gazes of those students who wanted to know what Professor Merryweather was talking so intensely to him about. "Tell your allies not to harm her if she does come."
"I promise," said Harry, feeling a bit breathless as Acies strode away. He wondered for a moment why she'd seemed so certain that it would be a female dragon who came, and then remembered that female dragons were usually larger, stronger, and fiercer than the males. She'd probably spread the idea before those Singers she thought would do the most good in battle.
If even a dragon can help in the battle against the wild Dark.
But, Harry could not deny, he felt a bit more cheerful after that.
"Ready?"
Harry, his breath pluming before his face, nodded, and then cast a warming charm on himself. He, Snape, and Draco had waited on the Hogsmeade road for the Dark allies who could accompany them—which meant most of them save Charles and Thomas—to arrive. Now Belville, grumbling about the cold and the damage that warming charms did to his fine cloak, had finally joined them. It was Lucius who asked the question, his eyes slit and his face as proud and cruel as a hawk's.
"I am," Harry said, just to reassure those of his allies who hadn't seen him nod, and then looked quickly around at them. "You all have a clear picture of the Apparition point in your heads?" He'd discussed it with them by the means of Charles's communication spell, as well as owled them copies of the maps that Scrimgeour had procured for him, and Henrietta and Hawthorn, among others, had Apparated there already. But the last thing Harry wanted was any of them getting splinched, so he thought it best to ask.
Nods and murmurs answered. Honoria actually laughed at him. "Honestly, Harry, we know how much this matters," she said, though she didn't look as though she knew how much it mattered at all. Letters of red and gold marched on her cloak, flashing insults to the wild Dark back at the dying sun. "We deserve to die by now if we don't."
Harry ignored her as much as possible—he was still irritated that she hadn't taken the payment of the life debt seriously—and then moved the extra step beyond Hogwarts's wards. The picture of the Apparition point was clear in his mind. He could feel the reassuring presence of Regulus and Peter at his back, Snape and Draco at his sides. Fawkes crooned above his head, and then all of that vanished into the blackness of Apparition.
They reappeared on a hillside, the Apparition point concealed in a thick grove of trees that almost blazed to Harry's sight with Muggle-repelling charms. He stepped hastily out of the way as the others Apparated in, and glanced around a few times.
The countryside seemed utterly unspectacular. Long shadows stretched from the grove across the steep ground, which canted more sharply below them than it did above. The grass here was matted and half-frozen with the frost they'd received this morning, the first proper one of the season, and too long to indicate that Muggles cared for it. Harry made out a path winding lazily past the grove. It didn't look well-used, either, since spreading ground plants obscured half of it.
"How far is the graveyard from here?" Burke grumbled.
"Less than a quarter mile, according to the Ministry maps," Harry said, and lifted his head to check the time. The sun was still safely above the horizon. "This way," he added, and led them down the hill.
They walked in silence, for the most part, except for Honoria apparently attempting to tell a joke to a distinctly unamused Ignifer. Harry shaded his eyes as he stared ahead. The village of Little Hangleton started towards the bottom of the hill, Scrimgeour's information said, though so far Harry didn't see a sign of it. Well, it was supposed to be a small village, as Muggle places went.
He actually almost stumbled into the shack before he saw it. His hand touched the weathered boards, and he started back in surprise. Snape caught him, and murmured in his ear, "Harry, what is it?"
"That's not a woodpile," Harry breathed, staring at the tumble of wood he had assumed some Muggle must have cut and then dumped here carelessly.
Looking at it closely now, he could see that it was a house, if one stretched the definition of "house" until it snapped. The door had fallen off the hinges and listed badly to one side, propped up by a broken piece of wood extending from the shack's right side. A tiny gap indicated the grave of a window. Harry could see raw-toothed holes in the shack's roof, and twigs that were probably the remnants of a bird's nest.
None of that would have attracted much of his attention, though, if not for the aura of powerful magic that stormed from the place. Harry could feel it like a spreading maelstrom under the much greater influence of the Dark storm. It eddied, a sullen black whirlpool. Harry imagined what might happen to a Muggle who tried to step into the old house, and shuddered.
"I feel it, too." Snape's voice was low and hard. "What is it?"
Harry took a deep breath, and then coughed. A stench that wasn't physical choked him when he tried to inhale it. This wasn't just Dark magic, he thought. He knew the feel of that, and it was very far from being the pure evil that Light wizards thought it was, even in its wild form. This was magic worked with deliberately malevolent intent, and he didn't recognize it. He knew that he would be cursed if he tried to get into the shack, but not what form the curse would take.
"I don't know," Harry said.
Snape's hand tightened, drawing him away from the pile of wood. "Then don't fool around with it," he ordered. "When and if we have time after our business is done at the graveyard, then we'll come back."
Harry wondered for a moment what kind of wizard would have left this here without any Muggle repelling charms around it, like an open pit trap, and then snorted. Tom Riddle, of course. Voldemort. The bastard.
"Can we get a move on?" Belville's voice was arrogant, but that didn't hide the rushing undercurrent of fear. "I thought we had to be at the graveyard at sunset, in case the storm struck there."
Harry shook himself free of his fascination with the shack. Like Snape said, it was a minor mystery in the face of attack from the wild Dark, and they would investigate it only if and when they had time. Untying curses that Voldemort had set himself was no easy task, and perhaps there would turn out to be nothing worth the effort behind them. It didn't look like the kind of place that Voldemort would hide anything valuable. "I don't think it will fall there now," he said absently, and turned his face up to the winter sunlight. "It's probably coming at midnight."
Belville said something uncomplimentary to that, regarding the hurry they'd taken to get here, but Harry ignored it. He could see the houses of Little Hangleton once they got beyond the shack, as if it were the gateway to the village, and so he concentrated on casting charms that would cause any Muggles abroad to forget to see them. They saw no one as they worked their way north and west around the houses, though. Muggles couldn't feel the wild Dark, Harry thought, but they could sense enough unnaturalness in the weather to be uneasy about it. They'd stay indoors.
At least, so Harry hoped. The storm would hit Little Hangleton first if he couldn't stop it. He shuddered to think of how the wild Dark would play with helpless Muggles, unable even to comprehend the force that faced them, much less to withstand it.
I'm doing this for them, too, then. I have to think of defending everyone, not just myself.
The weight of extra lives steadied him, rather than crushing him. It had always been that way, for Harry. If the wild Dark had just wanted him and Voldemort, he would have fought with less strength than he would now that he knew it would kill anyone who got in its way.
Kill, or torture, or play with…
He saw the stone wall of the graveyard when they left the last house behind. It sat below a much larger building that Harry suspected, from the information Scrimgeour had passed to him, was the Riddle house. The Riddles, mother and father and son, had been found dead there in the 1940's, their bodies unmarked, looks of terror on their faces. They had obviously died from the Killing Curse, and Morfin Gaunt had confessed to the murders.
Harry shook his head. I'd wager my right hand that it was Voldemort who killed them. Merlin knows how many victims have taken the blame for his crimes.
The thought ran away from his head like water through a hole in the bottom of a basin, and Harry realized he was panting. Draco noticed. He paused, then slung an arm around Harry's shoulders and squeezed firmly. They had to keep walking, or one of Harry's other allies would notice his growing discomfort, and that could be disastrous. Harry had not forgotten that a traitor was somewhere among them.
Harry leaned towards Draco, and fought to still memories of the last time he had come to this graveyard at sunset, exactly six months ago now, on the first day of summer. His left hand throbbed. He shuddered as he reimagined bonds gripping his wrists and ankles, and a flare of pain from his chest reminded him of the bite Voldemort had taken out of him when he still looked like a deformed child.
"It will be all right," Draco whispered in his ear. "Things will be different this time. You'll see."
Harry nodded into his shoulder, and kept walking. The stone wall around the graveyard drew nearer and nearer. Harry could see the headstones and angels he remembered looming above the half-tumbled rocks. He could see no sign of movement, though. He supposed that wasn't unusual. It was Thursday, not Sunday, and unless there was a funeral in the graveyard, there might be one or two Muggles visiting, no more.
Closer and closer they came, and the graveyard lay there. Harry could glimpse the grass inside it now, smooth and flat. It looked well-cared for, he thought. It had probably been the same when he was there at midsummer, but then he'd been too—busy—to notice such things.
He paused when they neared the gates. For a long moment, he couldn't force his legs to move. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, so loud that the murmurs of his allies faded behind it. He watched the sun linger in the western corner of the graveyard, and saw lights glimmering up from Little Hangleton below, and he shuddered.
"It's all right, Harry," Draco whispered. "It will be. I promise." He squeezed Harry's shoulder again. "But this time, you've got to lead."
Harry gave him a smile he hoped didn't look as pallid as it felt. Then he stepped forward and gently shifted the gates aside.
He stepped in, and then the world snapped.
Glamours fell like rags. Harry could feel the magic surrounding the graveyard now: thick charms to repel Muggles, wards to alert someone when a stranger entered, and curses running over the ground like a mat, all of it sheltering under a thick outer shell that had kept him from noticing any spells when he was outside the gates. He could see something dark writhing over the graves, and he spun back around, thinking Voldemort might have Apparated in behind him.
He hadn't, but wards had sifted down behind Harry, piling up like snow. He could barely see Draco, Snape, and the rest of his allies through the thick white lines. They were casting spells at the barrier, their lips moving in incantations that he couldn't hear. Harry swore, and swore again, and felt sweat build up beneath his cloak like a second skin.
"Potter."
Harry turned sharply. The dark thing writhing over the graves had form and definition in his eyes now, the way it hadn't when he'd been more concerned in identifying what kind of trap he'd sprung. But now…
Now…
His mind stuttered and stopped for a moment, then gagged.
The dark thing was a thicket of thorns, a mass of black branches, wide as pillars, all of them plunging into the center of the thicket, towards a root he couldn't see. The thorns themselves wound around the graves, and projected into wicked-looking tips that Harry could swear were barbed.
Impaled on three of them was a figure Harry recognized as Evan Rosier. Vines wreathed his feet and crowned his head and hair and pinned his arms to the sides, outspread. Harry could see thorns piercing the flesh of his limbs, stained red with the blood they drew. The thorns that corkscrewed into his back appeared to become one with his flesh, and Harry could see shadows running just under Rosier's ribs that were probably their ends. Rosier was crucified there, alive, and his face was twisted with a pain so profound that Harry held his breath for a long moment.
When he started breathing again with a whoosh, Rosier smiled at him. It looked as if he could barely manage the expression; it pulled on the barbs buried along his hairline, the briars that halted an inch from his eyes.
"Do you…like them?" Rosier whispered, wheezing in between each few words. Harry wondered for a moment how he could hear them, then realized he'd drawn nearer, staring up in shock and horror and an odd, dream-like fascination. "They're…eating me alive. Drawing the…flesh out of me…through my back. They'll…liquefy my heart in the…end. So she…told me."
"Who?" Harry whispered. He could think of no other question, and certainly not an answer, in the face of such suffering.
Rosier blinked, and the edges embedded in his face bobbed near to him with the movement and kissed his eyelids. "The…Thorn Bitch, of course," the Death Eater said. "Indigena…Yaxley. I thought you had…heard of her."
"Heard of her," said Harry, and licked his lips. Think of the storm. Voldemort's tricks and traps are nothing next to that. But he could not look away from Rosier, could not comprehend leaving even an enemy to hurt like this. "I didn't know she could do things like this."
"You are…about to learn, I think," Rosier said.
Harry opened his mouth to ask what that meant, and the grass beneath his feet whipped into motion, twining up his legs. Before Harry could think to fight, it had locked his body into place, and grown into the pocket of his robes, where it found and made off with his wand. Harry snarled, and prepared to draw his wandless magic in and wither the grass. He had no compunctions about killing other living things when they were doing the bidding of someone who could enact that sort of punishment on Rosier.
Vines lifted from the grass with a hissing sound and lashed around his arms, drawing them wide.
And Harry's wandless magic hit the barrier of them and fell back into his body, just as it had on midsummer when opposing the wall of Voldemort's will.
Harry screamed. He could not help it. The memories had overtaken him too suddenly and too completely. He lay on that stone again, the one where he'd been tied and had to struggle helplessly while Cynthia Whitecheek and Fenrir Greyback killed a little boy in front of him, the one where he'd watched Voldemort come back to life, the one where Bellatrix had taken his hand.
He screamed again when he saw a figure walking towards him, obviously a witch, in the same long dark robes that Bellatrix had worn. But Rosier's voice, shouting for him to stop screaming, and the sight of two arms, whole and undamaged, projecting from the witch's robes, shoved him back into his right mind. Harry closed his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling it rasp through his lungs. His throat already hurt. His right hand danced on the end of his arm, as though it wanted to detach itself from his body rather than chance being cut off.
The witch halted beneath him and looked up. Only then did Harry realize that the grass and the vines had both risen on long runners, elevating him a good ten feet above the ground. He felt his feet swaying helplessly in midair, and his wrists began to ache.
The witch studied him. Harry stared back at her. He had no doubt that this was Indigena Yaxley.
She looked ordinary enough, really, her brown hair touched with blonde and her eyes dark. What made her unusual were the shadows beneath her skin, which came into clearer view as she rotated one hand and the vines circled, moving Harry into a different position over her head. He could see leaves under her cheeks, petals cradling her eyes, the edges of vines curling around her ears and then dropping towards the collar of her robes. Harry tried to imagine the magic, along with the genius at Herbology, that it would take to put plants in that position and survive. He could not.
"There, that's better," said the witch, in a clear, crisp voice. "I prefer my guests when they aren't screaming. Dear Evan has obliged me in that, most of the time, although sometimes the pain grows too great even for him. And I haven't hurt you very much, Harry, really. Do you like them?" She nodded to the vines that gripped his arms. "My Lord has been having me experiment. These vines bind wandless magic as long as they are touching the victim's body. I went to some trouble to breed them. They won't hurt you, but they will hold you."
Speechless with hatred, Harry could only stare back at her. He had thought for a moment that this woman must be as mad as Bellatrix or Rosier, with the way she was talking, but her eyes were clear, and her smile faded as she waited and he said nothing in praise of her vines.
"It would be hard for you to appreciate them when they're making you prisoner, I suppose," said the woman, regret in her voice. "Pity." Abruptly, she turned towards the house above the graveyard, head cocked as if she'd heard a summons.
Voldemort Apparated in.
Harry felt his coming as a darkening of the faint sunlight that still remained. His magic roared around him, fully recovered—and augmented, it seemed, by whatever power he'd managed to drain in the months since Harry saw him last. He walked forward with a long, sinuous dark shape gliding at his side. A newly-bred basilisk, Harry saw, without plumes—a female.
Voldemort halted beneath the vines and looked up at him. Harry's scar split his head open like the lightning had split the sky while the storms still raged. Through the haze of pain, he saw Voldemort's lipless mouth part in a smile.
"Bring him down, Indigena," the Dark Lord said, somewhere far away.
The vines retracted smoothly into the earth, bearing Harry closer and closer to his enemy. The agony increased as he neared, and by the time his back touched the grass—more smoothly than he would have thought possible for a Death Eater—he was writhing in agony, though he refused to scream as yet. Yes, screaming would relieve his feelings and perhaps keep him from going mad, but he refused to let Voldemort think he had won.
Voldemort leaned towards him. When his pale face was an inch above his, the pain turned Harry's vision white.
He still didn't think he'd screamed, but then Voldemort was drawing back and Harry heard his own breaths ripping through his nostrils and throat, hoarse, pleading sounds like the gasps of a wounded animal. "Your vines work wonderfully well, Indigena," Voldemort was saying, with laughter in his voice. "Hold him still while I summon my own pet."
"Yes, my lord," said Indigena promptly. She sounded a bit resigned, as though this wasn't her idea of fun, but Harry had no doubt she would obey. The vines holding his arms pressed a bit closer, as if to reassure him of that.
Voldemort turned away from Indigena, easing the pain in Harry's head a bit more, and hissed. Harry forced himself to listen. Voldemort was speaking Parseltongue, there was no doubt of that, but it sounded like he was doing so through a mouth full of dirt. "Come, White One, Child of the Darkest Night, Digger of Tunnels, arise!"
The grass beneath Harry churned and mounded, bearing him briefly upwards. The vines didn't loosen their hold, though, and he fell back into their cradle as the ripple of movement traveled under him and then curled around Voldemort. The Dark Lord didn't seem concerned that he was within a rapidly rising circle of earth. He simply stretched his hands out and repeated his summons. Harry realized abruptly that he was surrounded by a pale green glow, like a sickly Lumos, that stood out starkly against the night. The sun had set.
The earth erupted. Harry saw a long white coil, as sickly a color as the light surrounding Voldemort in its own way. Voldemort shifted his position easily, and then he was standing on that coil, borne aloft on it, laughing and repeating the invocation one more time.
Other white coils shifted, long mounds of rubbery flesh stretching upwards towards the hidden stars, the rushing clouds. Harry shuddered in revulsion when one brushed past him, and he smelled the scent of decay, rotting flesh, a humid smell that he would never have associated with a snake.
The basilisk swayed and hissed, and Harry turned to see her confronting a blunt head risen out of the earth, opening a maw fringed with fangs like long strings of saliva. If the head had eyes, Harry couldn't see it.
He understood the smell, then, and the odd Parseltongue Voldemort spoke. He had summoned not a snake, but an enormous worm.
The great creature carried on rising, bursting out of corner after corner of the graveyard, until the only earth untouched was that supporting Indigena, the thorn patch embracing Rosier, and the vines that held Harry up. The witch never moved, except when she craned her neck to check on the vines. Harry saw a tender smile cross her face when she did that, as if she admired children or favored pets.
Harry managed to painfully turn his head a time or two, and made out the thick white glow of the wards at the gates. None of his allies could get through them, he knew, or they would have been here already, fighting furiously to free him from the vines.
That meant he was on his own.
Think, he ordered himself, and closed his eyes.
Voldemort spoke before he could delve into thought, though, his voice soft and thick and mocking and eager. "Do you like my plan, Harry? When the wild Dark comes, I will lure it with the promise of a feast—you and Rosier, my faithless Rosier, both in exquisite pain and radiating Dark magic. Let it come close enough, however, and this child of the earth I have called will begin to swallow it. When it is engaged in fighting for its freedom, I will harness it as I should have been able to at Walpurgis. That you interrupted. This, you shall help me with."
"You're mad, Tom," Harry said, opening his eyes. Voldemort stood a little higher than he did, outlined against the sky—darkness above him, diseased light around him, white flesh beneath his feet. Harry could feel his power, and, beyond him, the growing pressure of the wild Dark. It was gathering its might now, sweeping towards the graveyard. "You can't hold the Dark. It will tear you apart. That's what it's come for, to punish you."
Voldemort laughed, a sound that Harry thought he should not have heard across the distance that separated them, but heard nonetheless. He could see the crimson eyes fastened on him now, radiating a light of their own, one that made the shadows deeper. "Harry, Harry, Harry. You know nothing of the deep, old magic that I have studied, the years I spent in pursuit of the Arts before I returned to Britain and Declared myself the Dark Lord. There are natural oppositions, natural patterns, in magic, and in other countries, they have preserved the knowledge of them better than wizards have here, with their mouths dumbly open and their gazes fixed on the sky. The earth opposes the air, even as fire opposes water, and it may hold the greatest of winds. I will harness the Dark. I only need sacrifices to draw its attention, and those I have."
Harry let out a huffing breath. He was not sure which he feared more: that Voldemort was fooling himself, and the wild Dark would break him and go on to wreak havoc and destruction across the British Isles and half Europe—or that Voldemort was telling the truth, and he might be able to tame the power of the wild Dark and use it.
Either way, it's up to me to stop this, he thought, and felt a helpless rage rising in him. If Voldemort weren't so mad, this would be a lot easier.
Thunder abruptly spoke from beyond the graveyard, and Voldemort laughed aloud and spread his arms. "The Dark is coming," he cried, "and who in all Britain stands to stop me? No Dark Arts can penetrate the wards I have woven, the preparations I have made, the spells I have raised—"
"Not the Dark," said a voice Harry knew, "but the Light. For even in the deepest Dark, the Light doth shine. Aurora ades dum!"
And it was as if dawn had come to the graveyard.