Chapter 59: Coming in to Power

Coming into Power

A hot blue flame with bright orange tips came before his eyes, and he jumped in recollection. How could he have forgotten? He had seen this before. Indeed, he felt the same feeling spreading through him like intense dread. He had seen the maze go up in smoke instantaneously after the hot blue and orange flame had been set upon it.

But there was nothing on the maze now, why would he be recalling it? What did it mean? His heart raced in anticipation of something unknown happening, and he wished that he had spent more time in Lyon Llyonyss so that he could have learned how to direct his visions and have them at his will.

Would this bright blue flame engulf Harry and the other champions?

"Sage, all right?" Hermione waited for an answer. "Ron, something is wrong with Sage."

Ron reached over Hermione and nudged Sage with his fist, "Oi, come out of it."

Sage shook his head and then finally looked at the two of them, "What?"

"I thought something was wrong," Hermione said, picking up his hand again.

Frowning, Sage answered, "I'm not sure... I mean, there isn't anything wrong with me...It's just that I have seen this before and the maze was engulfed in a great fire, so hot that it burned blue and turned the hedges into ashes instantaneously."

"What!" Hermione and Ron said together.

"I don't know what it means, good or bad. All I saw was the fire and the ashes."

"But Harry's in there!" Ron exclaimed.

"Do not think that I don't know that Ron," Sage responded angrily. "What do you want from me?"

"Do something," Ron said.

"What?"

"Anything!" the redhead replied.

"I can't just go running out there like an idiot, Ron, no one would believe me. Especially not Dumbledore."

Hermione squeezed his hand, "You have prescience, Sage, shouldn't you be able to see a few minutes into the future to find out something?"

"Do you realize the amount of training and control it takes to master an art like prescience, Hermione?"

She shook her head negatively.

"Years of training, and I have only been aware that I had it for a year and a half. Most people who have prescience never learn to control it! Not like you just poof yourself ahead whenever you wish a few minutes foresight!"

"Don't get angry with me. I am only trying to help."

"Yeah," Ron added, "I mean can't you try to use it?"

Sage glared at them.

"Please, just try," Hermione plead.

He exhaled and growled, "Fine, I'll try, not much good will come of it though."

Sage closed his eyes and focused on what he wanted to see: Harry running through the maze.

"What's happening," Ron whispered to Hermione a few minutes later.

"NOTHING IF YOU DON'T STOP DISTRACTING ME WEASLEY!" Sage said loudly through his clenched teeth.

"Right, sorry."

Sighing loudly, Sage focused back on the inside of the maze, but he could not help but hear the noises of the stands. He put his head down and cupped his hands around his ears to drown out the sounds.

He began to hear loud, frantic footfalls. Evening his breathing, he focused in on the sound, his brow furrowing deeply in the process.

Slowly, there were more sensations, twigs and branches slapping against his arms, the smell of sweat.

Suddenly a picture came into his mind. He saw Harry staggering towards something, and he heard Cedric Diggory's voice. Sage couldn't make out what they were saying, but after a few moments, Cedric came into his field of view. The other boys put his arm around Harry and began helping him.

As they staggered forward towards the cup, Sage wondered why Diggory had chosen to share the cup with Potter. He was an idiot, Diggory, giving Potter another bit of that famous luck he was known for.

Sage scowled as they reached for the cup together smiling, but he frowned when they and the cup vanished into this air. It was a portkey and suddenly he felt the scene around him change. It was all he needed to hear. The sound of an unnatural, raspy voice.

"Voldemort," he whispered out loud, opening his eyes. "Bugger!"

Ron and Hermione were staring at him, but there was no time to take notice. There was no way of knowing how far ahead in time he had seen. It could have been mere seconds.

"Don't take the cup," Sage yelled.

Now everyone around him was staring at him.

Sage began bolting down the stands towards the grass below, yelling, "Potter, Diggory, don't touch the goblet!"

Over the great din of the crowd, no one could hear what he was yelling.

As he bounded off the grandstand and onto the grass, he felt a familiar feeling go through him.

"No, not now," he thought, pushing through the first waves of pain, before it got more intense. The mere prickles he could stand.

His muscles screamed he was running so fast towards the maze, and it did not help that the pain was beginning to worsen. It was difficult to breath through the familiar burning and stabbing.

Sage growled as he began stumbling, and then he fell onto his knees, still struggling to get up again.

With one last breath, he yelled as loud as he could, hoping that they could hear him. "Potter, don't touch the goblet it's a portkey."

He heard his voice reverberate throughout the area as it had become as loud as it would have had he thought to use the Sonorous charm.

Gripping his chest violently, he thrashed trying to push it away, trying to get up again. He had to do something.

Finally, it hit him hard, the blue fire had been him. He had burnt down the maze. That's what he had to do.

Severus ran over the grass, his wand drawn. He knew that others were close behind him and he could hear the headmaster calling him, but he wasn't paying any attention.

Sage was still struggling like an animal that had just been shot with one of those muggle contraptions, fighting through his inability to get up. It was horrifying. His nephew's face was turning a sick color of red as he scurried around on the grass fighting the effects of a vision on his body.

As he drew nearer to his nephew, sweat pouring down his face, something hit him hard in the chest sending him backwards onto the ground. Similar thuds were heard all around him. It had to have been the other professors falling too.

When he leaned back up to look at Sage, the boy was staggering away rapidly, still under the effects of whatever was happening to him. He was limping and jumping and twitching all in one. His eyes narrowed as he latched onto subtle differences in Sage's movements as he went towards the maze. The limp was lessening. He looked more as if he were running now.

Severus pointed his wand at his nephew's back, knowing that he had to stop him before he hurt himself.

Quickly it was slapped downward by a hand.

Glaring before he turned, Severus's black eyes met with the headmaster's eyes.

"Do not," the older man said simply.

"Why the hell not?" the surly professor spat.

"Let him fight it."

"It could KILL him! The more he pushes it down, the more it is going to want to come out. You KNOW that!"

"I know, Severus, but he will never master it if we do not allow him the chance."

"Albus, perhaps you have forgotten why people have intrusive visions. It is precisely because they cannot control them that they have them!"

"Severus, calm down."

"I will not calm down, a person can only have control of their visions if and when they can have a vision at will! And when they frequently enter a meditative state that will allow them to have visions unintrusively! He cannot do the first, and he has only done the second a handful of times."

"Severus-."

The man grabbed the headmaster by the shoulders shaking him, "My nephew is not expendable! You would have him make an attempt in the hope that he will be ready sooner, even if it could cost him his life!"

"That isn't true. He needs to know what he can do, believe what he can do. He has the motivation and the apparent necessity that he just might be able to experience that."

"It is not worth his life to see what he can do!"

Dumbledore shook his head furiously, "He will not die, Severus, he is much stronger than any of us knows. Just as he cannot grasp limitlessness, neither can we, but he still has it even if he doesn't believe it!"

He pushed the vision off of himself as hard as he could, not wanting it to come so that he wouldn't be able to keep conscious. If he had a vision, he would not be able to act. The pain of it was there, tremendously, burning his skin as he tried to run away from the people who would simply let the vision take him and any opportunity he had of preventing Harry from touching the Portkey.

As he neared the maze, he stopped in his tracks, his hands falling to his sides. Tremors went through him and he gulped and struggled for air.

It is not real, he said to himself, It isn't real. There is no real pain, there is nothing here to do this to my body. It is my mind believing that something is there that is not there.

With a sense of fatality, he felt that something had already happened, that perhaps they had not heard him.

I've already seen that I obliterated the hedges, all I need to do now is do it he thought.

Barely three minutes had passed since he had jumped from the stands, but it seemed like an eternity.

He forced in deep breaths even though they were painful. He balled his hands into fists, tightening all the muscles in his body to push away the tremors.

All in one second, the pain faded, and Sage took the opportunity.

He pulled his hands upwards and thrust them out in front of him, closing his eyes tightly.

Instantaneously, the hedges were engulfed by light blue flames, like electricity coursing over them. Just as fast as it was conjured, it faded, and as the smoke cleared all that remained of the maze was ashes.

There was no sign of Harry or Diggory.

As Sage's hands fell back down onto his sides, the sensations came flooding back to him, pushing and pulling him back and forth between waves of intense pain. It was nearly enough to make him instantly black out. His lungs were grasping for air as if he really were stuck underwater.

He fell to his knees first. There was nothing more that he could do. Harry was gone, taken by the portkey somewhere, and there was no way in Merlin that Sage could do anything about that.

When his palms hit the ground, he grabbed onto the wet grass. His clothes were soaked through with perspiration, and his robes were clinging to his body.

Clouding his perception of the outside world, the vision descended upon him, blanketing him in darkness.

The second after the vision came his heart almost stopped at what he saw. Peter Pettigrew carrying something. His own body shook and cramped as the man killed Cedric Diggory.

Still having some of his own thoughts with him, which was unlike many of his visions, Sage felt as if this vision was wasting away on him. Time was passing. Precious time that could save Harry's life.

Violently, he pushed his body away from the grass, grasping at a world that he was just barely able to see. Inside his stomach, he felt the need to hold onto it. He kicked out his legs, trying to control them through the pain of the vision.

He barely moved more than two feet across the grass, despite the intense effort.

Gritting his teeth, he put his hands flat on the grass and force his legs underneath him so that he was on his knees again, just that much closer to standing.

Through the fog of his eyes, he saw people running to him. Fear settled in on him. If they reached him, no one would know what he was seeing. It would be too late.

Haphazardly, he waved his hand in front of him, hoping beyond hope that he was able to impede their progress again as he had done before.

Deep inside he felt he only needed a few more seconds, just a few more, and he might have more control over himself.

He pulled one hand off the grass and forced it under his knee, to help guide his shaking leg under him. Once he had one shoe on the ground, he repeated the process with the other knee, until he was squatting.

Cringing and groaning he tied to spring himself up, but he could not manage the balance.

In his vision, Voldemort was unveiled as the ungodly little creature Pettigrew had been carrying. He was speaking to Harry, but Sage could not hear what was being said in the vision as he was too aware of the outside world.

There were no more choices. There existed no more can and cannot. He had to stand up, he had to. There was no one else in any position to help, no matter how much it hurt him to even move, no matter how much he just wanted to lay on the ground and let it take him.

In one swift movement, he bolted up and staggered around in circles screaming in the pain he could no longer ignore. The vision pressed down harder upon him once more, his sight went completely black, the pain dimmed as it always seemed to when he was fully experiencing a vision.

Something, however, was very different, while he could not see, he could still feel his body. He was still standing.

His heart thumping so hard in his chest, he was afraid his blood would all spill out, a strange thing happened to him. A surge went through him. He felt as if he had lost control but that he had not lost it. It was the strangest thing that had even happened to him.

A voice separate from his vision said, "You can show it as I once showed you of what you needed to see. It is there, it will always be. You must know that you can use it. Breath, focus, feel your ambient magic, it guides you."

It was Merlin's voice. He was not alone.

He forced himself still, made himself breath slowly, despite the fact that his mind was telling him to breath rapidly.

The force grew stronger, spinning around him, pushing against him, taking his robes up as if a great wind.

And when he opened his mouth to speak, it was as if it were not his voice, as if he was not speaking, and the words just spilled out in a booming, deep, vibrating voice. It seemed to shake the ground like the after-effects of thunder.

"Behold! The servant has returned to the master and the time of darkness shall be reborn. The Dark Lord will rise once again. The blood of his greatest enemy shall fuel his resurrection to life and return to him great power," It traveled out of his mouth in Latin, like a great gale of wind spreading out to touch those learned enough and quick enough to hear it.

Please drop me a note to let me know how you liked the beginning of our dramatic climax! Sage muse really appreciates it, as does the author. It's fuel for the 3rd story in the Sage Sage that I will also be updating! Hit that review, you know you want to! Pretty please? 3/2020