Harry Potter and the Heartlands of Time
Chapter Twenty-Three – 'Cause I'm Having a Good Time
Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved.
~Meg Rosoff
I kept my goodbyes brief and to the point—my barber, tailor, and my favourite bartender all got a look in.
After that, I shrugged into the last fine Armani suit I would ever wear—full three-piece, waistcoat and all. One should look one's best when they were dying and aiming to end a war. To avert ending the world.
The night after challenging Voldemort in the Canadian Rockies found me dining at a simple table in Hogwarts, a small group of my nearest and dearest, as the sunset over the western peaks, stretching long shadows across the Forbidden Forest, played tricks with the light on the lake.
We dined on the last warm evening of the year, and I knew that because I'd lived this evening thousands of times. Autumn would become winter would become spring. In the pasts, I'd fought Voldemort across all of those days. The view from atop the Astronomy Tower, a tower I'd often seen Albus Dumbledore die on, was splendid.
At the table next to me sat Fleur, her hand resting softly on my knee. Across were Ron, Neville, Hermione, and Luna—the A Team. Professor Dumbledore sat at the head of the table, and Tonks the opposite end, looking forlorn but resolute. She gave me a soft smile, and I read far too much into it. When you have a thousand years of memories in your head, reading into things came with the territory.
The food was simple fair, and I ate sparingly, sipping from a goblet of sparkling orange juice. My stomach was doing flips—not from nerves. I hadn't felt nervous in centuries. But the time magic begged to be used. Fleur noticed the flares of blue light under my skin, reflected in the cerulean gemstone that dangled against my white cotton shirt, just above the buttons of my waistcoat.
She frowned in concern but said nothing. I was committed to the end game now, and she understood that meant secrets.
Down below, the castle grounds were aflutter with activity. Armies gathered, defences woven, friendships made. The sound of merriment and something between excitement and fear carried well on the warm wind. The battle would be soon, and the men and women below—some no more than kids, really—would do their part to distract Voldemort's armies. That way, at least, the damage could be contained to this small spit of land.
"Thank you for all you have done, Harry," Professor Dumbledore said and raised his glass to me.
My friends joined him in the toast, and Fleur leaned in close to kiss me softly on the corner of my mouth.
All was said and nearly done.
The only thing holding him together is the scar tissue.
The outer defences sounded the alarm about an hour after sunset, and an impressive white-blue shield of light descended around Hogwarts in a magnificent dome. The strongest magical shield ever conceived. It would not hold long—it never did.
I sat alone in my fine suit on the slanted, slate-tile roof of the castle, above Gryffindor Tower, watching the stars, counting the light, when the shield sprang into existence.
Beyond the shield gathered the great and terrible armies of the Dark Lord Voldemort. Wizards, witches, wands for hire, trolls and other dark creatures, dementors chief among them. Fuck but I hated dementors.
Below along the grounds the hundreds of Aurors from across the world sprang into action, forming units and squads under various commands. That command ran all the way up to Dumbledore, and the defence of the castle, as always, was left to him. I stood apart from that structure, which was for the best.
I couldn't see Voldemort, not amongst the gathered mess, but I could feel him out there. I knew where to find him, and that time was drawing close.
The bombardment began moments later—a thousand dark spells exploding against the shield, a rainbow of sinful magic designed to break our defences and overwhelm the castle. I cast a quick charm that swept the grounds, the castle, and grunted below my breath. As instructed, the students—those not of age to fight—had been evacuated.
In all my lives, they only ever got in the way. Against all odds, should tonight go in our favour, better we didn't have a thousand child graves to dig in the morning.
Chronos appeared next to me in his immaculate brass-studded button suit, making my humble garment seem shoddy in comparison. I don't know where he'd learnt to wear the suit so well, but well he wore it. He leaned casually against the roof, seemingly at odds with gravity. His brown hair swept back from his forehead, revealing the faint outline of an old, sharp scar—a scar that had faded over the centuries.
"Are you still just a spectator?" I asked.
"It… is taking all of my strength not to slit your throat right now, Harry."
I nodded. I understood.
"You move backwards through time, moments become years, you told me. What will you do for the idle centuries ahead?"
He blinked, looked surprised, as the sky turned to fire above us and cracks in the shield splintered down the dome like spider-webs.
"Rather the sun turn black than you win," Chronos muttered. "That's what Voldemort said." He turned to look at me. Met my eyes. "The question now, of course, is not the will but the how. How you win, Harry. It can all still topple over tonight. You feel it, don't you? Time in flux, the pattern of reality tying itself in knots around you…"
I shivered. Nodded again. "I feel it."
"You've seen glimpses of a future where you win. A family, Lily, our granddaughter. None of that will come to pass if you falter tonight. If you… can't lay your hands on the snake-faced bastard."
"I can barely stand."
"And yet, stand you must." He snorted. "A thousand years of resolve broken now, Harry? Surely not."
A great shard of the shield, a hundred metres across, split from the whole and broke the dome's integrity. With a resounding clap loud enough to end the world all on its own, the dome fractured, the shield dispersed—all manner of dark and unseemly creatures spilled across the castle boundaries in a flood of death, decay, ruin.
"Well then," Chronos muttered. He floated now, standing on nothing but air. The mad grin on his face looked out of sorts, like maniacal laughter at a funeral. "I can't help you directly, Harry, no, no, but I can help you stand—yes, yes."
He leaned down and offered me his hand.
I considered his offer, tilted my head back and forth, dwelled a moment longer on regret and whether I was willing to pay the price—the years—for what tonight would cost.
Damn it all, I took his hand.
You started this alone, you chose the loop, the time magic. Whatever madness possessed you back then… was far worse than any damage you could do now.
I clutched my cane close and descended on air above the Hogwarts grounds. Slowly, as if drawing a thorn from my palm, I drew my wand. Ahead, at the vanguard of dark creatures, coursing forward on a wave of frost, surged an army of dementors.
I couldn't do much in the battle tonight. Helping here would spread my talent too thin, and we were already scraping the bottom of the barrel there. The tremendous war between light and dark, wizard against wizard against magical creature had to be fought without ol' Harry Potter, but I had always detested dementors. I could do this much.
I spun my wand in lazy circles, mindful of the missing fingers on my hand, and gathered the spell in my mind. The Ministry, back when there had been a proper Ministry, had kidnapped Fleur to rein me in—I had shown them then how to deal with dementors. They were not to be reasoned with, not to be used by either side. They were a poison to be drawn from the bleeding wound of reality.
As I hovered above the Aurors below, floating on nothing but air, I unleashed a complex and unique piece of magic, slashing my wand down through the sky and producing an arc of wicked-purple light. The spellfire expanded outwards, became a wall, razor sharp, that sought out its tragets.
The dementors veered away at the last moment, perhaps sensing something new, perhaps not, but the majority of the soulsucking fiends were caught by the blast… and burst into flame.
A thousand patronuses died on a thousand lips as a burning purple ash swirled like snow across the Hogwarts grounds.
The dementors were destroyed.
A tremendous cheer rose from the Aurors. I wavered, the world spun dizzily about me, and the veins below my hands shone fiery-blue. Time magic, courtesy of the Lady Fae. …lay your hands on the snake-faced bastard.
The Dark Lord's forces stumbled, but only for a moment, and then drove on, an inexorable flood. Much neater, much more orderly, the ranks of Aurors began the march to meet them. What happened next would be bloody, would descend into wand against wand, biting and punching, but often the good guys came out in front… so long as I could distract Voldemort.
Even now you don't think about ending him. You don't let yourself hope. I silenced that particular voice and kept on keeping on.
Spells, thick and heavy, began to fly through the air below. More than one or two were directed my way, glittering green beams of death and worse, but reality bent around me, my hands pulsed blue in time with the gemstone around my neck, and I was always just one step ahead, one moment to the next.
If this were a story, it would be time to give a rousing speech, a rallying cry, but the time for such things had long since passed. I straightened my collar, checked the buttons on my suit were fastened, and flew off to die as I had died so many thousands of time before.
There's a lot you don't know, Harry. A lot you've never known. And a lot of what you do know is distorted or wrong.
What will it take to set all to right, hmm?
The village of Hogsmeade was a fiery ruin, as anticipated, and hopefully mostly evacuated like the castle. I didn't have the time or even desire to stop and count the ashes, to try and save what could be saved. I'd saved it or lost it so many times that the best I could summon was a numb, weary indifference to the flame.
I knew, the part of me that loved Fleur and Tonks and all my friends, knew I shouldn't have sacrificed so much, once or a thousand times, to the point where I cared not at all about the cost. In my own way, I was worse than Voldemort—my soul as much beyond salvation, if not torn all the more, than his. But then, I'd been punished enough for that.
Moral or immoral, improvement in that area can only be earned when the heart is warmed, when there was something to aspire, to bend, toward. It had been cold, bloody centuries since then. It would be something to work on, after all was said and done.
I flew away from Hogsmeade and toward the nearby crest of mountains, behind which rose a moon thick and full that I swear took up a third of the damn night sky. Even without our connection, forged first through misguided horcrux and then across time and the melding of magics in Lost Atlantis, I knew where to find the Dark Lord.
He always chose to command his armies from the spit of rock toward the summit of the mountain, overlooking the castle and the forest from half a mile away and three-quarters of a mile high.
I made no secret of my approach. The plateau held the ruins of Rowena Ravenclaw's old observatory, a simple collection of dilapidated stone outer buildings. The observatory itself, though abandoned, had weathered time's storms remarkably well. Though the massive, sixty-foot telescope had long since crashed through the wall to lie battered and broken amidst the snowdrifts and cold rock.
A handful of errant spells burst from just below the mountain's summit, nothing more than distractions compared to the immense light show burning far below across the Hogwarts grounds. The Forbidden Forest had joined Hogsmeade in flame now—that always roused the centaurs, who emerged to slaughter anyone in their way. More often than not, they did some good for my team.
Travelling at speed now, the wind howling in my ears, I spun swiftly through the air, dodging the spells with ease, and came down in the centre of the plateau before the ruined observatory—in the heart of a ring of Death Eaters, Voldemort's inner circle, and fifty or so recruits besides.
"Harry," the Dark Lord said, silhouetted against the ruin of the observatory. Bands of golden magic encircled his arms, bare to the elbow, rippling across his skin like scales. He had, as he always did, banded himself in old Atlantean spell-armour. "What time do you call this?"
I leaned heavily on my cane and cracked my neck. "Time to die," I said.
I took one limping step forward and two dozen Killing Curses blazed from two dozen wands.
The night turned emerald green.
