Chapter 18
Final Boss

Harry did not need the voice of Gaia whispering into his ear to know the four-armed monstrosity Dumbledore had transformed into was dangerous. The bestial roar it threw their way was evidence all on its own, as was its near-human form and the fact that what they just saw was not supposed to happen whenever an Earth wand transformed. This was something new and unique, and new and unique monsters were always something to be especially cautious of.

Which meant it was no surprise when Dudley immediately rushed in.

The Grand Sorcerer turned burning blue eyes on the Knight, and it swung one white-furred arm with almost casual violence. A paw as large as Dudley's face hit him in the chest, throwing him away and scoring four claw marks on his chest armor. Now the leonine head turned to Harry, those same eyes filled with a terrible hate.

How much of Dumbledore's memories this thing had, Harry could not hazard a guess, but it would not surprise him if it remembered the recent defeat. The Grand Sorcerer pounced and brought its other arm down in an overhead swing, and he had to jump backwards to evade the sharp claws. He darted back in and scored a scratch on the paw. No matter that he already expected it, it was still a disappointment to see that paralysis had no effect on this creature. That would have been too convenient.

The monster moved again, its feet never touching the ground, and this time the backhand slap connected and threw Harry into the air to come crashing back down onto the hard stone ground. The landing knocked the wind out of him, but laying on his back was a great way to end up dead, so he immediately rolled over and pushed himself back to his feet. A look over his shoulder at the monster had his eyes widening.

The Grand Sorcerer had four arms, and now it was clear what the human ones were for. It had raised the snarling wand up, and fire was gathering at the tip and pointed right at him. An arrow flew through the air and hit the monster in the head, and it roared as its aim went slightly to the side. Harry ran a few steps in the other direction then several more when the fireball exploded out as a cone of flame that sprayed all the way to the wall. Magic normally had an extensive range, and there was no telling just how far that spell would have reached were it not for the solid wall in its way.

Harry glanced around. Sure enough, there was nothing in this room that would serve as cover to protect them from the flames. Dodging to the side was their only option.

Another arrow flew at the monster only to be blocked by a furry arm, and a spray of lightning came from the other side of the room. The Grand Sorcerer raised its wand and swung it down as though hitting the air with a hammer, and a trail of tall icicles sprang up from the ground towards Draco. The blond took a couple of steps out of their path then started running away more quickly when the icicles curved that path to chase after him.

Dudley was back in the fray, and Harry shook his head. Despite the faint blue glow around him that signified Dudley was using his power to increase his resilience, Harry did not like those odds. Not when this monster before them seemed to be just as good close up as it was with magic. He sheathed his sword and traced the same shape as he needed for Curtain, but this time he was not imagining the moon. "Sunlight itself serves as our shield," he muttered. "Wall!"

Cheerful yellow hexagons dotted Dudley's armor and faded nearly out of sight. That should give him a little more protection from the monster's claws.

The wand swung again, but despite the tingle of warning that ran up Harry's spine he could not see what it was doing. There was no fire, no ice. Nothing had happened. So why was there still a feeling of impending doom?

His hands tingled, and he glanced down to see a spark jump from one finger to the next. That was the last warning he had before his world erupted into a curtain of lightning bolts that all coursed through him at once. He would have screamed, but none of his muscles were cooperating. They were all locked up, dropping him to the ground with smell of burnt flesh and hair.

The pain finally started to fade after a few moments, but his body still did not respond. His eyes would have widened if he had control. This was not just lightning. It was the same paralysis he had used on the sand dogs. He would not be capable of moving until the effect wore off, and considering the flames once more forming around the head of that screaming wand, he was a sitting duck.

Flames shot out at Draco rather than Harry, and the Sorcerer was still able to run and get out of their way. Footsteps came from behind him, and something smashed against his shoulder and washed over him with a wave of green light that instantly loosened his muscles. "Are you okay?" Hermione demanded, pulling him to his feet.

He staggered a little, but now he could actually move. It must have been a panacea she threw at him, for little else could get rid of a magical paralysis. "Been worse. Cure," he added, coating himself in light that was a slightly different shade of green to heal the injuries inflicted by the Grand Sorcerer's spell. Knots he had not been able to feel released themselves, and he stood up straighter as the worst of the pain vanished. "We need to watch out for those spells. I wouldn't be surprised if they all have status effects attached."

"What effects are we looking at?"

"If his lightning spell is any indication, they probably have the same effects as my Statusblade ability. The fire will also poison you, the ice will slow you down, and obviously the lightning will paralyze you." He rolled his shoulders. It was dreadfully unfair that the Grand Sorcerer was immune to status effects but could still throw them out, but Gaia was rarely fair. "You and Draco keep hitting it from far off. I'm going to help Dudley up close."

"No, you're not."

Harry blinked at the force behind her denial. "I can't just leave him there on his own!"

"You're the only one of us who can use healing magic," she reminded him. "If you get knocked out or killed, we're done for."

Which meant the best place for him would be playing support. In any other situation, he would have argued and grumbled, but the Grand Sorcerer swung its massive arms and hit Dudley again, sending the Knight to the ground with large gashes torn in his metal breastplate. "Shite. Megacure!"

A spray of green sparks landed on Dudley, and he hopped back to his feet. A gesture at his pouch had his trusty axe reappearing, and with an axe in one hand and a hammer in the other, Dudley bellowed out a war cry and started swinging with wild abandon.

"…Maybe you have a point," he said with a sigh.

Hermione nodded and darted away, apparently deciding that the two of them standing together would be too tempting a target for the Grand Sorcerer if it looked over at them. He could not say she would be wrong in that assumption, either. They needed to be mobile, making sure that it could not hit them whenever it decided to take its eyes off Dudley.

Not that a little extra protection would hurt, he decided as he coated himself and then the rest of the party in Curtain.

The next several minutes passed in a terrified blur. Draco threw his spells, Hermione shot her arrows, and Harry focused on casting Cure after Cure at Dudley and renewing Wall and Curtain whenever they wore off. Twice Draco was caught by the Grand Sorcerer's fire spell and needed to have the poison removed, and Hermione was caught by the train of icicles after several attempts on the monster's part to pin her down. Harry was lucky in that he managed to avoid another cone of flame and a second area of lightning. It helped that after the first one, he was being much more cautious about any strange feelings.

Finally, Hermione moved in slow motion to let loose another arrow. It sped up as soon as it left her bow and slammed hard into the beast's chest.

The blow staggered the Grand Sorcerer, and before Dudley could take another swing it burst into ethereal flames. Something fell out with a thump, and when the light faded the smoking body of an old man once more lay on the ground.

"Dooo… yooouuu… thiiiink hee's still alive?" Hermione asked, her voice and the rest of her suddenly catching back up to the rest of the world.

"I don't know," he answered honestly. He crept up to the body, his senses on high alert. He did not expect Dumbledore to suddenly jump up and resume fighting, not with how bad he looked, but Harry had seen stranger things. A closer look proved that Dumbledore's chest was still moving, but he did not open his eyes. It was good thing, too. It was not just the old man's robes that were scorched. His face was a patchwork of skin that was red and only lightly singed next to areas that were completely charred black. "He's alive, and thankfully unconscious."

Hermione let out an audible sigh of relief, and Harry could not help but think back to the man she had shot and killed in the mines where they fought the Conjurer. It was no surprise she did not want another person's blood on her hands.

"Hey, Harry?" He looked over at Dudley, who in turn looked over at the disc still floating in the air. "What do you think we're supposed to do with that?"

Harry shrugged his shoulders. He had about as much idea about what to do as the rest of them did. Still, with no answer making itself known, he walked over to the disc and reached out for it. Maybe if he touched it, he could give it some command or something. His fingers hesitated a moment, but with a deep breath he closed his hands and braced himself.

Only for nothing to happen.

He opened one eye, then the other. "Up?" he told it in a tentative voice. "Go away?"

"It doesn't look like that's going to work," Hermione said in a droll voice.

Rolling his eyes at her comment, he opened his mouth to reply when something felt like it forced itself through his forehead and into his brain.

Harry pulled on a black robe not unlike the brightly colored ones Dumbledore wore. The room he was in appeared to be a changing room of some kind, though not one he recognized. No clothier's store he had ever been inside had a banner hanging from the ceiling depicting a light standing on its hind legs. Nor did he know the redheaded boy who was tightening a red and yellow striped tie around the collar of his shirt.

The door at the far end of the room opened, and a girl walked in wringing a scarf in the same colors as the boy's tie in her hands. He blinked when she looked up at him. If he did not know better, he was say it was Hermione. It could not be her, though. What happened to the cat ears that marked her as a member of the Stellis race?

The girl took a deep breath. "I want a word with you, Harry," she said, proving beyond a doubt that this was Hermione, although he had yet to hear her use such a bratty voice. "You shouldn't have done it. You heard Slughorn, it's illegal."

Done it? Done what? Who was this Slughorn person? What was going on?!

"What are you going to do, turn us in?" demanded the redhead, a scowl on his face and the tips of his ears turning red, though whether it was anger or embarrassment Harry could not guess.

His mouth opened, but he did not voice the thoughts that were running through his head. "What are you two talking about?" he asked instead, and without waiting for an answer he turned around and hung up a long set of robes, this time in a bright red same color as the banner. A sly grin split his face once he was out of sight.

"You know perfectly well what we're talking about!" Hermione shrieked. Harry wished he did because he was more than a little confused. This… other him, though; this counterpart? He seemed to know exactly what was going on, and Harry did not like it in the slightest. "You spiked Ron's juice with—"

Harry jerked away, and the vision ended as his hands released the edges of the disc. "What the hell?" he said to no one in particular.

"Harry, what's wrong?" Dudley asked.

"I… don't know." He shook his head. The memory of what he had seen did not leave him, and he could not help but puzzle over it. Alternate Hermione had accused alternate him of spiking somebody's drink, and from what she said, it was with something illegal.

There were only a few things Harry could think of that would be slipped into someone's drink, most of them being drugs or poison. He did not think it was the latter – he did not want to think that – but the sly smirk on alternate him's face did not inspire confidence.

"I saw a… a vision, I guess. Of life on Earth."

"Was it everything Mum and Dad and everybody else in Whinging Village claimed it was?"

Harry shrugged. His first vision had not been enough to tell. Maybe a second look would shed more light on the subject? With far more hesitance this time, he reached out again and pressed his fingers on the surface of the multicolored disc.

He opened his eyes to find himself in a very different place than last time. Rather than a clothing store he was outdoors in a village, though the roads were a strange solid black rather than cobble and bordered by paths of grey stone. Night was falling, but there was still enough light to see Dudley standing in front of him. Not that Dudley looked anything close to normal. Rather than armor he wore thin clothing not unlike what Harry could vaguely remember they wore the first few months of living in Gaia, and more disturbing was that this alternate Dudley had little muscle and far more than his share of fat. It was like he was a man who had gone to seed much, much earlier than should be possible.

What shook him most of all was the look of cruelty on Dudley's face.

"I heard you last night," his cousin said in a breathless voice as though he had come sprinting from a distance just to deliver this message, whatever it was. "Talking in your sleep. Moaning."

"What do you mean?" the other him demanded, sounding just as confused as Harry felt. That at least was a welcome change.

Dudley laughed, and the sound would have made Harry flinch if he was at all in control of his body. That did not sound at all like Dudley. Not in sixteen years had Harry heard that mocking, hateful laugh come from that face. Dudley's face twisted, and he continued in a high-pitched whimper. " 'Don't kill Cedric! Don't kill Cedric!' Who's Cedric? Your boyfriend?"

The identity of this Cedric person was, just like Ron before him, a very good question.

"I— you're lying—" the other him said in a tight voice that would not have convinced a deaf man that he was confident about what he was saying.

" 'Dad! Help me, Dad! He's going to kill me, Dad!'" Dudley continued mercilessly. He brought his fat fists up to his eyes and pantomimed crying. "Boo-hoo!"

Harry blinked and found himself staring at his own face in the disc. This vision made even less sense than the first, mostly because unlike the alternate Hermione, he had a hard time believing that was actually Dudley. Not because of his appearance, although that was also a surprise. It was harder to believe than Hermione somehow losing her ears, but not by much.

No, it was because that person with Dudley's face did not act like Dudley in the slightest.

He knew that way back in the distant past, he and Dudley had not exactly gotten along, but that was when they were kids. Back when Dudley had copied Vernon in every respect without thinking, including his casual hate of anything Vernon thought was 'unnatural'. Dudley had grown out of that and started thinking on his own shortly after the Transition, and by the time he and Harry were nine or ten, they had been as thick as thieves. When they were fourteen and running away from Whinging Village, they were practically brothers and considered each other to be the only real family each other had.

His frown deepened. That was the other thing wrong with this vision. Dudley was quick to forgive people whom he considered friends. How often had they gotten into an argument about something stupid only for Dudley to have already forgiven and forgotten when Harry finally pulled his head out of his arse and tried to make amends? What could have possibly happened, then, to create such a tremendous rift between them?

He turned to look at Dudley, who had moved to stand next to Hermione and Draco, and his cousin shook his head. "I don't think you should touch that thing again, cuz."

"I…" Harry's eyes moved to Draco, and he bit his lip. "There's one more thing I want to check."

Turning around, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Hermione had not seemed to be a friend in that vision. Dudley had flat-out hated him. What about Draco? Draco was a wizard, and alternate him looked like a wizard. They were the same age, so they should have been classmates. The real him liked Draco and considered him a friend, and Draco apparently felt the same. Maybe, just maybe, that was a friendship that would be translated in that strange world where the disc was grabbing these visions.

Maybe things would be fine, he told himself as he reached for the disc with fear beating a tattoo in his chest.

He slid through a puddle of water, nearly losing his balance and falling backwards. The water itself was spraying like a fountain from an elaborate ring of sinks in a room built entirely from stone. The walls looked too much like those of Hogwarts to be anywhere else, which if nothing else confirmed that he had indeed been training as a wizard in this place.

Another figure jumped out from behind the sink. Harry instantly recognized it as Draco, dressed in black robes just as he and the redhead had been in the first vision but wearing a necktie with green and silver stripes rather than red and yellow. Draco had an Earth wand in his hand that was trained on Harry, and the blond's face was pale like that of a corpse. That pallor and the wild look in his eyes was an expression Harry had seen once before, when they had run around in panic trying not to get eaten by the basilisk at the top of the Trial of the Body and Soul.

It was an expression of pure terror.

"Cruci—" Draco began to shout, but Harry was faster.

"SECTUMSEMPRA!"

The Earth wand in Harry's own hand made three slashes as though he were wielding a sword. With the first, a line of crimson scored Draco's face and spurted out blood. An inch higher and it would have carved out his right eye. The second caught him on the upper chest, ripping through his robes. The last was the worst and sliced him from shoulder to the opposite hip.

Draco took a single staggering step backwards before he fell bonelessly to the hard stone floor, and almost instantly the puddle in which he fell turned from clear to red.

"No!" Harry shouted, ripping his hand away from the disc like it had been burned. "I won't! If that's what Earth holds, then I want no part of it!"

It was as if the disc had simply been waiting for his decision. As soon as those words left his mouth, it started rising into the air again, growing and breaking apart as the fragments reformed into the rainbow-colored rings they had been when Harry first laid eyes on them. A wave of visible force erupted from the rings and swept through him, shoving him back a step. The magic in his veins sang as it passed, feeling more solid, more him, than he could ever recall in his life.

"What… have you… done?" a whispery voice asked. Harry spun around to find that Dumbledore had cracked his eyes open, the ruin of his face splitting open and oozing fluid. "That was… our only… way home…"

Home? Home?! Harry slashed his hand through the air and then flinched as the motion reminded him of how he had waved the wand that murdered Draco. "That is no home of mine," he said, doing his best to force the images from that vision out of his mind. "It is not a place I will ever willingly go. Not after what I saw. Your Earth can burn for all I care. I'm staying here on Gaia."

At least here, he was not a monster.

"Then you have… doomed us… all."

A door slammed on the opposite side of the room, and Harry whipped his head around as the memory of just what lurked outside that door came back in full force. The good thing as far as he was concerned was that it was not a horde of dragon-headed swordsmen that came pouring through the door. The bad thing? Neither was it the rest of the wizards who came to the temple with them.

What walked through the door instead was just one dragon-man, this one dragging a long-handled axe-like weapon on the ground behind him. It took a look at them before continuing its inexorable and deadly advance. Harry growled through his teeth and drew his rapier as the others readied their own weapons. Just when this situation could not get any worse!

TOCK.

The bone-rattling sound came from above and behind them, from the very rings they had just fought to protect. A brisk wind broke against Harry's back, and he spun around fully expecting some other horror to be coming for them. What he saw instead was a portion of empty air changing color and swirling in place as though he were getting drunk just looking at it. The distortion grew, and when it did the center became calm like the eye of a storm. The strange part was that the eye did not show the opposite wall; it showed a clearing in a forest.

It showed a way out of this place before they all got killed.

"Let's get out of here!" he shouted. Fitting action to words, he ran towards the distortion. Was this a trap? Was trusting it foolish? Maybe. Probably, even. But right now he would take the possibility of life-threatening danger over a certainty. Everything he had seen of the sword-wielding statues told him clearly that they were not foes he and his friends could defeat.

There was no transition when he ran through the distortion. One moment, he was in the inner sanctum of the temple. The next, he was standing in the forest on the other side. "Come on, come on!" he yelled, only to move out of the way when first Draco and then Dudley came through as well.

Hermione was not behind them.

He looked through the portal again and found the Stellis still in the temple and kneeling next to Dumbledore. At first he thought she was trying to help him up, but a blink and a squint made it clear this was not the case. Her hands were shoved inside his robes and moving around as though she were rummaging through his pockets. So involved was she in her looting that she was blind to the axe-bearing dragon-man still marching towards them.

"You don't have time to pick his pockets! Get out of there!"

Hermione looked over her shoulder at the dragon-man and jumped to her feet. A few seconds later, she was sprinting through the portal as well. The guard did not change its pace, neither hurrying nor slowing down. Only when it reached the old wizard did it stop in its tracks and look down at him.

Then it raised its weapon above its head.

The distortion collapsed on itself as the axe came down, vanishing entirely just before the blow itself. All that was left was the four Adventures and a forest that was positively idyllic compared to where they were before.

"Uh," Dudley said, looking around at the trees surrounding them. "Dumb question. Does anybody know where we are?"

The snippets in italics are from books 5 and 6, obviously, just from a slightly different perspective. Context is an invaluable thing.

Just the epilogue still to go. That will come out next week.

Silently Watches out.