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Chapter Forty: Wings Vaster Than The Earth

Harry wasn't entirely sure what he was doing as he sent his voice spiraling upward, other than trying to draw Acies's attention—or the attention of the dragon that had once been Acies. He must remember to make that distinction, he thought. She had said once that she wanted him to remember her when there was nothing human left in her, and this was the case now. She did not remember him. Essentially, Acies had died on that tower above the Hogwarts battlefield on Midsummer Day.

But his song had awakened her, and dragons were called the Singers. He sent his voice arching upward, reaching, hoping.

She barreled down towards him, and what came out of her mouth in answer was not song but flame.

Harry had been thinking it might be. He'd had his magic hovering around him, and now he raised it and whipped it forward, intoning Protego in his head and imagining a protective shield surrounding all those people gathered in the alley. It helped that it was a physically confined space, and that he didn't have to try to shield many people spread out over a wide area.

The fire, that piercing beam of concentrated white light, hit the shield and splattered against it. Harry could feel the dragon's devouring magic working against his own, a mindless beast, striving to eat the shield, and then fall through it and eat the people beyond. Harry breathed sharply, letting the breaths come between breaks in his singing, which he still hoped might calm her, and sent his strength reeling into the shield in slaps at the same time. Already, the effort was pulling at his magical core. Either he was more exhausted than he'd thought or the dragon's magic was more powerful than he'd thought. He believed it was the latter.

And he knew he didn't have long before the fire either ate through or some idiot drew his wand and cast a curse in his panic—which would weaken the shield, coming from behind as it did. The only blessing right now was that the dragon was close enough that her flame was a narrow lance, which only spread out as it neared the target; otherwise, it would have consumed the buildings all along the alley in flame. And as it trembled around the Shield Charm, sliding further and further in sheets of white sun-heat, Harry knew it wouldn't be long before that happened.

He could think of only one thing he could do, and it would be tricky.

But then, Harry thought as he sang, if there was one thing someone might name him by this point in his life, it was an expert in tricky situations.

He threw most of his strength into the shield, recklessly draining his magical core, long enough to insure that those behind it would be safe for at least another few moments. Then he looked up at the dragon, gave himself only a moment to judge distance and speed and height—he'd played Quidditch, he knew how to do this, and the dragon was close—and Apparated himself onto her back.

He landed on simmering scale with a thump that made blisters rise on his palm and his legs ache and burn, and the dragon reared back, her fire spraying into the air, and screamed.


Falco circled in the air, staring. He had attended the ceremony that marked the end of the rebellion in his sea eagle form, watching with angry eyes as Harry accepted the Minister's terms and then signed the scroll. Others didn't know or care about the changes they were inflicting on the wizarding world, but at least they had either fought against it or mindlessly followed their leaders into what they thought was a better day. They had not, as Harry had, possessed immense magic that could change the balance of the world and then not paid attention to what they were doing.

And then the dragon appeared. Falco himself was still debating what he should do—he had never faced a British Red-Gold before, and they had been dead long before his time—when Harry Apparated himself out from under the shield.

The dragon reacted at once to the presence and the weight on her back, slight though it was, confirming all the rumors Falco had ever heard about the sensitivity of scales along that region of the neck. She swung her head up and turned and tried to bite the new threat, her flame dying out from between her teeth so that she didn't singe one of the few parts on her body vulnerable to fire. But Harry had chosen a good position, just behind the neck, and she couldn't reach him with her teeth.

She began hovering in midair, with awkward beats of her wings, one clawed talon rising to pluck him off.

Falco stared, and felt something like a shard of envy pierce his heart when he saw what Harry did next. To be that young again, and that reckless.


Harry felt as if he knelt on sand in the middle of summer noontime. The scales shimmered beneath his hand, the color of blood in sunlight, incredibly beautiful, but Merlin, they hurt, blisters were already forming and bursting all along his palm, and he could feel his clothes beginning to smolder.

There was one thing that might shield him. He concentrated on the idea of what would happen if Acies should roast all these people beneath him simply because she'd been drawn by his song, how monstrously unjust that was, and how he would have more deaths on his conscience, because of that, because it was always his fault when something like that happened.

With a roar, his own phoenix fire rose and spread out through his skin. Harry blinked at the world through a sheening of blue flame, and felt the burning in his legs and hand stop. Then he opened his mouth, took a deep breath that smelled of smoke and brimstone, and began to sing again.

He hoped the Shield Charm had held long enough, though in his heart of hearts he thought he would know if Snape and Draco had died. He hoped the white fire sliding down it had not reached the roofs of buildings on either side of the alley, which they would turn into torches. He hoped many things, but he kicked them all out of his mind, sinking them into the Occlumency pools, and concentrated on the song.

This time, Harry was remembering those images that Fawkes had given him as he danced among the clouds on Midwinter night nearly a year ago, the moonlight and starlight and sunlight and all the legends that came with them. He had given Harry the gift of his voice, and the gift of his fire, and, once, the gift of his tears, which Harry had spent on Evan Rosier. But he had given him something more than that. He had died as a sacrifice.

And what came through him was Light.

Harry sang the song of morning, and he reached out and touched the wild vibrations of the dragon's mind, which was tuned to the song of the Dark. Dragons were the prime Dark creatures in at least one sense. They were all wildness, all will. They did as they liked and cared for nothing that held them back. Harry had seen that when he peered into the minds of the three dragons at the Triwizard Tournament. And they had all been lesser dragons, smaller cousins of the British Red-Gold breed.

She was Wildness.

Harry felt his song meet a greater one, brooding in the dragon's mind for centuries with no one else to unleash it. It sang in every beat of her wings, in every turn of her talons, in every blast of her fire. It did not want to listen to him, and it did not want to turn back; in fact, the very fact that there was a Light singer abroad in the world this morning had infuriated it, and had given it the strength to break free of the sleeping spells that Calibrid cast on it. It had come to find him because it could not bear to see Harry exist, singing his little songs of tameness and enslavement.

Those words of hatred were the Dark song's lyrics, and they appeared in Harry's head as if branded there. For a moment, the heat of the dragon's scales crept back into his consciousness, and he knew that he would burn if he thought too much about it.

He shook his head and threw himself into the song again, forcing his way forward through shields of blue, telling the Dark song in wordless warbles that it had made a mistake.

The song uttered a sneering screech and insisted that it had not.

But you did, said Harry, with a windy phrase that he thought Fawkes had intoned that night, dancing between the dark clouds. You think I am a Light wizard with the voice of a phoenix. But I am not. And he thought at his hand Manus flagrans!

The jolt of alien heat that he sent up through Acies with the Burning Touch Curse did not hurt her, but it was a Dark spell, and one that most Light wizards would not use. Harry felt the astonished silence of a starry gulf spread around him. The Dark song, reeling, did not know what to think.

Harry tried to convey that as best he could. The phoenix's voice was not the best place for a discovery of the Darkness within oneself.

But there might be a place, the place where Dark wildness and Light respect for free will met. They were not so different in those aspects, Light and Dark. But the Light cared more about restraining itself for the sake of others, while the Dark would take other wills captive so that they wouldn't interfere with its own—and thus they produced the aspects of Light tameness and Dark compulsion.

Harry was more Light in that aspect, and he could not deny it, but he had known rage. That night when Bellatrix had cut his hand off, he had come near to joining the wild Dark that roared between the stars, simply because his emotions and his magic had both spiraled out of control. The Dark song in the dragon's mind caught a snatch of that and bayed like an eager hound, demanding to know more of it.

Harry took a deep breath, to fuel the music that he would need to tell this, and then plunged straight into song and out through the other side.


Falco could not believe that Harry had not killed the dragon yet. He must know that even a British Red-Gold likely would not survive a jolt of magic to the heart. And he was closer to her heart now than he would have been on the ground. And if he did not know dragon anatomy well enough for that trick, then he could have drunk her power and made her unable to fly or breathe fire, both of which dragons relied on their innate magic for.

Instead, it was as if he were communing with her, talking with her the way that he would have an intelligent being, and trying to argue her out of attacking those common wizards who waited below, their necks craned up, staring at the wheeling dragon and the blue-glowing boy on her back.

Falco darted a quick glance at them, the ordinary ones. They were well; the flame had gone away before it could dent the Shield Charm, though a moment more and someone might have been wounded. But they weren't getting under shelter. Falco uttered a screech of disgust. Had the very sight frozen them? Sometimes he despaired of the ability of people to protect themselves. This was yet another reason that he hadn't Declared. A Dark Lord or Light Lord was expected to shelter those who followed him, and Falco would rather they learned to protect themselves.

His gaze went back to Harry as the song changed. Falco frowned slightly. He had spent a year among phoenixes once, back when his magic was still mostly Light, back when he had hoped that his Animagus form would be a phoenix. And he knew that their voices didn't sound like that.

Determined to discover what dangerous mistake Harry was planning on making this time, he canted his wings and swept upward, trailing behind the dragon so that she wouldn't decide to roast him and scoop him up for a meal with her talons. Wizards had died in stupider ways, facing a British Red-Gold.


Harry, with a grimace, gripped some of the careful not-thinking he had grown to prevent these memories from ambushing him and ripped. They came flooding back into his mind as if they had happened yesterday, and the Dark song did not see them, but heard them through his voice.

Harry sang the despair he had felt as he writhed with helplessness and watched the boy Greyback and Whitecheek had killed die in front of him. They had died in the end, and one could argue that they had paid for their crime with their lives, but that hardly mattered to the exposed, raw memory. Harry should have been able to protect him—he was still the strongest wizard there, before Voldemort's resurrection ritual—and he had not.

And I did not Kieran, and I did not Claudia. I make empty promises and I do not keep them. Helplessness was a wine he had forgotten how much he hated, a cold poison sliding down his throat. If I could use a Time-Turner to go back in time and prevent Gloriana from killing Claudia, Loki from killing Kieran, and Whitecheek and Greyback from killing him, then I would.

The Dark song howled eagerly, and demanded more.

Harry gave it the pain and the suffering of having his wrist cut off, the impressions he'd fallen through, down into some neverending ocean of black and red. He had thought, at the time, that he would never stop falling. Sharp teeth bit his left wrist, and fire clawed at it, and he forced his eyes open to see that it was bleeding, the blood sizzling into steam on contact with the dragon's scales.

More, hissed the Dark song.

Harry gave it the rage he had felt when fighting Voldemort. And the Dark song sighed and crooned and hissed at him.

Harry was glad his eyes were open. He saw the moment when the dragon, freed as if from the necessity of communing with him, turned her head back down and eyed the streets of gaping, screaming Muggles beneath her. Secure in the knowledge that she bore a Dark singer and not a Light on her back, she could get on with the hunger clamoring in her belly.

Harry tilted his head back, and sang joy, and sang Light, and snagged the dragon's attention into furious roaring again.


He cannot alter like that. He cannot move between Dark and Light like that.

It wasn't possible, as Falco well knew. He had once studied the arts that he thought would permit him to move between the allegiances that easily, and song was one of them. Why should it not be? It meant different things to each listener, and yet it was lauded as a universal language. And he had come to the conclusion, sadly, that the Dark and Light knew all about song, and the other ways of escaping their attention and not Declaring, and he could not fool them that way.

So he had learned to think the thoughts that must be thought, courting first one and then the other until he knew the paths and the secrets of both well enough that he could flit seamlessly into and out of them, tempting both with the knowledge that his Declaration might be right around the corner.

And now Harry was moving between them in such a crude way, throwing himself from rage to joy.

Falco shook his head from side to side, an unnatural gesture for a sea eagle, but perfect for the negation he wanted to express, and heard expressed, as well, in the dragon's roar. The Dark is not so easily fooled. She knows what he is now, and she will pull him off in a moment. The dragon had already pulled up to hover again.


Harry poured all the intensity and all the joy of the moment of Draco's arrival at Woodhouse into his voice. This was what he was, damn it. The Dark song did not get to say that he was only Dark, only wild and war-like. He might be more wild than he was at peace, but those moments of happiness were part of his life, too.

The Dark song rolled back to him and stabbed him with chords made of his own memories, showing him all the despair and guilt and hatred that he had admitted to, and asked him whether most of his life had not been suffering. Even this settling of the rebellion had come from the desire to take vengeance, hadn't it? He hadn't settled the grief about Kieran in his soul, and that had driven him to take extreme measures when it came to claiming justice for Claudia. He was not grieving; he was raging, and trying to destroy her murderer, and those were things that someone Dark, someone obsessed with revenge, would do.

Harry told it about the moment when Draco had appeared in his bedroom at Woodhouse, the flooding joy and shock and relief when he had realized what this meant, the hesitancy he had had in accepting the offer until he realized that Draco's long absence had come from the need to think this over, and how no kiss had ever tasted so good as the one they shared then. Draco had followed his own heart, his own choice, his own goal, his own will. That was what Harry wanted for everyone, that kind of courage. It was the hardest thing to do—or perhaps the second hardest, with the only thing more difficult than that being restraining one's own will and making sure one did not step on others. But that was Harry's task as vates. Draco's task in that short period of time had been to make sure he knew what he really wanted, and he did.

Harry had never loved Draco so much as he did in that moment. He would never understand why weakness of will might draw someone else to a partner. Harry loved and admired and needed strength.

The Dark song coiled and lashed about him, confused. Harry heard it hissing steadily in his ear, and then he felt the scrape of talons on his head as the dragon tried to pluck him from her back once more.

Harry sang the memory of the Walpurgis Night when Voldemort had tried to enslave the wild Dark, and he had helped it. He gave the Dark song that was Acies's mind the image of that, the freedom, the utter submission he'd done to the Dark—riding it, not trying to chain it or confine it—let her mind fall headlong into that, and then ripped the image into something else.

He was high in the air above Britain, on Midwinter night, his heart aching as he watched the Light grip and fight the wild Dark, forcing it back. Fawkes had died, an immortal creature who should have burned and come back to life again and again. That immortality laid down, freely given, had been enough to open a gate and bring the gryphon through. The Dark song recoiled, screaming.

Harry threw it into the Chamber of Secrets, himself kneeling on the floor, his mind in shreds after Sylarana's abrupt death, and the silent self swallowing the bit of Tom Riddle that he'd left in the diary, swallowing his magic, and then coming over to show pictures to Harry. He had tried to reason that he did not hate his family, that he had no reason to hate his family, and the silent self had replied with implacable truth, implacable fury. The Dark song came back to him, purring and growing fat on the loathing Harry had felt for his parents and brother.

And then they were in the Owlery on the day that Harry had broken free of the phoenix web, and Harry sent notes like arrows to sting and scratch the Dark song, and show it how he had come free of that web in the moment at spring equinox when Light and Dark were balanced. Triumph, gentle and fierce, rose in him, and once more the dragon screamed in confusion. She knew no gentle triumph. From the moment dragons broke the egg, all life was a war, an endless battle to send their wills forth and not have them balked by others. The shell was the first enemy, and then the hatchlings that would devour their siblings in the nest if they could. She did not understand how a victory could be for the self and not involve hurt to someone else.

Harry twisted again, and showed her a victory that had done harm, when he killed for the first time. Rodolphus Lestrange's body had carried a piece of Voldemort, once imprisoned in a locket that Sirius wore and Regulus stole, and Harry had known it was necessary to kill him. But he had been thirteen, and exhausted from Sirius's death, and the revelation of him being the one to deflect Voldemort's Killing Curse and not Connor, and the freeing of the Dementors. He had just wanted it all to stop. That kind of dizzy exhaustion that lashed out because it didn't know what else to do was familiar to the Dark song, and it crept back, suspiciously, singing a low chorus at him to confirm what he was.

And then it understood, and Harry had no need of the violent alteration between memories. It grasped him, it understood him, as both Dark and Light, dragon-phoenix, human-Singer. It had never known something like him in the world before, just as the dragon knew nothing else like her. It wrapped itself around him and clung, as one comrade-in-arms to another, hissing and purring. Harry took a deep breath, feeling his throat burn, and murmured reassurances, all the while thinking of what he could possibly do with a British Red-Gold. There was no way she could come back with him to Hogwarts, of course. She would burn down the Forbidden Forest and devour everything that lived within it in a week.

The Dark song cried to him again, the song of something swimming alone in the deep gulf between the stars. Lonely. So lonely, it said, in a series of repeating roundels. It had gone to the Isle of Man because it had sensed the presence of the skeleton that the Opallines had made into Gollrish Y Thie, and it had thought it might find another of its kind there. But then it had not, and the dragon grew maddened and breathed her fire out.

Harry swallowed. He knew one way to change that, to change things, but he had no way of knowing if the Dark song, and the dragon herself, would accept it. He could only ask.

He conjured an image in his head, and let it pour through his voice. The image was small, and hopped, and leaped, and flapped, and was not unlike the small rushing things that Woodhouse thought of all animals not part of itself as. He gave the dragon the image of hatchlings, hatchlings of her own blood, and wondered if she would accept that.

The dragon let out a roar that cascaded through a dozen harmonies, and made Harry's ears bleed and his eyes burn, and let him know that hatchlings of her own blood would be more than welcome; they were needed, necessary. She wanted to mate, wanted to lay, but she could not find a mate of her own kind anywhere in the world.

Harry sang understanding, peace, compromise. She would not find a mate of her own kind anywhere in the world. But before her building rage and despair could overwhelm her, he presented her with the image of the Hebridean Blacks on their isles. They lived near the cold, deep sea, where much food drifted and swam. They had males who had bellowed back to the phoenix song even as she had, and had been angered by the presence of a Light singer in the world. They were not her own kind, but perhaps they were close? Perhaps she would go there, and accept a mate, and produce hatchlings of her own, hatchlings of mingled blood?

The dragon thought about that, and then she turned her wings to the north.

Harry bent over her scales, still protected by phoenix fire that he kept from dying with sheer will, and breathed.


Falco followed the dragon on wide wings of his own, and wondered, in his heart of hearts, what this all meant.

There was no doubt in his mind that Harry needed to Declare. Of course he did. And then he went and alternated between Dark and Light as if he needed not to, and Falco did not see how he could do that and expect to get away with it. The Dark and the Light were amused with him right now, perhaps, and knew that he was so young that his bounding between them was no more than the gamboling of a spring lamb. But they would catch on, and they would not be amused, and they would demand that he choose one side or the other, and Harry would not be ready.

And he had used this alternating in a very dangerous manner, to tame a dragon who might have destroyed a city—who had appeared in front of very many Muggles, all of whom would have to be Obliviated. The sight of a dragon was sometimes blamed for causing the persecution of witches and wizards that had resulted in the separation of the magical world and the mundane one. Of all the sights in the magical world, the Muggles least knew how to cope with a dragon, how to accept what it would mean for them if creatures mightier than they were existed.

This was no game, this was no joke, and yet it had been treated as if it were a game and a joke. Harry had only won by a gamble that either Light or Dark—or his magic, stretched thin as it was—might have decided to put an end to at any time. This could not be allowed to continue, with the wizarding world and the balance Falco lived to preserve teetering on the edge of risk.

Falco made his choice. Harry valued free will more, and that put him closer to Light. And he carried a phoenix's voice in his body, and that meant that he actually carried a shard of the Light in his throat.

And despite Falco's efforts to help Tom, he was not getting better.

Therefore, Harry himself must be made to Declare for Light, and Falco himself would have to take the position of Dark Lord. He mourned it, but to keep the balance, sacrifices were sometimes necessary, and he would demand them of himself, too.

He thought he heard thunder rolling around him for a moment, and felt a general heaviness in the air, but then it was gone, and he concluded it must have been a manifestation of wild magic stirred up by the dragon. He shrugged his wings and continued following Harry and the British Red-Gold, wondering where Harry would finally set her down.


Harry was shivering with effort by the time the Hebrides finally came into view. That was not long as the dragon flew—and this dragon flew enormously fast and, at last, high, so that there was less chance of Muggles seeing her—but he had to fight to keep singing, to protect himself from her heat with his own flames, and to ignore the cold of the wind that whipped past him and wasn't impressed with the phoenix fire. Then his lungs started laboring because they were thousands of feet in the air, and Harry gave up counting the minutes or worrying about Muggles seeing them. He would sing to her and keep her calm enough to fix on the idea of a mate, instead.

The dragon slanted down, and Harry saw the isles appear below, out of the leaping sea. He saw Dragon-Keepers running in circles, and smiled wanly. Those would be the members of the MacFusty clan, the wizards native to the Hebrides, who tended their dragons and kept them from getting out of control. Of course, right now the Blacks were dangerously close to getting out of control, rearing and spreading their wings and flaunting themselves if they were male, or crouching low over their nests and snarling if they were female.

Acies wheeled once, and then dived straight down. A moment later, a Hebridean Black shook off the wizards trying to calm him as if they were nothing and rose to meet her. Acies spread her wings wide and roared, fanning flame between them, and he roared back, not seeming at all intimidated by her strange color or even stranger size.

Harry looked about for a moment, but he could see no convenient way for him to simply leap off, and he certainly didn't wait to stay on Acies's back during her mating. He lowered his gaze, fixed on a tiny rock among the lashing waves, and Apparated to it just as the Hebridean Black breathed, bathing Acies's talons in flames that only seemed to tickle her.

He appeared on the rock, and staggered, struggling to keep his balance on the water-slicked stone. He tried to grip with his hand, and then snatched it away again. The blisters were so painful that he'd be surprised if he were able to hold a quill for the next few days.

Good thing that I already signed that scroll with Scrimgeour, he thought, and then cast a Sticking Charm on his feet so that he would stay still and looked up.

His breath caught. The dragons were dancing above him, displaying for each other, their voices deep and booming music that made the stone beneath his feet vibrate. As Harry let his song and his flame die at last, he saw Acies rake her intended's back with fire. The Hebridean Black rolled and bit to put the flames out, and scratched her on her right foreleg. Blood drizzled into the ocean water, and Acies flew higher and spread her wings to show off their colors.

"Vates?"

Startled, Harry looked up. An older wizard was standing on a rock not far from him, little more than a stepping stone, his wand in his hand and a smile on his face. He wore thicker robes than Harry was accustomed to seeing, and his gray eyes were surrounded by lines from squinting into sun and rain. He had long, wild white hair that reminded Harry a bit of Moody's.

"My name's Gerald MacFusty," he said. "I wrote to Headmistress McGonagall at Hogwarts when the British Red-Gold woke and left us." He glanced up for a moment, as though he didn't know how not to watch the mating dragons, and then he shook his head and looked back at Harry. "I have long experience working with dragons," he said gently, "and know how to offer some healing for burns." He nodded to Harry's hand, and, Harry realized, his legs. He had taken some burns before the phoenix fire managed to protect him. "Hold out your hand."

Harry gratefully did just that. As the pain in his hand eased, he found his gaze going back to the dragons. "They're wonderful, aren't they?" he asked.

"Oh, they are that." Gerald murmured an incantation Harry wasn't familiar with, and the dry pain in his legs eased. "We wish more people remembered that, both how beautiful and how dangerous they are." He leaned across the water between the rocks then and gripped Harry on the shoulder. Harry looked back into his face.

"Thank you for not killing her," Gerald said softly. "We feared you would have to, when she left."

"So did I," said Harry. "But she was bound with a sleeping spell, and then—well, I woke her up with my music today. I won't spread my voice around the Isles like that again without thinking of the consequences," he added.

"We know, lad." Gerald nodded to his feet. "Unstick them, then take my hand, and I'll make sure that you get some tea and something to eat before you have to go back south."

Harry murmured Finite Incantatem, and then heard Acies roar again. He looked up, shading his eyes with his hand, to see the dragons chasing each other, twining around each other in a spiral dance straight into the heart of the sun. A deep contentment spread through him.

She's still alive. She's still free. Sometimes, I can keep my promises.