"Neville!" Hermione shouted as soon as she woke up. Everyone looked at her for the shortest of moments. It was probably the first thing to happen in several minutes that seemed advantageous for the three of them; before that Voldemort had basically just toyed with them, resisting Ron's Imperius Curse almost effortlessly while avoiding attacks. What felt like an hour ago, Malfoy had woken up, only to be subjected to the same curse himself upon the discovery that his dark mark was gone. Whether it was the fact that the caster's will was being tested by being actively cursed, or whether it was for some other reason that the four of them could scarcely imagine, he resisted the vastly more powerful enemy.

"Nice of you to join us," Ron said, taking a breath. They were all taking a breath, from the looks of it.

"Neville, the fundamental truth about casting- about magic, in a sense, is that you have to intend the result. There's no consistent explanation that does not involve the intent of the caster. To intend the result, you have to have hope in your own ability and believe in magic. You can't really say you intend to do something if you don't know how-"

"Believe in magic?" Malfoy asked. It was an honest question, and not one that presumed an answer. Voldemort appeared to be disregarding her in favor of wondering what Luna was still doing inside of his mind. Neville had not devoted any thought to it so far; it felt like there had been no thoughts that he could spare, but most likely, he had believed that the two witches had been overcome by his mental defenses and were sitting there braindead. For one of them to escape with her mental faculties intact suggested that they had not both been taken out, and even if one had better luck in fighting whatever the hell was in there, why leave? Why leave to relate some strange message?

"The Phoenix-" she started.

"Is that what you believe magic is?" Voldemort asked all of a sudden. His eyes adopted a vaguely humorous look, but he did not smile. "I should have known. Everyone from the Koreans to the Rune Scribblers of Greenland have some baseless explanation in folklore that only works if one believes it. Is that what your hope is?"

Perhaps his realization was a moment late, but Neville realized that most likely, their enemy was only trying to put them off while he thought of some way of getting Luna out of his head. There has to be some reason he still hasn't taken us seriously yet. Even if he thinks we might have something up our sleeve... and even if he wants to see what it is... there's no way that his fear of death would ever allow him to get this close to the two prophecy kids when there is some unknown variable in play when he has no backup. Perhaps it was Ron's sense of strategy rubbing off on him, but everything was clicking. The dark wizard in front of them wanted them to display what power they had, but in a worst case scenario, he still had an escape, or some powerful weapon he could use to kill all of them at once without permitting them to respond to it. His challenge was not thinking of how to beat them, but calculating at what point he had to just eliminate the threat. A glance at his friend's face of grim determination told him he was either thinking along the same lines, or had already come to that conclusion.

"What do you believe magic is?" he asked. "I realize I never asked."

"You can no longer entertain me with such questions. I have no interest in allowing your friends to recover, or whatever they hope to accomplish." His scarlet eyes flitted back and forth between them. "All the same, I have grown rather fond of humiliating you, and I shall explain it for you. There is no general case theory of magic. In my youth, I entertained the idea that it simply was, that as the universe was, so was magic, and so were those who could cast it. Over time I came across several ancient cultures with their own explanations, and I realized it was entirely possible for different types of magic to exist, each with their own theories, and it was also possible that there was a theory that would work, but it would never be discovered, or that the theory could change across times and places."

"Are you contradicting the idea that intent is necessary when casting?" Hermione asked, her brow knitting. "How is it that you intend the result will take place? If I were to decide to go to Hogwarts as a first year, I could not honestly say that I intended to go there unless I believed it existed and that the Hogwarts express would take me there-" Something seemed to stop her in the middle of her saying as much.

"It is as simple as it can be, and yet I suppose it should not surprise me that one as simple as yourself fails to understand it. I know that I can perform magic because I am a wizard, and neither a muggle, nor a squib, nor a talentless hack."

"Everything you are is the product of your bloodline," Malfoy said. "And yet, squibs fail to perform. Are you implying that you are inherently special for reasons that do not relate to your bloodline, and that is what makes-"

"Precisely," he said. It looked like he had finished wracking his brains for Luna. Either he was certain she was not doing anything important in there, because he had checked everything important, or he decided that she had succumbed to the effects of his defenses, and Hermione had simply surprised him by not reacting to it. He'd have ordinarily ruled out the chance that she could step over a friend's dead body and act like nothing was wrong.

Neville knew, though, that nothing really was wrong. Whatever had happened to their friend, as much as she meant to everyone, she had come to fight, and for an incalculable number of them, that meant dying. It did not, however, mean an end.

"You're close," he said after a moment. "It's not our birth that gives us magic, though it is the case that some people were born into it. I can see how someone might think that there's no rhyme or reason if there's a rule that functions only part of the time. The truth is, we were chosen," he said after a moment. "If it's the case that each one of us has a destiny in the prophecies-"

"Prophecies only apply to the great, Longbottom," Voldemort said, his vexation waxing. "If no one had ever heard of me, no one would have assumed that the prophecy was about me."

"Yeah," Ron said after a moment. "-and, if you had just decided to do something else instead of going after the Potters and the Longbottoms, no one would have thought that the prophecy applied to you. The thing that we're assuming, though, is that the prophecy was always there, like the prophecies in the Phoenix Script. What if it was a new?"

"You may as well ask what would happen if it had been faked," Hermione said after a moment. "That's not the point, though. The Phoenix-"

"Again, do you truly place your hope in this legend?" the enemy asked, continuing with his strange mocking tone. "Allow me to clarify something. Accio wand."

From a great distance, a wand flew to his hand.

"That's-" the witch started.

"Yes, though I am not entirely sure how she found me, it appeared she took it upon herself to challenge me alone. Your Phoenix, your hope, came here to bargain for her own life-"

"You liar," Ron muttered. Neville's jaw only clenched. Whether the circumstances were true or false, it was undeniable that Wahde had been defeated, and almost certainly killed. That meant, however, that the Phoenix had chosen a new champion, and in the context of the prophecy, it was almost certain that either he or Evan would be next. She knew this. Why- did she not realize there was no escape? Was she trying to get out of here and tell us about his tactics or something? The finer points of predicting her strategy escaped him at the moment with so little information.

"Very well, if you do not believe me, I suppose I can have her explain it for us." He pointed his wand at the ground and an Inferius rose from it. "My servants relayed their one discovery of interest to me about six months ago. I suppose I never can say they did nothing for me." A twisted, mangled version of their friend's visage turned to face them as if seeing them for the first time. "Speak, impudent wretch. Your master commands it."

"I had no hope of victory... I wished only to... tell the rest of the world that... they had no hope..."

"You're all lucky I can get into what's left of her mind," Hermione muttered after a moment. Her words sounded inside his own.

She gave her life to find out how Voldemort would behave in single combat against someone who claimed to be a fated hero, and against someone powerful. She knew your destiny was greater than her own, and she found this one way of giving you an edge- I can only speculate as to how he got one, except for what he revealed himself- he has a Time Turner, a theoretical enchanted clock that can relocate the current self to an earlier point in time.

He really would have preferred for none of the horror he felt to show on his face. The enemy seemed to be amusing himself by sending the Inferius against Ron and Malfoy. He could raise any number of those, powerful as they come- he could even raise Dumbledore if he felt like it. He made them give him a time travel device for no reason other than because the only person he ever trusted to fight for him is another copy of himself, and the only advantage he could give himself is to protect himself from threats he could not have possibly imagined; anything we could have brought to the scrap, he was confident he could defeat it before or after we revealed it.

I'm certain of that, Neville. The only thing about which I have greater certainty is that you will defeat him.

It all seemed like some sort of joke. Before his very eyes, his two other allies were managing to fight off Wahde, even with all the incredible magical power she had in life, and the cursed abilities Voldemort had bestowed upon her in death. With one using the mind arts and the other using the Imperius, they impressed even the master of the undead as they released her from the suffering he had imposed. Without a soul remaining, her mind and will were crushed by the simultaneous effort, and that was all that was left to her. The dark wizard cast a few diagnostic spells and muttered to himself.

I need you to understand this. Everything I have been saying to you about magic is true. To a great degree, understanding magical theory governs our ability to cast spells, but those are only specific uses of magic, each one of them derived from folk magic, which itself is an expression of accidental magic. Neville, I thought that I would find out what basically made magic worked, and I thought that I would impress everyone with my brilliance, and perhaps it's a manner of a reward and a punishment at the same time that I get to tell you enough for you to make sense of it all. After all these years I have never been more confident than now when I say I believe in magic, and you are the one who will defeat Dark Lord, precisely as it says in the prophecy.

I need some time.

It was all that he told her, and all, evidently, she needed to jump into action. Moving against the enemy without her friend, she seemed even less worried than she had been before, however that was even possible. If he could have a fraction of her certainty, he would do anything for it. It was almost like years ago, when the two of them ran off to Paris looking for Nicholas Flamel, and she was practically dragging him along, and he was having to trust her every step of the way. Something, something apart from the million things that were obvious, had to have gone wrong for her to be counting on him. At the same time, though, as long as he trusted her, and as long as he remembered enough about the painful responsibility of delegation, that meant he had to trust himself, or the prophecy, or some combination, or something else entirely.

His belief in magic was something he had given no conscious thought in his entire life, but had to serve as a stumbling block for some of the people just showing up to the magical world in their first year of Hogwarts. He had never even asked Hermione if she needed help with anything; in those days he was happy to ask her to explain topics they covered in class in case he forgot something. Silently, he wondered how right Voldemort had been in the idea that there was no explanation, no general case theory, if one had only to believe in it, to know that it existed in some form. Hating himself for taking so long in the midst of battle, he reminded himself that haste was waste, that he had asked for time, and his friend would give him as much as she could, whatever the cost might be.

It was not enough to believe that spells and incantations were related. Memorizing magical theory and applying it as he had in class, only to forget it later and have to work harder to train it in was not what was meant by belief. Nothing half so intellectual had gotten him through his worst fights, and he knew that it was the same for everyone who had ever been pressed. Was that it? Was it only now, when he knew he had tried as hard as he could and pushed his meager intellect to the limit, and when he knew that his friends had worked to incalculably greater lengths, that it was not a matter of working harder, not a matter of being smart enough in the first place? Were all their efforts wasted, or did they lead them, did they lead him, to at last realize what he needed to understand magic?

In all my life, there was always a glimmer of doubt. Everything I did, I only did because I felt like I had to, whether or not I could. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe it was some kind of courage. It doesn't matter now.

Out of his wand, which he was still holding, there was an iridescent stream of sparks, and he tried to shut it off as a gut reaction, but he realized quickly that it was purposeful, if not his own purpose. He realized he had drawn the attention of his enemy, after he apparently tired or torturing Evan for attempting to stand against him once more. He's left us alive so far so that we would show him what it is we brought here to kill him. He never imagined we'd show up without any kind of weapon. It never entered his mind we would just trust each other. Neville could see that the dark wizard could understand what he was doing, or at least he had an idea.

"So, then, you thought to attack me with some undiscovered means. I expected as much. The amount that I do not know about magic, however, can be represented by islands of ignorance to be swallowed up by a rising sea."

"I don't think so," he said. "I think you actually know less about magic than you realize. You've said described magic as a set of unrelated phenomena, when that's not really what it is. I don't think you know this, but my parents once tried to integrate Squibs into magical society by getting them jobs making potions, or working on brooms, and basically, some things they could do, but some things they couldn't, and it's basically because they have something like a developmental disorder."

"Pure bloods have understood this for centuries," Malfoy said.

"Yes, and by having to contradict you on every possible grounds, their opponents only made fools of themselves. They weren't willing to accept that you were right about anything because they wanted a justification for not communicating with you. That was how they decided that you spent your whole childhoods convincing yourselves of lies." He looked around. "It's something I absorbed in the Hufflepuff-"

"What are you doing?" Voldemort demanded, seeing the iridescent sparks coming out of his want take shape. It was hard to see at first, like stars coming into view as the sun set, as the constellations became clearer, but the pattern was rather avian. "What is that?"

"I think it's a phoenix," he said after a moment. "I'm not exactly sure. It's not entirely conscious. He looked over at Mafloy and Ron. "Maybe I ought to just be glad that my hair didn't change color-"

"If this glowing apparition is the locus of your hope, then I have less to fear than I could have possibly imagined," the enemy said, his voice unchanged. Though his words were confident, it was clear enough he had no desire to see what the conjured bird would do. It was a long-held observation in the study of Transfiguration that for some reason, birds and snakes were the easiest to conjure from nothing, or rather, nonbeing, the place where vanished objects went. No one realized, however, why specifically those animals were the exception to the general rule.

He waved his wand at the strange bird and he could for a moment hear the voice of Luna Lovegood. Was it what he wanted the most? Did she do it herself, somehow? All she told him was that it would be all right, but perhaps that was all he needed to know. It seemed no one else understood what exactly was going on, but he could barely put any of it into words himself. Evan was the only one looking away. Even he turned, however, when iridescent fire spread around him.

"What is this?" Vodlemort asked, half amused. He's still plenty confident in his time thing- might be because I've still got no idea how to counter it. He raised his wand. "Avada Kedavra." The flash came before his allies could have predicted it, but the flames rose and the spellfire was nowhere to be seen. "Fascinating. The self-acclaimed Heir of Slytherin grows less impressive by the moment."

"Well, if you wait around long enough, he'll still be alive, and you won't be able to say that about yourself."

Whether or not anyone believed him, it was not out of a vain hope that he said as much; he knew it to be true.

"Very well. Perhaps it is time, then, that I reveal the reason I have allowed you to live thus far. I had hoped to see if there was any truth to the myths of this Phoenix, and it appears that I should have spared the previous host, if now I face the true master of the power that it bestows." He frowned, but his frown faded. "I have no particular shame in my assessment that your power is likely greater than what the Elder Wand could have afforded, had I ever managed to find it." Something like a gold watch came from his sleeve to his hand. "I have, however, a far greater power than even that."

Neville could not have said whether it was better to pretend to be ignorant about the effects of the Time Turner. Instead he started a spell, he started it knowing that it would be completed, and that the effect would be exactly what he believed. The workings of magic were clear to him in his mind in ways that he hoped to one day explain to Hermione, if she could stand to listen to him talk about magic.

"Then, go ahead and tell us about it, if you must," he said. "You're a dead man, Voldemort. Nothing you say is going to change that."