Cliffhanger warning.
Chapter Sixty-Five: An Island In the Seas of Time
It was pain.
Adalrico had thought he would be able to explain pain if someone asked him to. It was the curve of the blade, the touch of the poison, the cool-eyed gaze that evaluated when the acid had done enough. But now he knew he had only truly known pain through one end. His had been the hand that inflicted.
Now it was the hand that felt.
They had his hand in something that was eating his fingers away. The liquid swirled only a small amount as his hand flopped like a fish, but the metal band around his wrist held it there so it could not get away, and the liquid ate steadily, cleaning flesh from bone, tearing it open with tiny hooked teeth.
And beneath the skin and the meat and the bone, which it cracked and swallowed the marrow from, it fed on his magic.
Adalrico knew he would come forth from this time weakened. There was no way that he could not. But he wanted to know if he would come forth from it at all, if he would see his wife and his daughters again. The steady burn of the scar on his left arm, which the Unspeakables had set blazing like a beacon, said that Harry would come for him, and that, yes, he would walk in the sunlight again.
But the rational part of him, which still existed somewhere beyond all the screaming and all the pain, whispered that the Unspeakables wanted Harry to come. Adalrico was a prize; they could study his Dark Mark, and take his magic to guide their experiments. But Harry was a greater source of power still, and strange in ways that Adalrico only barely understood when Thomas tried to explain them, marked by the scar on his forehead. They would want him, could use him, more.
And Adalrico's capture was drawing him ahead, down and down into the darkness and the madness.
That was what he thought before the pain became all his world.
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Harry halted and lifted his head. They were in the corridor that led to the Department of Mysteries. They had come down from the lifts, and entered a hallway made of stone that looked like any other stone in the Ministry. But the soft, subtle vibrations of magic around them told Harry the truth.
He felt a sting of admiration through his fury. No wonder the Stone escaped for so long. This part of the Ministry isn't in the same world as the rest.
He could feel it, the shifting sideways that occurred between one step and the next, the short passage that the Stone had constructed—or caused to be constructed, since Harry was not sure it could grow hands—and used to join the Ministry and another, very similar place across the boundary. Harry saw the rest of them start as they felt it. Hawthorn and Snape, Draco and Narcissa, Elfrida and Millicent, Moody and Tonks, and the ten Aurors Rufus had been able to give him on such short notice, all knew the moment they stepped between, but they did not know what it meant.
"Be careful," Harry said quietly to them. "Magic may not act here as we're used to."
Moody snorted at him, and his magical eye rolled around his head. Harry wondered if it was his imagination that it went further and rolled faster than normal. "And you think we needed a warning from you to figure that out, boy?"
Harry smiled a bit, reassured. Then the reassurance dropped away, and his rage flooded back. He saw Snape lean away from him with a slight flinch, pressing one hand to his forehead, and Draco lean nearer, sniffing rapturously. The others expressed various signs of discomfort.
"The Stone does expect us," he said quietly. "Stay as close to me as you can. If I have to shield you, I won't have time to spread it out."
Not that they could help but stay close to him in the narrow corridor, Harry thought, as they made their way towards the black door at the far end. But beyond this hall, he knew they would find any number of odd rooms, and some of them would be large enough for the Stone to hit them from several directions at once.
He was alert. That was the only reason he heard them.
Insects streamed up the corridor, glinting silver as spiderweb in the dim light. Harry threw up his hands, and his first shield rose. But he was looking for signs of the curses Moody had taught him as they came, and saw the telltale red tinge in the same moment that Moody roared his warning.
"They'll make the shield explode, boy! Down!"
Harry dropped his shield and fell to one knee, using the rest of his magic to press his allies flat and to reach out and slap the insects away with an invisible hand of pure force. Some of them careened away, spinning into the walls with a series of angry clicks and buzzes. Most of them, though, kept coming as though the invisible hand didn't exist, their legs spreading and their jaws opening.
Harry had no idea what they would do if they touched his allies, and he had no intention of finding out, either. Someone whom he loved was already dying for him, hurting for him. He imagined the insects stinging Draco and Snape, or biting them, and a slow, burning power heaved itself up his throat.
It was familiar, but last time it had risen so quickly that Harry had had no time to study it. Now he did, as it cracked red wings from the shelter of his back and spread out through his eyes and ears and nose.
Go, he willed, thinking the word so loudly he would not be surprised if that gave Snape a headache, too. Do not be.
And they were not, the insects winking out of existence the way that Harry had made Greyback wink out of existence when he tried to attack Draco. Harry rose to his feet in the ensuing silence and nodded back to Moody, the only one with an eye in position to see him.
"We can proceed," he said. "They're gone."
"They'll have others," Moody predicted, but he stood, with a long, slow glance that Harry didn't have time for. If the old Auror wanted to be afraid of him, then he could. Harry was going to rescue Adalrico. He strode forward, and Draco and Snape and Millicent, pressing at his shoulder, were anxious to follow.
Nothing else attacked them in the corridor. Harry touched the black door, and felt the throbbing magic beyond. He had his doubts, suddenly, about how accurate the maps of the Department of Mysteries Scrimgeour had given them would prove.
He took a deep breath, gave a grim smile as he remembered the Minister's joke of "holding down the line"—in reality, preparing the rest of the Ministry for the moment when the worst might happen and Harry lost to the Stone—and then pushed the door open.
As it happened, the maps were accurate. In front of them was a room with a polished blue floor, so deep that Harry very nearly did think he was stepping into a pool. Candles flickered and sparked on the walls, blue as the ocean. Black doors lined the circular walls, and Harry thought that if he counted, there would probably be twelve of them.
"Behind me," he said, the only warning he would give. His magical senses were extended around him like a lynx's whiskers, but he could feel nothing lying in wait. Of course, that only made him warier, and certain there were traps somewhere beyond his reach. He paced forward, and heard the others clinging close to his shoulders and heels. Millicent was the only one who might have passed him, and Harry put out his hand to hold her back. She took one look into his face and understood.
When the last of them was through, the black door shut. Harry held his breath, wondering if it would work as Scrimgeour had told him—
Yes. The room began to turn, faster and then faster, until Harry had the urge to close his eyes so he wouldn't vomit. He held still, though, and watched as the doors danced. What they were doing to Adalrico would be far worse. If his ally could bear that, then Harry could bear this.
The revolutions slowed and stopped at last. Harry strode towards the door directly in front of him and reached out with his magic, pushing at it. One push, one pull, and the door swayed gently open. Harry shoved it back against the wall of the blue room with his magic, still not wanting to touch the wood. The door thumped loosely, not the kind of thing it would do if there were anyone hiding behind it. Beyond, in that room, Harry could see nothing but darkness.
Well. He could also hear something—whispers. And an invisible rope came coiling out of the room, grabbed him around the waist, and would have tugged him in if Harry hadn't braced his own strength and fought back. The magic retreated with a hiss. Harry let out his own breath and glanced over his shoulder.
"Do you know what this place is, Moody?" he whispered.
"That'll be the Death Room." Moody's magical eye was spinning like a top. "Nothing much in it but a veil, boy."
"A veil?" Harry turned and listened to the whispers again. Though it was hard to make them out, he was almost sure one of them was Sirius's voice, and another sounded like Sylarana's hiss, and he heard Fawkes's warble. He shuddered.
"A veil that leads to—some other place." Moody shook his head. "Nothing like the Stone in there, that I ever saw, and it's only a room for the dead." He watched Harry a moment, keenly, then spoke so sharply that Harry jumped. "Shut the door, boy!"
Harry realized he'd had one foot over the threshold. He tugged it back, took a deep breath, and pushed with his magic. It was hard. Something in him fought against the closing, lunging forward, thinking of the veil as a tattered curtain he could pass, to find peace and old friendship among the dead.
But it's the living who need you now. With an effort, and a loud click, he shut the door. He expected the room to begin revolving again, but it didn't, and Harry half-closed his eyes and touched the scar on his left arm.
It blazed, and now that he thought about it, Harry could feel a distinct pull coming from one of the doors on his right. He turned in that direction, and the others moved with him, obedient to his warning about the shields. Harry turned and gave them a quick smile.
"Whatever we find on the other side of that door, you have my gratitude for coming with me," he said.
Then he faced the wood, and felt Millicent's magic surge on one side of him, the mirror image of her father's, dark and heavy and strong as stone, and Draco's magic on his left, quick and lithe as a fox's.
His scar forced a drop of blood up through the skin.
Harry opened the door.
The room around him swooned. Harry tipped forward, and felt the others follow him, scrambling. Beneath them, green and silver blazed, and Harry's first, mad thought was that they were falling into the greatest Slytherin bedcover ever woven.
But no, he could make out cloudy shapes like trees, and thin threads of silver like streams, and then he realized that they stood on the edge of a great gray cliff, and then he felt the mind that heaved beneath him, and then he realized that the door had opened directly on top of the Stone.
And then the Stone seized him and wrenched him out of the world, out of his body, into the paths that lay on the other side of magic.
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Draco shouted as Harry vanished, but he had to face the enemies bearing down on them, dark birds with glittering metallic bodies and jeweled beaks. They hurtled out of the green-and-silver sky, and up from the gray cliff, coming from every direction and none; Draco's vision wouldn't stop spinning, as though his head had continued to fall, separate from the rest of his body.
He cast a curse, but heard a human scream of pain. Then talons made of diamond grazed his arm, and he flung himself in the direction of what he thought was the ground, clinging to the Stone. He felt it shift beneath him, and was reminded that he couldn't even trust what they stood on.
He closed his eyes and reached for the one gift that would avail him here, at least if the birds had minds. He leaped.
And he was within a cool, shallow puddle of thoughts, borne on heavy clanging bronze wings, aiming along a straight line between crooked, twisting mirrors, his beak open to rake across his mother's face.
He gained control and then crashed into another of the birds, bearing it away from Narcissa. He could see straight in this form, and he knew which direction was up and which was down, and he reoriented himself and spun away from the Stone, flapping his wings and crying. He could guide the others, if they only looked, but none of them could trust their eyes, and none of them could turn away from the battle; more birds were coming.
Draco dived through the bird's mind, looking for an answer. He refused to think there was a solution that his possession gift might not be able to discover. Yes, there was, and he would find it.
And there it was, as if his desire to find it had pulled it into being. In front of him, the puddle of the bird's mind boiled away, but connections led away from it, thin and strong as spiderweb, to the others' minds. The Stone could control one of them, and in so doing, control the flock, its awareness leaping between them all, like the Many hive. There was no central mind. It moved and changed as the Stone needed to change it.
Draco had never jumped so many minds so fast before.
Staring down the connections, an instant before he flung himself through them, he had the feeling that he had better learn.
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Harry landed in a twisted, oddly beautiful landscape. He crouched at an angle, holding his head up and setting his magic blazing furiously around him, to cleanse the air and steady the fluid in his ears so that he had at least a small sense of balance.
He stood in the middle of a black gravel path, the stones shifting softly under his feet as he moved them. They were cool to the touch of his flesh hand, burning coals to the touch of his silver one. Above him ran the gleaming underside of a silvery road, and around him on either side twisted gold and purple and more black and deep gray and palest white. He was in the middle of a mass of crazy catwalks, and the magic around him breathed deep tales of slumber, of Light power strong as that gathered at Midsummer and Dark magic strong as that gathered at Walpurgis.
"I am here."
Harry turned sharply. A blocky gray shape drifted in front of him, an illusion or representation of the Stone.
Harry didn't lash out with his absorbere gift, though he longed to do so. He knew the Stone was immune to it, to all magic. But it was becoming apparent that it also manipulated magic with consummate skill.
"I want Adalrico back," he said levelly. "Give him to me, and give him back intact, and maybe I won't destroy you."
"You're angry, aren't you?" The Stone sounded interested, as if he were a scientific curiosity to be studied. The illusion angled and drifted up, passing through Harry's head. He flinched, but felt nothing from it, no touch of cold or sharpness. It was simply there, and for the moment, it happened to be in the same place that his head was occupying.
"Of course I'm angry," said Harry, and pulled his magic tight as chains around him, ready to lash out the moment they found a target. "You knew that about me. You took one of my allies so that I would come here. Give him back."
His voice rattled several of the paths. The Stone responded in a tone of quiet amusement. "I knew that you would be furious, but not to this level." For a moment, it was silent, and Harry turned his head to watch the illusion. He half-wanted to ask where they were, but he knew, if he thought about it. They were in the paths he had briefly glimpsed last Midwinter, flying with the wild Dark, opening a gateway for the Light's gryphon through his body. These were the secrets so many Lords and Ladies had risked their lives to discover, the unconquered country into which they blended when their tasks were done or they couldn't withstand the call of Dark or Light any longer.
Even Harry could feel that call, nagging at the edge of his awareness, urging him to drop his barriers and embrace the magic that flowed around him. What could be better than being part of magic itself? He would have everything pleasant that he did now, and none of the trouble and vexations. He could stop making sacrifices. That was what he wanted, wasn't it? That was what he deserved, wasn't it?
Harry laughed to himself. Lily was a harder taskmaster than you are, and she taught me to deny pleasure, he told the paths, and they danced back from him like hurt deer.
"Yes," said the Stone suddenly. "You are caught outside of time now. And that means that I can finally find out where you stand in relation to time. I will discover all your secrets eventually, but this is the one I am most curious about." And it reached out and ripped him.
Harry screamed in pain, his arms rising to cover his head, his magic leaping out and falling back, defeated, from the Stone's absolute and utter protection against it.
But something else roared like an unleashed dragon, and this time the Stone was the one who screamed.
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Snape had closed his eyes immediately when he found his vision would not stop spinning. He had trained to blind-fighting in the Dark Lord's service, and at least the sounds the birds were making were fairly constant. He aimed his wand, and cast the Severing Curse, and heard wings and body separating and tumbling through the air, to land with an echoing crash. He did not dare open his eyes and gloat. He knelt down, to protect the person who lay nearest him—Millicent, he thought.
He did not dare think of Harry, either. He had to trust that Harry knew what he was doing, and would fight the Stone on the level, in the way, that none of them could. If he did not think that, then he might as well snap his wand and cast himself off the Stone's dizzying cliffs right then and there.
With his eyes shut and the confusion of sight cut off, though, he began to hear something else. It sounded like the throbbing engine of a Muggle car. It was in the rock beneath their feet—that was always beneath their feet, no matter what it looked like—and rising steadily to meet them.
Snape opened his Occlumency pools, shielding and shading and splitting his thoughts. He called up the rage that was brought only by the thought of Harry in danger, but he forced himself to think of something other than rescuing Harry while he did it. He spread his wandless magic out around them, winged and fanged and vicious, ready to act as a net and intercept what was rising from the Stone. He was the strongest of them but for Harry. It was his duty to protect the others.
He heard the birds' cries change suddenly, and nearly opened his eyes. Instead, though, he concentrated on the throbbing.
Near.
Nearer.
Nearer still.
And then the Stone tore open and tipped them down a chasm, and Snape spread his magic out like wings, unfurled and unleashed it, and commanded it: Hold.
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Harry did not understand what was happening. All around him was dazzling, white, shadowless brilliance, brighter than the brightest lightning, and it pierced his eyelids and showed him the changing and unchanging outline of the fingers he'd pressed over them. And the Stone screamed, and the dragon roared, and something caught him under the ankles and tipped him up to float in space.
The lightning died. Harry waited another few moments to open his eyes, though, certain he would be burned if he did.
When he saw again, he could only stare.
He floated in a new kind of dazzle, one that he thought had not banished but occluded the paths of Dark and Light. This was a white, scissor-shaped radiance, cradling him on one blade and the floating illusion of the Stone on the other. And spread out around him were coils.
Harry stared. One unfolded like honey rope from his forehead, and stretched behind him in a wide tunnel. When Harry turned his head, he could see the shape of a bird, frozen forever within it. Or were there many birds, hurrying back and forth between him and a distant point? Whichever one was true—and perhaps both were true at once—he needed no Thomas to tell him this was the representation of the link between him and Voldemort that the attack at Godric's Hollow had forged.
It was odd. He had imaged the tunnel as straight. Instead, it was angled, bent like an elbow. Almost Harry thought it missed something, some other angle that would have completed it and made it make sense, but he did not know what his own thoughts meant, and in any case other things soon snared his attention.
Under his feet drifted another honey rope, coiled in on itself. When Harry peered closely, he could see that running dogs marked it, and small, gray, shadowy figures that reminded him of Dementors.
The second prophecy that Trelawney made. It concerned Sirius's death, and my freeing of the Dementors.
Harry swallowed. He glanced back once more at the rope attached to his forehead—the first prophecy, the one that proclaimed the savior who would defeat the Dark Lord—and then turned to look for another. There should be one more, Trelawney's third riddling, the one Harry thought meant he would have to defeat two more Dark Lords.
And there it was, stretched all around him, lapping him about, draping the white scissor-blade, and joined and tangled with the first prophecy until Harry could see the bird's wings beating in it, too. He took a deep breath and shook his head, now having a good idea of the force that had roared and risen to defend him.
It had been Time itself. Harry was part of three prophecies at various points in his life, and prophecies were living creatures, capable of shifting, and two of them were still trying to happen. They would not have been pleased if the Stone had peeled back Time from around him. Harry was already caught in a maze of what had been and what would be. There was no place for an interfering Stone.
He started to chuckle, looking towards the illusion of the gray block again, which ached in bruise-colored ripples, and then his breath caught in his throat.
Beyond the Stone floated another rope, this one not honey-colored but dark green, shot through with glints of gold. On the coils, her eyes fixed on him, sat Death's black, slim hound shape.
A fourth prophecy was coming for him. And judging from the color, it was dark and Dark. Harry swallowed, and hoped fervently that it was the last one he would have to live through. He didn't fancy being the subject of three prophecies at once.
The last one I will have to live through. Is it so? Does that glimpse of Death mean my own death? And is it about the Horcruxes?
There was no way to tell from this distance, and no way to be certain of the prophecy until it arrived. Harry did not think that would be long. He wondered if he should be relieved—especially that the war with Voldemort would apparently not last long—or worried.
He glanced down at his own body as light from it caught his attention, and blinked. He had marks in this view of time, other than the scar on his forehead. The imprint of a phoenix glinted on him, the beak starting at his throat and the body continuing down his chest, and a golden-white trail whorled all over him. By glimpsing its endless bends, Harry thought he knew what it was. He had traveled the Maze, and the Maze was outside time in its own way, from another world even as the Stone was. It had branded him, and so had Fawkes's gift.
"You are interesting."
Harry looked swiftly back towards the Stone again. There was still pain in its voice, but even more awe.
"You are marked and scarred and tattered by time, wound in the future and traced with an immortal sacrifice, and through you Tom Riddle is marked and scarred and tattered by time," the Stone said. "And the third. Where is he? There is a place left in your aura, as if for a guest, and yet he is not with you."
"I don't know who you're talking about," said Harry, and started, quietly, to gather and to swing his magic.
"It does not matter," the Stone whispered. "I could spend centuries studying this, trying to grasp the odd coincidences that let this come about. Such a child of Time. And Time does not like me interfering with you. Well. I will not, not now. I will deliver you up to it, and study your life instead. Backward and forward, there is much material here, and you will teach me more if I let you go than if I bid you stay."
"Give me Adalrico," said Harry. The wonder had dulled his rage, but not restrained it, and now it orbited him as on a chain, ready to strike at where the Stone was vulnerable.
"I cannot," said the Stone. "He is being used. His magic is fueling our experiments. I will agree to a peace between us, and take no more of your allies, but it would be only a corpse that I gave back to you."
"Wrong answer," said Harry softly, and then he reached out, crashing his magic through the dream-world of Dark and Light, leaping and wrenching through the paths, striking straight for the Unspeakables and bidding them die.
He had done this before. Then, it had been beside a lake, and it had been a web he could not undo, and he had shouted the words in silence while tears streaked his face. Now he shouted them aloud, and behind the tide of his magic that struck the Unspeakables, his enemies, dead, he sent the absorbere gift.
"Adsulto cordis! Adsulto cordis! Adsulto cordis!"
They died of heart attacks, and their magic, which would ordinarily have gone back into experiments of the Stone's in death, sank down his gullet. Harry tugged on the magic, bearing it to him, letting the absorbere gift slam shut when it could hold no more and begin to digest. For the first time, he welcomed the magic to make himself stronger. If the Stone did not listen to him, if it chose to fight him rather than save those still dear to it, then he would need that power to survive the coming battle.
The Stone wailed, a pitiable noise. Harry doubted it truly cared for the Unspeakables, but they had belonged to it, and at least it sounded like a child mourning for lost toys.
He waited in silence, while his power expanded around him like a rippling pool, and he began to gather and swing it again, that crashing chain that was also a paired spear of destruction and magic-swallowing snake. He was stronger than he had been. It didn't make as much of a difference as he had expected. Swallowing magic, and saving it for himself instead of using it at once to benefit others, did not instantly corrupt him and turn him into a monster. He wondered a little, now, that he could have thought it would.
He did not feel that bad about the Unspeakables' deaths, either. They had been the Stone's servants, sworn to it, bound to it, unutterably loyal. He could feel the dying echoes of their bonds inside him, and it made the slavery Voldemort enacted with the Dark Mark look like cords of twine. They would not have yielded to save their own lives, and they would not have given up Adalrico, and only their loss might convince the Stone to give his ally back.
They had been human. And he had killed them. Harry took a few deep breaths, watching the Stone more with the edges of his pool of magic than with his eyes. He would have to talk to Joseph when this was done and make sure he had not torn another wound in his soul. But this was battle, this was war, and if he could not handle it—either the killing of people who would never be anything but enemies, or the consideration of their humanity that would follow after it—then he should never have joined it.
"You may have him," the Stone whispered.
Harry did not sag with relief, because that would weaken the impression of uncaring strength he presented. "Intact in magic and in body," he insisted.
"Intact in magic and in body." The Stone tilted a corner towards him that Harry thought was the equivalent of a meek head-bow.
"And you will not interfere in my life again, or take any of my other allies."
"I already said I would not." The Stone sounded faintly surprised. "You are too fascinating."
"And you will leave the Ministry and the wizarding world alone."
The Stone took its time about answering, and Harry reached out to an Unspeakable and began to drain her without saying a word.
"I will leave the Ministry and the wizarding world alone," said the Stone quickly.
Harry let the Unspeakable go. He hoped he had not already reduced her to a Squib, but he kept himself from checking. He had Adalrico to think about. "Then bring me back from the dream-world to the real one," he said.
A long moment passed, and then the Stone said, sounding more surprised than it had so far, "Someone seems to be preventing me from doing that."
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Draco jumped from bird-mind to bird-mind, barely touching down in one pond before he leaped on. In every mind, he planted the same direction, trying to make it seem as if they were the creatures' thoughts, and not his own. He cracked and split apart the water there, and placed the series of ripples he wanted, so that the command would both reinforce itself and travel through the connections into the minds of the rest of the flock.
Save them.
The flock swirled and descended before Draco could finish circling them. He cursed in words that had no breath behind them, hoping that they hadn't done so because the Stone sensed and decided to stop him, and turned to look out one through one pair of topaz eyes.
He saw the best sight he could have hoped for. The cliff his mother and Professor Snape and the others were fighting on had cracked clean through, and they dangled above the chasm in a net of light and pure magic no thicker than algae. Professor Snape's pale face said where the net had come from.
The birds were grabbing their former prey with gentle talons, though, and flying with them to another part of the cliff. Draco waited only long enough to see his mother borne to safety, and to see the birds carting along his own motionless body, and then leaped one more time, and went home.
He sighed as he opened his eyes, then grunted in annoyance as one pair of talons sank deeper than it should have and the clamor of steel wings nearly deafened him. He sat up as the birds put him down, and found himself wrapped in his mother's embrace. The birds wheeled around them once, then divided; half the flock flew away across the dizzying land of mirrors, which was growing steadily less dizzying, while half hovered, guarding them. Draco hoped the first half had gone to fetch food and drink, which would be a good use of the "save them" command, and let his head sag back on his mother's neck.
"You saved us again," she whispered into his ear.
"I think Professor Snape helped," said Draco, and blinked, turning his head. "Has there been a sign of Harry?"
Narcissa shook her head tightly.
All of them, from Draco to the weakest Auror, felt the enormous flare of magic a moment later.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Harry gasped as something slammed into him, unseen. The dimension of Time flickered and faded, and Harry tumbled, no longer supported on the scissor-shaped blade, no longer able to see the phoenix imprint or the Maze's brand or the prophecies that coiled about him. He lifted his head, and saw himself on the black path once more, while above him the other roads raced in different directions. The illusion of the Stone had vanished with Time.
Who—
And then a shape dived at him, a glittering wave of power running at its back, and Harry knew which enemy of his was at home in this country of strange and secret paths, this country between the Dark and the Light. He began to swing his magic as a chain, ready to meet Falco again.
