Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
All right. This chapter has GORE AND TORTURE WARNINGS. It is ugly, deliberately so. So, please, if you find these sorts of things triggering and don't want to read about them, reconsider reading this chapter. It is not quite as bad as the chapter where Harry loses his hand, but it's pretty up there.
The title of this chapter comes from the fantasy series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson.
Chapter Sixty-Nine: There Is Also Love In The WorldIndigena Yaxley did not much like torture, and she found suffering a source of boredom. Thus, she wasn't enjoying her latest mission—on which Voldemort had told her that she was the only one permitted to accompany him—that much.
On the other hand, needs must, and a duty wouldn't be much of a duty if it didn't have an objectionable part buried in it somewhere. So she had come along, doing exactly as her Lord had told her.
When Evan Rosier had found her alone one freezing night in January and told her about the weakness of Hogwarts's wards, Indigena had disbelieved him. Rosier had fled, quite sensibly, before her Lord could find him, but Indigena had carried the news to the Dark Lord anyway, thinking he might know better than she did the truth of it.
He had laughed. How he had laughed! And then he had sent her to spy in the Forbidden Forest, guarded by her plants against animal betrayal, and bade her to send some of her vines twirling about the bones of Hogwarts, testing for a hole. If the wards were at full strength, even a plant like Indigena's, under the control of a hostile mind, should have been seen and destroyed. But all her vines came back to her alive, and with reports of the wards melting each day. They had been stabilized, but there was a weakness in the middle of them, a hole, into which they continued to run. The melting was simply slower than it had been.
Indigena jumped, a bit, as a deep groan came from behind her. She was facing the stone wall, and having one of her vines that bound wandless magic grow up it and around in circles. No matter how fast Harry entered the room, she would bind and hold him. She kept her concentration on that, and not on what her Lord was doing behind her. And if she could recite the events that had brought them here in her head as another distraction, so much the better.
The Dark Lord had changed his original plan for their February outing, which involved some Muggles who happened to be related to Harry, and chosen to target Hogwarts instead, as soon as his own spies, two of his bred snakes, brought back word of where the weakness in the wards was located. It seemed the Dark Lord had had a good idea, and the snakes had confirmed it. So they had come to a tunnel beginning in the Forest that the snakes had shown them, Indigena had hollowed it out further with her vines, and they had walked underground and into an older tunnel, and then into Hogwarts.
They'd emerged from behind the statue of Salazar Slytherin, into the Chamber of Secrets.
Indigena looked up from her vines. She had to admit the Chamber made an impressive sight for someone, like her, who had never seen it. The Dark Lord had touched the statue of Slytherin and spoken in incomprehensible Parseltongue to it, walked about with his hand lightly brushing the walls, and had in other ways acted like a man coming home.
Then he had gone up through the Chamber—which, he'd told her in slit-eyed amusement, was guarded from the notice of both Headmistress and Founders' spirits by Slytherin's old spells—and to fetch Snape. It had all been ridiculously easy, more than Indigena would have expected it to be.
She jumped at another groan from behind her. She shouldn't be reacting like this, she thought. Severus Snape was a traitor. He had taken the Dark Mark, the kind of brand that in the old days would have signaled an unbreakable contact between Lord and companion, and yet turned against the Lord he had sworn to serve. He had said one thing, and then learned to mean another. And from the stories Indigena had heard about him, he had done it more than once, or he would not have given up Albus Dumbledore to the Ministry. A small, sniveling worm, a snake who didn't obey the Dark Lord, a damned man with no honor. Why did her stomach still twist as she listened to her Lord torturing him? It was true that she found most torture boring, but she didn't find it revolting. Setting her thorns on Evan had even been fun. At the least, it gave her information about how they reacted to human food.
She told herself sternly that revulsion was not permitted to a Death Eater—and that was what she was now, however much she might wish it otherwise. She settled her stomach, and then turned.
Voldemort had taken Snape into the center of the Chamber, a good distance from most of the plants Indigena had had overgrow the walls, all except a set of the vines that would bind Snape from using wandless magic. He had his limbs splayed out, stretched to their fullest extent, and gradually moving further apart; Indigena had told the vines to do that. Being on a rack was the least Snape should experience, really, Indigena thought, and did her best to convince her mind of that. It didn't help that Voldemort had removed Snape's robes and left him only shirt and trousers, so that she could see exactly how far his limbs were stretched.
The Dark Lord paced in a quick circle around Snape, currently, hissing to two snakes curled around his arms. They had their fangs locked into Snape's flesh, pumping in venom. Indigena didn't know what kind of snakes they were, other than ones that her Lord had bred out of his Parseltongue books. She only knew that they were what made Snape utter those groans every now and again. Her Lord had said something about the venom withering the flesh from the inside. Indigena could see why that would hurt.
Her Lord paused now, eyeing the snakes, and then abruptly hissed out a long, breathless command. The serpents released Snape and slithered off him and towards their Lord, twining around his pale arms as he stooped to receive them. They were black, with long red dashes running the length of their spines. They swayed their heads back and forth even when the rest of their bodies were coiled along the Dark Lord's arms, as if they could not miss a moment when they might dance.
Indigena saw Snape recover, somewhat, from the cessation of pain. He really was extraordinarily tough. Of course, he had survived two years at Voldemort's side during his first rise, and Indigena knew he would have suffered curses and pain from both his Lord and other, jealous Death Eaters. Now, he opened his eyes, and while a spasm crossed his face, he kept his gaze locked on the Dark Lord's and did not look away. Indigena saw no defiance in his face, unless it was a patient, stony kind.
"Now, Severus," Voldemort said in what was almost a croon, "I did so want you not to be distracted while I spoke to you." He gestured at the Chamber. "We are in the sacred place of Salazar Slytherin, the Founder of our House. Will you not look at it? Will you not enjoy?"
Snape never looked away from Voldemort. He said nothing.
"You have fallen so far from a Slytherin's true ideal," said the Dark Lord. One thing Indigena marveled at was how he could make his voice seem almost caring. Of course, he might use Occlumency to control his emotions, she supposed. "Poor Severus. Serving a Light Lord. Ignoring the call of your rightful master, who will bring back the world Salazar would have wanted." His voice altered, and Indigena learned why in the next sentence. The Dark Lord really did find it hard to control his passionate hatred of Harry. "Running about after a boy, as if he were the one who could grant you the power and prestige I know your heart so desires."
Snape continued saying nothing. Indigena supposed he was trying to avoid giving Voldemort what he wanted. So far, he hadn't even screamed.
"Do you know, Severus," the Dark Lord said, "that I considered sparing you at one time? My Potions brewer. My servant who overheard the prophecy concerning the supposed Boy-Who-Lived for me. My perfect spy." Shockingly sudden, one of his hands flicked, and a strip of skin separated itself from Snape's leg and peeled away. Snape closed his eyes and held still, muscles trembling as if he were a horse on the verge of running, while Voldemort flayed his leg with precision and care. Indigena watched the coating of skin slide from muscle and bone and delicate red-pink coils of flesh, and told herself it didn't matter, that this was the least a traitor like Snape deserved.
She could not convince herself. She was not so far gone to honor as to vomit, but she did have to look away for a moment.
When she turned back, Voldemort had begun to flay off the muscle as he'd flayed off the skin. Snape did make a sound now, not quite a scream, but an abbreviated cry, forced from him entirely against his will. Indigena looked into his eyes, but she knew he didn't see her. His face was blank with suffering.
"I will do this," the Dark Lord said, his voice and face gone emotionless now, "as payment for your transgression, Severus. But I made a promise, and I shall keep that promise." And now he was laughing, a sound that made Indigena feel as if he were flaying off her ears. "I will leave you alive. I swore an oath. When Harry arrives, Severus, and trades his life for yours, then, I think, it will not matter to you whether you ever walk again."
Indigena saw the bolt go home. Snape must have thought, until that moment, that he was being tortured solely for betraying the Dark Lord. Voldemort had said nothing to indicate otherwise, and had seemed interested in inflicting physical pain more than emotional. Now Snape knew he was bait in a trap, and for the boy Indigena did believe he must love, as much as traitors could love anyone.
He made a valiant effort to fight. He bucked and twisted in the vines' hold, and Indigena felt them briefly begin to burn as Snape's wandless magic started to rise through his skin. But the vines had been bred to take care of that. They bore down a little harder, and the magic turned into ashes and embers
Snape slumped back again, and Indigena looked away from his face. Snape knew he was bait now, knew that Harry was coming to save him—if by "save him" one meant "lay down his life in his place."
Indigena fully expected her Lord to keep this oath, in fact. He had told her what he intended from this evening. Not just to kill Harry, not just to destroy the one who might destroy him, but to drink all of Harry's magic, make the boy an empty shell and himself powerful beyond measure. The power would be doubled or tripled if the boy came as a willing sacrifice, and his willingness would end if he did not see Snape safe before giving himself to Voldemort.
Indigena had wondered that her lord was prepared to give up vengeance on the traitor so easily, but she'd seen Snape's eyes now. This was not giving up vengeance. It was deepening it, spreading it through Snape's flesh like the venom of the black-red snakes, to linger and cause damage even after the sacrifice was complete.
The Dark Lord was destroying his right leg layer by layer; he'd reached the level of tendon and ligaments now, and was untying them like cords around a Christmas gift, laughing softly all the while. The pain was hideous.
Snape knew that laughter. He'd stood beside his Lord often enough when it sounded, as they watched some poor victim taken apart at the seams by Bellatrix Lestrange, or killed during an initiation, or, on rare occasions, tortured by Voldemort himself. He writhed under the pressure of it, his eyes closed and his throat now and then opening to release a scream.
But the physical pain and the sound of the laughter only intruded on his consciousness in jolts and flashes. He was an Occlumens, a better Occlumens than the Dark Lord was a Legilimens, and his training had run deep enough that he could retreat behind the suffering and think.
And perhaps Voldemort had known or guessed that, because now he had polluted the serenity of Snape's mind, his near-resignation to dying, with the one venom he could not purge.
Over and over, Snape saw the vision of Harry coming to the Chamber of Secrets, allowing Voldemort to bind him, allowing his magic to be drained or his blood to be taken in whatever obscene ritual the Dark Lord had planned—it was always rituals with him, always, always, as if he could make up for his own corruption by appeals to something greater—and then dying.
Because Snape had allowed himself to be taken. Because he had never expected, ever, for his vision to go dark as he paced in his quarters, worrying about Harry, and for it to come back in the Chamber of Secrets, his former Lord looming over him.
The realization pried deeper and deeper, tore open his mind and touched delicate places that Voldemort could not have assaulted with the most tireless torture. There was no safety. There never would be. They had relied on the wards of Hogwarts, and those wards had failed. He might try to protect Harry, but he would be turned into the very victim that Harry must come to rescue. And Harry would die, because, it seemed, there was no other fate that could take him.
When Snape screamed, he felt that pain more than the other.
They had tried. They had fought, and in the end, it was not enough. They had lost.
Snape had thought himself resigned. He had believed that he thought their struggle desperate, that he respected the Dark Lord as a powerful enemy Harry might not defeat. Now he saw how foolish that had been. He had lived as if he had hope. There was none. Why should there be any?
Despair moved on him, the heaviest snake Voldemort had yet created, crushing and strangling him both at once. He could not breathe. Fire ran up the inside of his arms, but it was only an echo of the anguish slowly destroying his mind. This must be, he thought, his thoughts dim and sluggish, what it is like at the end of the world, when one can no longer deny that the world is ending.
Strange. He had always thought himself stronger than this. There was a point in his life when he would have welcomed the Dark Lord's triumph, had worked for it and hastened it on, and another when he had not wanted it but had believed he could survive it, since he could always go cold, the way his mother had taught him. He could have endured being a slave, being tortured and humiliated, seeing people he knew die. What tie did he have to the wizarding world so precious that it was more important than survival, that most Slytherin of goals?
And now the end of the world was here, and he was breaking before it.
He had to fight. He understood now the kind of suicidal courage that Harry had told him Black had exhibited, moments before his death. Black had understood that his death was the best way to destroy the fragment of Voldemort growing within him, and it was no wonder he'd smiled as he died.
If Snape destroyed himself, then at the very least Harry would have no reason to come here. The Dark Lord would have no hostage.
He began to gather his magic, folding it in under his skin. Now and then he screamed more often, to distract his Lord and get him excited. Let him think Snape's Occlumency barriers were crumbling, and he was surrendering to the physical pain. He ought to know better, since he was the one who had told Snape about his purpose as a hostage, but that was the Dark Lord for you. He never had understood the existence of love, let alone how it actually worked.
He hated and feared death. He would never think that someone else might rather die than contribute to the death and torture of someone he loved.
Snape waited until a moment when the Dark Lord had stopped to consider what torture he should begin next, and the vines had showed no sign of readjusting their grip on him, a kind of breathing pause.
Then Snape focused his own magic on his heart, bearing down, going from no pressure to all pressure in a moment, willing it to stop beating. He felt his heartbeat speed up, the instinctive fear that threatened to destroy his attempt, the crushing sensation that he had always heard signaled a heart attack. But stronger than any of those feelings, and the reason he was doing this at all, came his vicious satisfaction. He would do this, and his Lord had laid no defense against it—
Then his will drained away quite abruptly, the way the wards had run into the weak point of the Chamber. Snape found himself lying flat on his back, or as flat as he could in the hold of the vines, with his Lord kneeling above him and staring at him. His scarlet eyes conveyed a moment of genuine amusement.
"Sssseverus," Voldemort said, deliberately hissing the name. "Did you think your Occlumency barriers would hold in such a moment of focus elsewhere? Did you think I would not see what you intended to do, and that I could not stop you?"
He reached out and stroked Snape's hair, his white fingers moving as quick as beetles' legs over his face. "No," the Dark Lord said, with a hint of the tenderness and compassion that Snape remembered from his speeches about poor young pureblood wizards whose culture would be lost if Mudbloods overwhelmed their world. "No, that would never do, would it, to lose my pet when he is on the verge of fetching me the fine fat prey I want?"
He lifted a finger from Snape's face to his mouth, and smiled at what he tasted there. "There was once a potion recipe I read of that used the tears of true despair as an ingredient," he murmured. "A pity I have no use for what it creates."
Snape gave up. Physical pain and mental pain had blended into each other, and he was lost in suffering, so pure a state that keeping track of where the various sensations came from was pointless.
He could feel him coming.
Oh, yes, he could feel him coming, could Lord Voldemort, his head high as he prowled around the bloodied and half-skinned mess of his former servant, and gazed at the doors to the Chamber of Secrets. The doors were closed, but that did not matter. His heir could open them. Had not his heir received the gift of Parseltongue from him? He could open the doors.
Harry.
He restrained a snarl. Lord Voldemort was too dignified to snarl. He had done what was needed, and this night, this night under a frosty February sky and in the presence of the greatest of the Hogwarts Four, he would receive back what he deserved. He had created a magical heir when he never meant to. It was only fitting that his heir's gifts would come back to him.
This was a day of no particular distinction, not Midwinter and not Midsummer and not even an old Muggle or wizarding holiday. That did not matter. When he rose again, after having consumed all of Harry's magic and licked his corpse clean, then it would become a day of horror and loathing for all who opposed him, a day of celebration and rejoicing for those who knew the right way of things.
He could imagine, he could imagine, children being brought to the Chamber in the future and learning that this was the very site where the Dark Lord had regained his full powers. Their eyes would gape. Their mouths would open. And then they would turn and look at him, Lord Voldemort, because surely sometimes he would be here. And he would be here however long the children might come, because he was never going to die.
He paced. His serpents, of a kind not seen, not bred, for a thousand years, sang and danced on his arms. Now and then he spoke to them, and praised them. Snakes were the only creatures he had ever truly understood. They obeyed him, and were loyal. They understood power, and yielded to it. There were no suicidal charges with fangs bared. He had often thought that life would be improved if more people were like snakes, and understood his dominance instinctively.
Oh, yes, he could feel him coming. He cocked his head and laughed softly, exultantly, hunter's pride singing in his veins. Harry was at the entrance to the tunnel far above them, now. Soon he would speak to the sink with the snake carved on it and begin his descent. Oh, yes, soon. He was a hunter, a hunter who did well. Any prey could be lured in. One merely had to know what bait to set.
Lord Hunter! He had considered that as a title for himself once, before he had seen the value of using his common, ordinary, Muggle name as the basis for a name both the worlds that had betrayed him would learn to hate and fear. But he could adopt it as a secondary title when he took the Ministry. He could insist that the Minister take the title of Lord Hunter. He could insist that people speak of him as that every second time they spoke of him, should he wish.
He was dizzy with the possibilities of the future opening before him. All his study and pursuit of Dark Arts knowledge—all the years in Egypt and China and Russia and even that year in New Zealand when he had thought he would die of strain as he painstakingly learned bone magic—all the years of his first rise, and the thirteen years of suffering he still owed Harry for, and the eight months since, all had led to this moment.
The boy was walking willingly into his trap. Had he considered, at all, that coming to his destroyer of his own free will would mean that his surrendered magic rang with power? It would be one thing if Lord Voldemort had to take his magic, tear it from him; it would still aid him, it would still give him what he needed, but it would still be a spoil of conflict, a prize of war. Surrendered, given up, then Harry's will would agree with his own, and when Harry was dead, the force of his will as well as his magic would join Lord Voldemort's.
And why not? He is my heir.
He prowled back and forth, back and forth. His heir was coming up the tunnel that led to the Chamber now. He knew where they were. Had not Lord Voldemort shown him the Chamber in the vision? The true vision, not the false one. The false one had moved Harry out of Hogwarts, where he would have sensed Lord Voldemort the moment he arrived, otherwise. The true one told the truth: that he intended to let his little Severus live, as long as Harry came alone and without his wand.
And now Harry was coming. He lifted his head and focused his senses forward, through the numerous spells he'd put on the tunnel when he went to fetch Severus. Among them were spells to sense cypress wood, to sense flesh and blood, to sense Omen snakes.
Harry came alone and without his wand.
He laughed exultantly.
Harry had not realized, as he walked the tunnel to the Chamber of Secrets, that it would be such a process of stripping away the unnecessary thoughts.
There was Draco's voice, sounding in his ears, furious, panicked, as Harry explained his vision of Snape and Voldemort in the Chamber of Secrets, Snape's limbs wound with vines that Harry had good reason to recognize after that night at the graveyard. "You can't go, Harry! I forbid it!"
Oh, he had said other things, too, especially once they got back to Hogwarts and Harry found out that Snape was gone from his private rooms, but they were all variations on that one, central theme. Harry could not go, because Draco had forbidden it. A rescue party could be organized, but Harry could not be one of its members. Or, if he had to go to defeat Voldemort, Draco would be at his side.
Draco had not changed his tune. Harry had tried reasoned argument, had explained his plan, had told him what he thought would happen to Snape if Harry did not go, but that did not matter. In the end, it was largely because of Draco that Harry had first used Extabesco plene to vanish from the sight of the people around him, and then used wards to block the door to the bathroom where he would enter the Chamber of Secrets. Let them bang on that barrier all they liked. They were never going to get through it. Harry had carefully set the ward so that it would take an equal amount of magical power to his own to burst it, and only one wizard in the school had that.
"This is…most disturbing, Harry."
That was McGonagall, her face understandably pale at the thought that the Dark Lord had walked the halls of her school, and was under them right now, and she had had no clue. She had to admit that the Chamber of Secrets made an excellent candidate for the hole in the wards, though, and that none of the Founders' spirits would have been able to sense anything; they had never been able to find Slytherin's Chamber, or they could have told Headmaster Dippet the truth about Tom Riddle's first opening of it fifty years ago. And she was concerned about Snape.
Nevertheless, she, too, had told Harry not to go, though her face said she understood why he wanted to better than Draco. She had told Harry that he could not trust Voldemort to keep his word, an understatement if there ever was one.
She didn't understand, though, not really. Harry had to go because there was no other choice. Voldemort had Snape, and Harry had to go, and that was really all there was to it.
He set the memory on fire and sent it drifting in ashes behind him.
Tonks and Moody had tried to reason him out of it. Connor had looked into his face and said nothing, but his eyes spoke his fear. Remus, summoned at McGonagall's insistence, had said he would rather bite Harry than see him go to the Chamber.
Harry set all the memories on fire, and he was going to the Chamber alone, quiet, feeling the tingle of Voldemort's spells seethe over him. Argutus was not with him. Draco was not with him. Snape, especially, was not with him.
He had come, quiet, with Dumbledore's magic in the tie in his robe pocket. He didn't think Voldemort would have cast spells to detect cloth, since that would only reveal that Harry wore robes.
He had come, and he was quiet. He did wonder what he would do about the doors to the Chamber, but, as it turned out, Voldemort had opened them before he ever reached them. The bastard probably wanted him to make a dramatic entrance, Harry thought, dimly, as he stepped inside.
Three things happened at once, so quickly that he had to think about them to sort them out. Vines lashed around his arms and legs, binding his wandless magic. Voldemort Vanished his robes, leaving him naked and rendering any weapons he might have hidden in his robe pockets perfectly useless.
And Harry saw Snape, lying on his back in a nest of vines, one leg a looped, unwound, bleeding mess, his arms red as fever with magic destroying them from the inside, his head lolling on his neck, and realized that the sight hurt him more than any moment of his parents' trial had.
He let his hand hang, and watched as Voldemort strode forward to pick up the tie containing Dumbledore's magic, which had fallen to the floor. He stared at it for a moment, then laughed. Harry bowed his head further, squeezing his eyes shut.
Don't scream. Don't scream.
"A fine feast you have brought me, Harry," Voldemort said, and under his voice Harry could hear Snape panting, small and breathless and desperate sounds. "Yourself, and this tie. You know, I trust, that a willing sacrifice of magic makes it all the more powerful?"
Harry shuddered, let himself shudder, made the vines tremble with the force of his shuddering. He had not really thought that he could simply walk into the Chamber of Secrets and use the magic stored in the tie. But he wanted Voldemort to think that. He wanted Voldemort to think him helpless, nearly conquered, so gone, so lost, to anything but the rescue of Snape that he had not thought to come in fighting, or use the magic in the tie before he entered the Chamber.
Harry knew what he had to do. He had known from the moment he confirmed the vision was real, from the moment McGonagall came back from Snape's quarters with a white face. And causing a battle that could destroy the school was not part of that plan. Nor was causing the battle only after the children had been evacuated, partly because none of the people he cared about and who cared about him would have let him go to the Chamber even then, but also because Harry wanted Hogwarts to remain standing, thank you. He was done with sacrifices, except the ones he chose. And a sacrifice of pride was a small one. Look helpless now. Lure him closer.
Don't scream. Don't scream.
"You have not answered me, Harry," said Voldemort, his voice low and sweet. "Do you know, it was through your forays into my mind that I learned the secret of the wards' weakness? I sensed you at once, my little dreamer, but I preferred to wait and see what you wanted. It seemed a small cost to reveal some of my plans when I could read your mind at my leisure."
That nearly did destroy Harry's self-control, but he clung to the plan in his mind, straight and sleek as an arrowhead. Snape had been right about the danger of the dreams and he had been wrong, and Snape had suffered because of it, but that would have to come later. There was a place for love here, but not for apologies, and not for guilt.
Don't scream. Don't scream.
"Still no answer." Voldemort paced closer to him. "Do you think it a point of honor not to scream, then? Is it the last strength left to you, when you've yielded every other one to me—willingly?"
Harry flinched, a half-jolt that he seized up before it had gone too far, as if Voldemort had accidentally hit on his best-kept secret. He leaned further back in the vines, and closed his eyes.
Voldemort laughed softly. "Well, then, Harry, let us see how long it takes you to scream, then."
Harry had known it would be Crucio, sooner or later, but Voldemort did not speak the incantation aloud, and the sudden pain seizing him seemed to come out of nowhere. He tipped his head back, and felt his muscles shudder and judder and shake themselves apart. He didn't know if he would be able to stand when it was done.
Don't scream. Don't scream.
"Still no scream from you?" Voldemort had moved closer, from the sound of his voice. Harry did not yet know if it was close enough, and he did not dare open his eyes, just in case Voldemort used Legilimency to read the truth in them. "Well, then, perhaps this is in order."
A weight smashed into his right elbow, and filled Harry's vision with blinding yellow pain. He suspected that Voldemort had chosen the spell for its shock value. He had known agony was coming, but not from where, or how braced he should be.
Don't scream. Don't scream.
Voldemort snarled, and moved closer. Harry half-slitted his eyes, and found him standing a few feet away from him, still too far. He was angry, from his tone; Harry shut his eyes again before Voldemort could actually meet his gaze.
"I will make you scream yet," Voldemort whispered, and then invisible fingers seized Harry's kneecap and began to pull. The pain was exquisite.
Don't scream. Don't scream.
Harry clung to the mantra, calling up every bit of training he had received to survive, and rode the pain out without screaming. Another shuffle of Voldemort's boots. Harry peered. He was close. He was very close.
"Now, this," Voldemort whispered. "Ulcero iterum!"
And Harry felt, again, the pain of his left hand being severed. Voldemort leaned over his face, bending nearer and nearer to him.
It served.
Harry opened his mouth to scream.
And the tiny Many snake, coiled inside his mouth and thus invisible to the spells that sensed flesh and blood, lifted her head and spat her venom directly into Voldemort's eyes.
Harry saw the Dark Lord blinded, that blindness that neither Muggle nor magical cures existed for. The Dark Lord reeled back, screaming, his hands flying to his face. His pain spell on Harry's left wrist wore off.
The Many snake slithered out of Harry's mouth as Harry hissed a command at her, and straight towards Indigena Yaxley. Harry looked up, catching a glimpse of the woman's startled face, and yelled in English, "Let me go, or I set her on you!"
Indigena might have done better in a different time and a different place, a time when she hadn't just seen her Lord blinded and a place where she had chosen the battleground. She might have been startled, or she might have seen how quickly the Many snake moved, and known that none of her vines or strangling grasses, which depended on her will to guide them, were that fast. Or perhaps she thought she had to stay alive to serve Voldemort, and that was more important than holding Harry, since there would be other chances for battle.
Whatever the reason, she believed him, and the vines holding Harry relaxed.
Harry dropped to one knee, ignored the fact that he was naked as well as he could, and then reached out and began to swallow.
He had reconciled himself to what he would have to do. As Voldemort screamed in his blindness, as Snape thrashed in his nest of vines, as Indigena did Merlin-knew-what, Harry ate magic. He reached out towards the Slytherin tie, Draco's tie, and unfolded the magic he'd contained there. It flooded towards him, a great filthy tide, and he swallowed it.
Before, he had feared that Dumbledore's magic would overwhelm him, because it was stronger than his own, and he didn't know how to cleanse its taint. Now, one fundamental thing had changed: he no longer objected to the taint. It was a weapon, and he would use it. He had become reconciled to what he had to do. As it filled him, he rose above it, his will greater than his distaste, and lashed out at Voldemort, using that swallowed magic to increase his own absorbere abilities.
Voldemort screamed as he felt his own magic being ripped away, and he might have tried to stop it. But his blinding had unseated him, distracted him fundamentally; he could not even command the snakes wound around his arms to attack Harry. Harry gulped, and gulped, and gulped, and still Voldemort could not absorb the sudden loss of his sight enough to fight him. Harry had counted on that. He ripped and tore and ripped and tore, and did not allow himself to think about what kind of damage he was doing, or what kind of filthy magic he was swallowing. This had to be done. He would do it.
No more sacrifices of lives to my morals. I'll hurt him if that's what I need to do.
Voldemort screamed, and screamed pitifully, and Harry's limbs shook as magic flooded them. He felt like a great, sloshing reservoir of polluted water, and still he drank.
"Harry! Call her off!"
That was Indigena. Harry turned his head, feeling swollen, and saw Indigena hanging from one of her own vines that had grown up the wall. The Many snake was climbing the vine tenaciously.
"Enough," Harry hissed, and she turned and slithered back to him, winding around his neck. Harry turned to look at Voldemort. He had never felt more like him than in that moment—full of Dark magic, having used Parseltongue and snake venom and absorbere magic to get this far.
Perhaps that was what made him speak the words he did next. Perhaps it was only the idea that, since he had the Dark Lord so much at his mercy, he should kill him now and save the war that might follow.
"Avada Kedavra," he whispered.
The green light took form at his fingertips. It gathered, it blazed, it fled forward. It hit Voldemort with the force of the Hogwarts Express.
It did nothing. When it faded, Voldemort was still screaming, his hands clutching at his eyes.
Harry nodded. Somehow, he was not surprised. The Dark Lord had sought to make himself immune to death. It seemed he had succeeded, at least in part. After all, he had not died from the rebounded Killing Curse the night he cursed Harry.
Or perhaps it had something to do with the prophecy. That needed an elder and a younger to kill him, and Harry didn't know which role he might play in it, but there was no thunder of prophecy in the air now.
He turned, slowly, feeling ponderous with the weight of the taint he carried, to look at Indigena Yaxley. She looked back at him, and was silent.
Harry knew he could kill her. The problem was that he no longer knew which reason he would be doing it for. He had come down determined to drain Voldemort's magic and Dumbledore's so that he would not cause the destruction of Hogwarts and he could save Snape from unnecessary death. But, so filled with Dark magic, with power that had been used to kill and hurt and scar, he felt detached from the world. He could kill Indigena, but he would never know whether he had killed her because she could be a threat in the future, or because it had seemed fun at the time. A sluggish current in his own thoughts said it would be fun.
No more sacrifices. If I will not sacrifice lives to my morals, neither will I sacrifice my morals to this war. I must know why I am killing.
He turned away, back towards Snape. This one thing he could be sure of. Rescuing his guardian was still a good thing.
Wandless magic scooped Snape up on a bed of wind. The vines slid from his limbs, and he rose, gently, his head lolling. His eyes were open, though, and sane, and fixed on Harry.
Harry met Snape's eyes in the middle of the Chamber, the only sound Voldemort's screams of pain and horror, and reality surged back into him with the force of the pounding tide, of the magic he had swallowed. He was more than the soldier who had determined he would need to wound, and he would have killed Indigena just because it sounded fun at the time, because he hadn't been himself, and getting Snape out of here was not only a good thing but his first priority.
There is also love in the world, he thought, and realized he was weeping and did not know when he had begun.
He called the bed of wind towards him and stood on unsteady feet. Crucio had left him shaky, and the spell pulling at his kneecap had hurt, but he could walk. The magic in his body saw to that. He realized he was naked, still, but that didn't seem important. He turned towards the entrance of the Chamber.
"Harry."
Harry didn't know why he looked at Indigena Yaxley. She stood with arms around her Lord, who had at last fallen unconscious, gazing at him with a complex mixture of emotions on her face.
"You should know," she said softly, "that we had the information on the wards' weakness from Evan Rosier. Not from your dreams. My lord knew of it back in January, and only waited so long to attack because he wanted to be absolutely sure of our way into the school."
Harry blinked, once, twice. Then he said, "I don't understand why you're telling me this."
Indigena gave him a kind of fragile smile. "No," she said. "I suspect you never will." She paused, and freed one hand from Voldemort's twitching body to make a fist of it and touch it to her heart. "Thank you for my life."
Harry just stared at her. Indigena smiled once more, and then she drew her Lord towards herself and Apparated.
Harry floated Snape towards him, and saw that his guardian had fallen unconscious as well. He did not look at the ribbons of blood and flesh that covered him; he looked to make sure that he was alive, and then he turned towards the entrance into the Chamber.
It was time to go back up.