Disclaimer: Looking out some country window…
A/N: I know I've been away for a few months – with good reason! My original novel just went live on the Amazon Kindle store! Check out my profile for links, or Google: Distant Star by Joe Ducie
What we have here is an interlude, while I get back into the swing of things. Expect a full chapter in June.
Enjoy,
Joe
Harry Potter and the Heartlands of Time
Interlude – Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas
Most men completely accept knowledge as truth.
They are sheep, ruled by fear.
But you are different. Always calm, detached.
A smooth flow of thought into action. Indeed…
It is almost as if… as if you had no soul. How do you do it?
Body and soul are one—yet yours are separated.
Like a child from the knight in his storybook.
~Vagrant Story
Our ideals never really marched in time.
Perhaps that's the best way to describe the relationship between my good self and the lord of all children's nightmare—Voldemort.
You know how I did it.
(Bargained with the Infernal Clock and fucked a watery sprite, two personifications of time and destiny itself.)
You even know why.
(To save the past from the future. To unmake the end of the world.)
But the cost, oh the cost to the soul. What soul? The weeks fly by and the years roll on. The man that I've become.
Merlin wept.
"Barkeep, I'll take another. And I don't wanna hear anymore shit about how young I look!"
Walking down the old paths of Faé and Forget, I felt the warm breeze at my back, urging me on along this foolish yet fucking necessary quest.
A quest for an idea, a quest for a terrible fate.
The forest was light surrounded by oppressive darkness. The last bastion of magical purity on the planet, a ward of broken realms and swaying promises. Soft petals of sparkling light cast the green trees, thick on all sides, into blurs of electric-blue amnesty.
"'Let me take you down,'" I hummed the words softly against the light, "'Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields…'"
Any other day and I would have been terrified; I would have been clawing at my eyes and on my knees before the weight of the magical world that was pressing down all around me. But this wasn't any other day. This was the last day of my life.
There was a clock on the face of Hell, of that I was quite sure.
The path through the forest meandered back and forth, across fallen stumps and over moss-covered boulders, yet it cut west – forever west – through the debris. I saw nothing living save the trees, and yet I felt watched.
This path had started in the Forbidden Forest, on the Hogwarts side, and I had travelled for the best part of a day through that wood, my wand clutched tightly in my fist, spelling trouble more than a few times, and yet I was no longer in the Forbidden Forest.This forest, these trees, wasn't exactly anywhere.
I'd left the whole world behind, what was left of it.
"'Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.'" The oppressive silence devoured my mumbled song, yet I had to make some noise. I had to rage against the darkness. "'Strawberry Fields Forever.'"
In time I came to a clearing in the trees, and yet a thick canopy still arched high overhead and cut deep into an enormous slab of stone that rose up and out of sight into the azure sky.
In the clearing was a dark pool, fed from a heavy waterfall that cascaded down over the worn slab of stone. Where the waterfall struck the pool a radiant, foamy swash shot up sparks of pure silver light.
This was the place. I felt it in my bones – in my heart and my mind.
I was thirsty. Don't drink the water. But to drink or eat in this…place… was death. Was worse than death. Was forever-death, can ya dig it?
Still, I'd have to go swimming to get this all done and dusted.
I was dressed in a pair of old Hogwarts robes over a shirt and jeans. I'd been going for the 'wizardly' appearance, but that now felt foolish. I shrugged out of the robes, pulled off my shirt and unlaced my boots before losing the jeans, as well.
In short manner, I stood naked before the secluded forest pool – save for my glasses and my wand, clutched in a death-grip in my right hand.
It was time.
And yet I hesitated. Of course I hesitated.
It would be an easy step down into the pool to begin my work, my dark and tricky work, yet I paused for a moment to take in my shimmering reflection in the water.
Even in the twilight, my reflection showed the mess of scars and twisted fused skin that covered my body, burning over my shoulders and clawing at my neck. It had been a hard war, a desperate race for Atlantis… I was ruined.
And about to be as ruined as Voldemort.
I stepped off the edge of the path and into the pool. The water was warm, welcoming, like an embrace, and for a moment I felt like I was floating. The mud beneath my feet was as soft as silk… I was terrified.
"Fuck that," I whispered. "Fuck the fear." I gathered my will and waded out into the deep water, up to my knees, wand at the ready…
The forest was silent save for the cascading curtain of water before me. It was time to get down to business.
Like any good magic worth a damn, this summoning required blood fresh from the vein. I muttered a quick spell and a razor-sharp point of silver grew out of my wand tip. Without any preamble, I drew the tip across my free wrist and slashed it open. Blood, hot and brilliant-crimson, spurted from the wound, down my hand, and began to drip into the water.
I turned and tossed my wand back onto the bank amongst my clothes. I wouldn't need it again, the voices in my head whispered. Voices I'd come to trust and yet understood as the jagged hooks of insanity.
I sensed its presence gathering before I saw it. The water around me began to churn, like the tide of the sea, drawing my oh-so-precious blood down into its dark, impenetrable depths. I was convinced coming here had been the right decision, but still…
From within the waterfall I caught it's eyes staring at me. Twin sparks of soft purple light. There was a soft giggle, feminine and striking, as the spirit of the past surged forward through the water and came to rest before me.
"Hello, Harry Potter."
I took a step back in spite of myself. The creature before me was beautiful, shapely and curved, and as naked as I was. Her form consisted of nothing more than sparkling silver water and those deep, distinctive purple eyes. She was a creature of Faé times, of the Old World… not even close to human.
And yet her form was beautiful… beautiful and complete. Her liquid-figure looked human, looked like a woman. A fall of flowing water clung to her face on either side, a drop of clear hair, resting on her shoulders. My eyes glanced down to her chest, to her breasts and the suggestive flow of nipples.
I took a deep breath.
"Hello…"
"It has been an age of ages since one so young and so mortal sought the company of one such as me…" Her voice was smooth, seductive… "I know why you are here."
"Really?" I doubted that. No one had ever dared to do what I had planned.
"Of course," the spirit said, gliding around me on the surface of the pool. "You are here for them. For the lost. For… Fleur Delacour, for Nymphadora Tonks, and Albus Dumbledore. You are here for Hermione Granger, you are here for Ronald Weasley. So many ghosts haunt you, Harry, so many corpses paved your path through my forest…"
"The world is burning."
"No, it has burnt, and you seek to undo it. You seek to unmake the Infernal Clock. Such a task of inspired madness!"
Well, I guess she did know what I had planned. Despite the shields that guarded my mind, this creature could see right through me. I was still bleeding into the water… "What I want—"
"Is not what you need. I can give you what you need." Her watery smile, her full lips shot with the silver sparks from the waterfall, promised pleasures I could only imagine.
I let out a deep breath slowly. "And what is it you think I need?"
"Time."
That one word echoed throughout the forest, breaking through the veneer of unnatural silence. Behind me and all around the trees groaned, swayed… a smile crept onto my face.
"We're on the same page, you and I."
"To challenge the universe, Mr. Potter, as you have done, as you will do for a very long time to come, is the most reckless, foolish… and heroic undertaking in the long life of your world."
"I'm no hero—"
"Thrice damn your modesty, Harry. You are the last hero. You echo back and forth across time and the ripples of what you have done – and what you will do – are legend."
I didn't care for that, not at all. "Legend…?"
"Legends of defying chaos and entropy – of resisting the inevitable march toward nothing."
I shook my head. "Are you speaking in riddles?" I hated riddles. "Speak clear, as the Atlantis Proclamations command your kind. I invoke the Treaty."
The spirit, the demon, the shade-creature before me swirled back under the curtain of falling diamonds and became indistinct against the rush of the waterfall. She laughed at me – a cruel, cunning laugh born of my ignorance. "Your Lord Voldemort broke that truce when he seized the Lost City."
"I claim the truce unbroken – Voldemort does not speak for mankind and the Wizarding World. I do."
The spirit flowed forward again, sparks of silver light coursing through her watery form. It flowed forward, close enough to where I stood up to my knees in the pool that I feared attack.
"That," the spirit said. "That… is what I hoped to hear."
I sighed. "Thought you might…"
"Then you accept the mantle of Champion?"
There was no reason to hesitate. No reason not to sell my soul and damn the consequences. I was going to die, of that I was quite sure, and soon. But it would be worse to live. "I must. It's time."
The spirit shook her head and one clear arm of sparkling water came up to rest on my shoulder. Her touch sent ripples of raw pleasure, hot and sure, through my body. I felt myself growing hard…
"You must stop thinking of time as a straight line, as a perspective of cause and effect. Time, for you, Harry, is no longer… forward."
I shrugged. Strawberry Fields Forever. "I'll try."
"Yes, you will." A heavy, pregnant pause. "And the universe will break you for it."
"Oh let that bastard do its worst…" I was beginning to feel light headed. I'd lost a lot of blood. "Just name your price, lady…"
Her smile was sweet, if such a thing was possible, and her hand on my shoulder moved down my chest, over the crisscrossing scar tissue, across my stomach and lower until she held the length of me in her soft, clear grip.
"You seem more than… willing… to pay my price."
I almost smiled. "Well, so be it.
"And that's what happened," I said, trying hard not to slur my words.
The woman sitting next to me at the bar in the Bellagio Casino, in the heart of Las Vegas, was most definitely a prostitute, but perhaps that was what I needed right now.
"You've got a wild imagination," she said.
Her little black dress was more of a little black belt, and left little to the imagination. I tossed back two fingers of liquid gold with a practiced flick and slapped another hundred-dollar bill on the bar.
"I've been winning at the blackjack tables."
"I saw your run. Impressive. How much did you clear?"
"Just shy of half a million dollars. Would you like some?" I reached into the pocket of my fine suit jacket. These suits were always an extravagance, but if I had to die—and die I had, a thousand times—then I would die well dressed. "Here."
I gave the beautiful woman a handful of gambling chips and tapped the bar for another drink. The lights and sounds of the casino swirled around me, embraced me. I got lost in the maelstrom of debt unfound.
"Oh… my god. I can't accept this. You just gave me fifty thousand dollars worth of—"
"Take it and run, sweet thing. Hey, did you hear I was a wizard, once upon a time?"
She left the chips sitting on the bar and laughed. "You are drunk."
"And you are beautiful, and tomorrow I will be sober." I thought of the war back home, of Voldemort off in another world seizing the mythical realm of Atlantis. As he had done so many times before. "Want to hear another story?"
"I think I do, yes."
That called for another drink.
"Okay, listen close, sweet thing. Once upon a time, there was a boy named Harry…"
A/N: A fanciful interlude, yes, and another glimpse into how Harry spent his endless lives and how he became an immortal son of a bitch.
Okay, again. This interlude was just to let you all know I'm still writing, and that my ORIGINAL NOVEL IS AVAILABLE NOW.
Google: Distant Star by Joe Ducie
Currently, it is an ebook for Kindle, but in the next week or two other formats will emerge, including paperback. The next chapter update will be in June-t'is half written.
Thanks, as always, for reading and reviewing,
Joe-pop.
