I died.

I'd love to spin a detailed story about the afterlife. Maybe it's like a train station, with shining subway cars to take you to the beyond. I could have finally seen my parents, perhaps. Possibly even picked the brain of whatever higher power was behind all my trials and tribulations. Really risked my ticket into Heaven by being sarcastic about it.

But, either you don't get to remember that kind of thing when you come back, or I wasn't dead for long enough to even get the experience.

Dying hadn't felt like anything, but being revived felt like a wash of love and power reigniting every cell in my body. I couldn't play dead with how I twitched and my eyes snapped open, but in the time I'd been out—maybe only a few seconds—the Death Eaters had all moved over to the edge of the cliff, wands drawn and ignoring my "corpse." Even the snake went to take a look. Black, still tied up and way more out of it than I'd been from the ritual, looked surprised when I sat up, but managed to keep from making a noise.

I had a theory about what had happened, and it didn't involve me being immune to the curse because of fate or higher powers. What was important was that I was no longer surrounded, had my Apologies focus in hand, and my left hand still hurt but was no longer being actively and slowly disintegrated.

Time to get to work.

I managed to roll fairly silently to my feet and hissed out, "Diffindo!" as I passed Black, cutting his bonds. A few steps past him, I was able to take cover behind one of the braziers: it wouldn't last long, but might help for a second. Not hearing them immediately taking notice, I turned my focus on my left hand, incanted, "Excorio!" and directed the exorcism charm into the ring on my blackened hand. I figured running around with an active horcrux on me wouldn't be very good for long, and that the charm might help with any remaining mummification curse energy. Honestly, I had a thin hope that it might also save my hand, which I couldn't exactly move at the time.

The wailing of the soul being evicted finally got everyone's attention.

The bad guys still had us on numbers, no doubt. My focus in hand might have given me a chance against any one of them, but I was only in a slightly better position than I'd been before I got killed. So I took my shot, whatever energy that had revived me giving me enough stamina to go for broke right after using the tiring exorcism charm. Sighting at Voldemort, I yelled, "Hoc est corpus!"

As I'd expected, the element of surprise only got me a moment of speed advantage. Somehow the dark asshole had snapped out another killing curse fast enough to have done for me if I'd waited even half a second. What I got was red and green energies colliding in mid air.

Then things got weird.

The threads of power propelling the spellfire, normally an invisible trail of ionized air, ignited. As green and red magics destroyed one another, the energy washed backwards, forming a blazing golden rope of energy connecting my focus to Voldemort's wand. My magic was bound to the process, and I couldn't have let go of my focus if I wanted to. Neither could he.

Some force with a sense of aesthetics briefly levitated the both of us more in line with the ritual circle, facing off directly across its diameter maybe four yards apart from one another. At least I wasn't the one with my back to the cliff this time, and I absently noted Black hiding behind the pulley-decorated post he'd been bound to. Before even Mavra could react, the golden rope threw off dozens of additional threads of coruscating light that surrounded us in a webbed dome centered on the ritual circle.

Voldemort's eyes widened and he yelled at his followers, "Do nothing!" Already off guard at my survival, he clearly didn't understand what was going on. Given a faint undercurrent of Fawkes' cry that I heard within the magic that was currently muting the exterior sounds, I suspected it was a byproduct of using foci with matched cores. And I kind of hoped that, since the phoenix was a buddy, I'd have an advantage in this particular test of wills. "Do nothing unless I command it!" he shrieked, the phoenix song rising so that even he could make it out.

"Maybe you should retire that curse," I yelled across the golden tether linking us. "You're oh for three the last times you've used it, right? I'd be interested in seeing what goes wrong the next time you try it."

"What have you done!? What is this spell?" he snarled.

I loved that he was giving me credit for doing this on purpose. As I'd kind of assumed, the connection began to become unstable, the rope modulating from a uniform cord into a wavelike structure, almost like an undulating necklace of beads. "Your return trip to hell," I told him, exerting all my will along the cord.

Give him credit, Voldemort was powerful. If he knew what was going on and wasn't under five minutes back from over a decade in perdition, he probably would have won the reverse tug of war. But I was highly motivated and he was off balance. So when I started to push, the beads of force slowly but inevitably moved toward his wand.

I smirked as I noticed through the wavering light that the rest of the bad guys were just standing on the edge of the cliff watching. They probably should have gotten to safer ground, but might have been worried about getting around the dome without getting shocked. And that's when a dark-furred arm reached over the edge of the cliff, grabbed Mavra's leg, and pulled her off to plummet into the sea below.

Nobody expects the monkey.

With the biggest physical threat out of the way, Black found his courage and an objective. "Tell Remus I'm sorry! That I meant something!" he shouted at me, then sprinted awkwardly between the edge of the dome and the edge of the cliff. Crouch and Nott staggered back, hesitating to attack their master's horcrux and forgetting for a crucial moment that any basic immobilizing spell would have worked to stop the haggard man. They left him a clear path to the other horcrux outside the dome.

I liked to assume that Nagini had a really surprised look on her face when Black grabbed her and then leaped off the cliff, aiming for the rocks below.

"Two more horcruxes down, Tom," I shouted over the now-thunderous phoenix song. It was a calculated risk to reveal that I knew what they were, but the shock value was worth it. I did get to see his surprised face.

The moment of anguish was enough to slam the rest of the energy home into his wand.

What I hadn't prepared for was for the wand to produce an echo of the last (and basically only) spell it had cast. Namely, killing me. Silvery smoke poured out of the end of Voldemort's wand and took my own form. The Harry phantasm regarded me from where he stood next to Voldemort, said, "Well this is odd," flexed his fingers and made a pantomime that I read as, "I'll hold him once you break the connection."

I nodded and shouted, "'Thilda! Ready to go?" Moments later, the reddish-brown-furred howler monkey swung herself back onto dry land as close as she could get to me without crossing the dome and waited. Resources in place, I yanked my focus offline to break the connection, and I watched my phantom double tackle Voldemort as the dome collapsed into countless golden sparks.

By the time Voldemort was screaming, "Stop him!" I was already sprinting downhill, Mathilda bounding onto my back as soon as the dome had fallen. She was much easier to carry and apparate with in her animagus form; despite the long arms and surprising monkey strength, she was only about a dozen pounds.

Crouch and Nott didn't manage to get it into gear before my long legs and adrenaline had carried me far enough across the rocky scrub to feel comfortable trying to apparate. Sure enough, the anti-apparition space wasn't that big, and I twisted in space just as a couple of spells finally started to streak down the hill at us.

As was becoming my signature move, I flipped them both the bird as we disapparated to safety.

Whatever coastline we'd been on was close enough to London to apparate into Remus' backyard on the second try, after skittering off a Veil crack and landing in the middle of a random cow field. It had been an educated guess that we were closer to the house than to Hogwarts, based on the fact we hadn't frozen to death like we might have on a seaside cliff closer to Scotland. Feeling safe inside the fidelius-protected house, I firecalled Dumbledore and we were quickly allowed to floo through into his office.

While Dumbledore wanted to debrief immediately, he had to deal with me waving my curse-blackened hand in his face. He seemed more interested in the ring than in my injury, but at least sent us down to the infirmary while he gathered the Order. Madam Pomfrey made some very unhappy noises about the wound, but managed to bind it up in potion-slathered bandages that she thought might let me save the hand.

Also, I was very nearly magically exhausted. Mathilda was fine other than some scrapes.

As soon as Pomfrey agreed I was stable enough, though she'd prefer I stayed in bed, I was whisked back to the headmaster's office. The debrief was intense, and involved an ever-increasing number of members of the Order of the Phoenix getting called in. It was like three in the morning before someone remembered to give me back my pants.

Dumbledore wanted to warn everyone that Voldemort was finally back, but the more political members of the group finally convinced him that wouldn't work out. The aurors, in particular, were pretty sure all that would accomplish would be turning Minister Fudge against me, Dumbledore, and the school as he tried to stick his head in the sand. I'd been somewhat circumspect about mentioning Voldemort's wraith, so the idea was around in the minds of the Ministry, but even with Mathilda to back up my testimony it wasn't likely to be enough.

What they could do was go to the site, which Dumbledore was able to pinpoint based on research he'd been doing into Riddle's early life, especially once I mentioned that it had been a horcrux hiding place. The scouting team found enough evidence of the ritual left behind to secure the scene, including tracking down the body of Sirius Black and the oversized snake dashed to pieces on rocks below.

I was glad that Remus was still locked up in his quarters in wolf form rather than having to go along on that particular mission.

The eventual strategy we settled on was revealing that noted-bogeyman Sirius Black, known-terrorist-at-large Barty Crouch Jr, vampire-of-interest Mavra, and an unnamed masked Death Eater (who answered to "Nott") had kidnapped us as part of a ritual. That part was pretty easy to prove, even if we had to throw Sirius under the bus. The difference from the real story was that they'd created some kind of dark magic homunculus to try to convince people that You-Know-Who was returned.

The hope was that Fudge would go hard against the Death Eaters to try to prove that Voldemort hadn't returned, which would allow those that knew he had to hunt for him.

Finally, after the hours-long meeting (which basically wound up with Mathilda as a member of the Order since they hadn't exactly ever asked her to leave), we were sent back to the infirmary, where I was confined to bed rest and Mathilda was allowed to stay even though she was doing okay.

"I thought I lost you," she said from her bed, an arm's length from mine. We'd been in the meeting so late that the room was already growing light from the first rays of the rising sun.

"You brought me back," I told her.

"Only by accident," she admitted. "I was trying to blast him in the back. I didn't really think about how the rings work."

"Happy little accident," I smiled. "Penny is going to lose her mind when she realizes we made an actual counter to the killing curse."

"And did you think you'd lost me? When I fell?"

"Only for a second," I told her. "Then I realized no two-bit death trap was going to do in Mathilda Grimblehawk."

"That's right. Full price death traps, minimum!" She deliberately removed her ring from her right hand and placed it on her left ring finger, reaching out across the separation.

When my ring clinked against hers, our hands grasping in the dawn light, it felt like victory.