A/N: Slightly shorter chapter this week, as it has some vital events, and the pacing feels right. Longer, battle-driven chapter next week! Please read and review.

I also had another original book come out this week, for any REMINISCENT EXILE fans out there - LOST GRACE (RE#4) available now from all the usual haunts. Author name: Joe Ducie.


Harry Potter and the Heartlands of Time

Chapter 20 – The Older I Am

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

~C.S. Lewis

"Well?" Fae asked. "This offer won't come around again, Harry."

"I can't die just yet," I said. "I've too much to do. I'd rather you not kill me."

Fae nodded just so and helped herself to one of those oh-so-tempting cucumber sandwiches. To hell with propriety and the concern of accepting food, drink, and aid from creatures beyond time who put great stock in such things. I had a sandwich, too. The bread was soft, the cucumber crisp. It was delicious, and did something for the stinging pain in my mangled ear.

"You misunderstand," she said. "I'm not offering you a means of death, I am asking whether or not you want to continue living, whether you wish to die. Shuffle off your contorted mortal coil."

I glanced at my friends, a touch ashamed, as I was beyond masking the truth in these matters. Did I want to die? For a good long time now. "Well, there were lives, long years, where I wanted to kill myself. I could never find you, though, Fae. And now I know why. You were hiding."

"Forging you into what you needed to become." She sipped her tea. "Some would argue I did you a great service, far beyond the time loop magic sustaining your soul."

"I want this to be my last life," I said. "Those times I ran away, the time I found Tessa, that was as close to killing myself as I could come. Not fighting and just waiting for the loop to reset at the eight-year mark. I don't want that anymore."

Fae nodded. "You mortals were not meant to live so long. The soul degrades, the madness corrupts. You're hundreds of years past your best."

"And feelin' it."

"Harry, mate," Ron said. "Bit of a glum conversation, yeah?"

I considered, then nodded. "Quite right. Get to the part where you screw me over, Fae."

She reached up to her head and removed the sparkling tiara that sat on her silver hair like a net of spun gold. Casually, as if it were the TV remote, Fae tossed me the horcrux. "Given freely," she said. "A salve for the trouble my brother caused in getting you here. He did not need to be so… petty."

My missing ear agreed.

"Thank you," I said and tossed the horcrux down the table to Neville. "Keep an eye on that, Nev. We'll pitch it into the sun later."

"Can you bring people back to life?" Luna asked Fae. "Are you one of those elder gods?"

"No, child, that power doesn't exist in this realm. Death is final, and not to be crossed."

Luna stared between me and the goddess of time. "Harry's died an awful lot and he's still here."

Fae laughed, a high sound, chiming across the chamber within the pyramid. "Harry exploited the fine print, my dear. With my help."

"Devil's in the details," I muttered.

"Quite."

I'd had me some time to consider Lady Fae's question—how would you like to die?—and decided, surprisingly, that I didn't. This life, this roll of the dice, my last, felt more real than any of the other twenty thousand I'd lived. Any day in the last one thousand years.

"I'm kind of in the right lane for the first time in a long time," I said. "If it's possible, I'd like to live out my normal span of years."

Does she know of Chronos?

Fae clicked her fingers and froze time.

I blinked, looked to my friends—Ron about to bite a cupcake, Neville frowning at the horcrux, Hermione with a tear about to fall from her eye, and Luna staring dreamily ahead, lost in her own world. A much kinder world than this one. The tea in my mug sat suspended in a wave up against the side of the cup. I let it go and the cup hovered in the air.

"OK, sure," I said. "Why?"

"Because this next part's just for you," Fae whispered.

She leant across the table and whispered to me what was going to happen, what the future looked like in the years to come. By the time she was done, I was laughing, though whether in madness or despair, I did not know.


Crazy old house in the city. Small balcony with a cactus, I could write in the mornings, drink in the evenings. You know, work for myself, see it through. End the war.


Time shifted and we were back aboard my battleship, heading north from the island of Riau, the weight and depression in our hearts fading with every mile we put between ourselves and the cursed island.

"I don't…" Hermione began, frowning. My friends stood on the main deck, surveying the clouds and the ocean. We were racing the sunset, encroaching darkness trying to swallow us at the aft of the vessel. "I don't remember how we got back on the ship."

"Me neither," Ron said. "Harry, mate?"

I held an ice pack to my mangled ear, steering the ship with one hand. "Magic," I said. "Time magic. We're old friends."

"Did you do something stupid and don't want to tell us?" Hermione asked.

"Possibly." I laughed. "Neville, you still got that tiara?"

He held up the horcrux.

"Good man. Let's go destroy it."

In the back of my mind, I heard Larry and Fae laughing. My business with Riau wasn't done, not by a long shot, but I had been granted a reprieve to end the war.

When all of this over, when the gears of the ancient clock grind down to nothing, I'm going to Disneyland.

After getting patched up at Hogwarts, disposing of Ravenclaw's tiara via a convenient basilisk tooth and flipping the bird to the angry tortured soul-cloud that spewed from its ruin, I took Fleur out to dinner. From here on out, things were going to move fast, faster than I could control, and I wanted a decent memory to hang on to.

The atmosphere in Paddy's Pub, just outside of County Carlow, a little hidden away gem I discovered worlds and worlds ago, was always one of merriment and a taste of wild abandon. I think the same could be said for Irish pubs the world over. Something about tables squirrelled away in little nooks, pretty bargirls, and strong, warm walls adorned with aluminium drink placards, for Guinness and Bulmer's and good, strong Jameson's, that sat well with the soul.

"I'm getting the steak," I said and pushed the menu aside without even opening it. Fleur and I sat at a table for two on the edge of the dining room across from the bar. Soft shadows danced along the wall from a dozen tea light candles scattered across the tables. "Good steak here. Scotch fillet for around twelve quid. With pepper or garlic sauce. Or both. None of that healthy salad nonsense, either; just a stack of chips or mash."

"I've not been hungry all day. Especially after seeing you stumble back into the castle maimed, 'Arry. You push yourself too hard." Fleur inhaled a deep breath of the warm air wafting over from the kitchen. "However, I believe right now I could eat enough for two." She winked at me.

"I recommend the steak."

"Yes, I understand zat. But let's pretend for a moment I do not want to eat a half-kilo of meat. Anything else you'd recommend, my weary traveller?"

I thought about it. "You know… I don't know. I've always gotten the steak."

"What about ze gnocchi?"

I flinched. "Gnocchi's a brave offering for an Irish pub, don't you think?"

Fleur folded her menu and played with her tall glass of lemon, lime, and bitters. "Perhaps the vegetable pie then."

We ordered and made small talk until our food arrived. A nothing-conversation about wine, books, and the merits of fine scotch. Topics best avoided until after dinner included the Dark Lord, the constant attempts on my life, our unborn child, and the weather.

Dinner faded into dessert—simple, sugary crust apple pie and vanilla ice cream.

"Will you marry me, Fleur?" I asked over dessert and produced a band of white gold with an elegant, timeless diamond in a clutch setting. Time had flown by, as it often does in good, warm company.

"Oui," Fleur said, not in the least surprised. She held out her hand and I slipped the ring onto her finger. I leant across the table and kissed her.

I scanned the bar, contemplating breaking my sobriety and ordering a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Something else as timeless, and far older, than a diamond watched me from the bar.

"Oh, Saturnia…" I said.

Fleur frowned and followed my gaze.

"Saturnia," I said again (Tessa that was, a fractured piece of her, anyway), as she drew level with our table. Memories of this woman dressed in red, her lips pressed against mine as she slipped a dagger between my ribs, harvesting my blood to traverse the path to Atlantis, danced through my mind. "What a coincidence. I hadn't thought to see you again."

"My, my, my, Harry Potter, at a loss for words? Come now, you're far more charming than this."

"You look… well." Saturnia wore a devastatingly gorgeous dress, cut off just above the knee and strapless, exposing a soft canyon of cleavage. Her auburn hair hung in gentle waves down over her shoulders. She was glowing, of course. "Radiant, gorgeous, beautiful. Graceful. Like a fine wine, you just keep getting sweeter." I clenched my silver hand. "Hey, you remember my fiancé, Fleur?"

"I do not want to see zis woman, 'Arry."

Saturnia tsked. "But I've brought you an engagement gift!"

I edged the steak knife off the table and into my hand, ready to get stabbin' if stabbin' were needed. Stabbin' was going to be needed. I closed my eyes and counted to three. "What, dare I ask, have you brought?"

"This is the last time we speak, Harry. The very last, I promise." She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. "And to mark the occasion, I've brought you the last of something else. It's waiting at the bar. Good evening."

Saturnia disappeared sideways into nothing, apparated away, and I wondered if it truly would be the last I saw of her. Something… odd about that feeling. I was thankful we were dining in a secluded booth, but I caught a kid across the room staring at where she'd been standing with wide eyes.

"I do not see anything for you, 'Arry," Fleur said, frowning at the bar. She had retrieved her wand, a protective hand over her baby bump.

I used my magic to touch the living things around me. A gentle ping resonated in my mind as the invisible wave of power rippled outward. I could feel the life force in Fleur, in her unborn child, and in all the people at Paddy's. A dark canvas with dozens of tiny pinpricks of light, swaying slowly to the music, as if I had an ethereal radar in the smoke rings of my mind. One of those was Fleur and if I concentrated a touch harder I'd be able to discern—

My sensory net struck a wall made of cascading flame, and I almost lost my dinner. The wall felt a lot like what I imagine hot, raw sewage would taste like. A point on the canvas that was neither living nor dead... nor human.

"Oh hell," I cursed and pressed my fingers against my eyelids, fighting a sudden wave of nausea.

Something wicked was at Paddy's tonight.

Something… far from Irish.

I broke away from the starry canvas with a thought and looked up and over Fleur's shoulder, across at the bar.

A man stood next to the polished mahogany and the beer-soaked mats, just before the bridge of frosty taps. He was dressed in a fine black suit and a matte-purple shirt. A simple bowtie, untied, hung around his neck. His smile stretched from ear to ear, revealing rows of pristine white teeth.

He winked at me and his eye—his whole eye—turned black as coal.

A sense of fear and raw insanity hit me hard, and it was all I could do not to scream.

Fleur gasped. "Who is zat?"

"That," I said, weary with woe, "that creature drinking my scotch at the bar, is the last wild horcrux of the Dark Lord Voldemort."


I used to think I'd get wiser with age. I'm pushing a thousand now, and still making the same old mistakes—just in brand new ways.


A/N: Please review. Again, if you'd like to support my writing I also had an original book come out this week, for any REMINISCENT EXILE fans out there - LOST GRACE (RE#4) available now from all the usual haunts. Author name: Joe Ducie

Next update in a week!