Chapter 3
"It's a repository."
Harry blinked at Bill, the eldest Weasley son and also the only person Hermione had called for help, as he delivered this statement completely without explanation. "A what?"
"I've been calling it a soul vault, but when I called Bill to take a look at my notes, he confirmed it. He's never seen one made to hold souls before, but he's seen attempts at it and ones made to hold other things, like magic or elemental forces." Bits of Hermione's hair were working free of her braid as he watched her explain. It was a sign that she was particularly excited or agitated.
"When I saw her notes," Bill glanced at her; she was pulling a thick leather-bound journal out of her bag, along with Harry's bottled memory and her pensieve, "I thought it was a theoretical exercise, at first. A true soul repository has long been thought by professionals to be impossible. When she told me it was real and something you had discovered, well, I had to see it for myself."
A room packed with dementors came to mind. "I'm not sure how safe that would be for you..."
"No, no, I didn't mean in person." Bill eyed the memory vial. "I would like to see your memory of finding it."
"Oh." Harry looked at Hermione. "You didn't show him?"
"No. I was fairly sure you would be okay with it, but it's your memory, so I brought him with me today to ask you." She pushed the ethereal mist toward him with a finger.
He pushed it at Bill. "It's fine, you can watch it. Just don't go telling people about what you see."
"Thank you," he sighed, relieved. "Do you mind if I watch it while Hermione explains our findings?"
"No, go ahead." With Harry's permission granted, Bill set Hermione's pensieve in front of himself and poured the memory into it. A quick tap of his finger on the mercurial surface, and his body stiffened in place, consciousness dragged into the memory. His dark brown eyes gleamed silver.
"That's a little creepy," Harry commented.
Hermione, flipping rapidly through journal pages covered with inked and pencilled notes and diagrams, didn't look at the practically petrified redhead. "A pensieve may give you the feeling of pulling you bodily into it, but it really only snares your mind. He'll be like this for a while."
"How long?"
"Maybe half an hour. It depends on how much of the memory he decides to watch. Now!" She pressed the journal fully open on her target page. "The soul vault, or repository, is meant to do more than just hold souls. It was designed to be the power source for an immortality ritual."
"What?" Visions of Voldemort and his horcruxes danced through Harry's mind. "Hermione—!"
"Calm down, we have nothing to worry about. There isn't a new dark lord running around." The witch's total lack of alarm made Harry grudgingly lower himself back to his seat. "Whoever set this up lived and died a very long time ago. Azkaban was discovered in the early thirteenth century, but a small fortress had already existed on the island. Most believe it was built around the same time as Hogwarts, though there are theories that it was built even earlier. No one knows for sure, but no one knows exactly when Hogwarts was built either. All that aside, everything in your memory was set up for an immortality ritual, probably when Azkaban's fortress was built, and then the ritual was never used."
"Why wasn't it used?" Harry couldn't imagine someone going through all the effort of designing what he saw—and building Azkaban, if Hermione's theory about that was correct—without using it in the end.
"One possibility is that the designer decided not to pursue immortality at the last minute, for whatever reason, though I consider this the less likely option. Another possibility, the significantly more likely possibility, is that the person died before getting the chance. They could have been discovered and stopped, killed, or they could have merely died of old age before the ritual was ready. But..." Now a grin was subtly growing on Hermione's face. "That isn't the most interesting thing I learned!"
"It isnt?"
She shook her head quickly, not trying to suppress her excitement another moment. "No! The dementors, Harry! I think whoever created this ritual, created the dementors too!" Harry was rendered speechless by this declaration. Hermione launched into her explanation unprompted. "Passages of the carved runic script invoke two unusual objects," she held up two fingers vigorously, "two similar and connected objects, that are symbolically titled the Taker-Vessel and the Taker-Giver. The Taker-Giver's first purpose is to take the energy from the Taker-Vessel and place it into the repository. It's second purpose, after enough energy has been gathered, is to take all that energy back out and give it to the ritual's target, the wizard or witch intending to become immortal. There's more of course, details that bind it to the area of the circle itself and manipulate precisely how it gives and takes the souls during each transfer and the like, but it's clearly the solitary dementor that's being referenced each time.
"The Taker-Vessel isn't nearly as integrated, but it has two purposes as well: to find and take a source of a specific type of energy—the soul of a magical being—and then hold that energy within itself. Restrictions on the Taker-Vessel bring it back to the Taker-Giver when it has a soul and allow the Taker-Giver to, well, take the soul out."
Harry was fairly sure he understood almost all of that, though the hows and whys behind everything were beyond him and were going to stay that way for the foreseeable future because he didn't have the in-depth specialized education in runes and runic rituals that Hermione (and Bill Weasley, who'd helped her) did. That didn't mean he didn't have questions, so when Hermione paused to take a breath and glance over her notebook, he voiced one. "So it's obviously the dementors that this Taker-Giver and Taker-Vessel are, but you said the dementors were created. How's that?"
"Because," she said in the slightly annoyed tone of a person who wished her audience would wait to hear everything she had to say first but who also had the patience of years of friendship and familiarity with said audience, "the Taker-Vessel needs energy of its own to go out, look for, and take souls. In addition to everything else, the circle regulates how the dementors get their own energy and how they propagate."
"You mean, how they make more of themselves?"
"Yes. They aren't allowed to take any of a soul's energy for themselves. They get little pick-me-ups as sustenance from the central dementor every time they go down to that room—without that, they would slowly fade away—but they get most of their power when they're first, er, 'born' is probably the closest word. It takes a few of them, perhaps several, but if one finds an unburied corpse while searching for souls, it can call for others to gather to it and they can cocoon the body with fragments of their own power. Then they take it back to the ritual chamber, where a final burst of energy from the central dementor completes the transformation and links it to the runes as another representative of the Taker-Vessel."
Nausea twisted Harry's stomach as he looked at his discolored hand. "Is that what... what they tried to do to..." Is that what they tried to do to me? He couldn't finish his question. After watching his memory in the pensieve, he knew what he looked like.
"No. Not exactly." That did not exactly made him feel better. "That may be what it looked like, but the only similarity to what happened to you and how a new dementor is made is that you had received enough of the dementors' power to be taken down to that room. When the central dementor touched you, it attempted to connect to you in the same way it connects to a regular dementor to take the soul it carries."
"So it really did only try to take my soul like the regular dementors."
"If anyone other than you said that, they would not consider it a good thing," Hermione remarked. Harry rolled his eyes, not particularly sheepish about it, which made his friend scoff. They both knew this was only the latest in a long line of peculiar incidents. "Yes, it only tried to take your soul, not turn you into another dementor. It didn't succeed, clearly, but it didn't get a good connection with you either."
"It seemed to have a pretty good hold." He flexed his silvered fingers, sending Hermione a Look with one eyebrow raised.
"The only part of you it could latch on to was your hand, and its power was thin by the time it reached your head. I imagine it usually connects to a dementor more directly." She tapped the corner of her mouth with a finger.
Harry grunted. "Ugh. What about the souls? The ones that ended up on my arm?"
"That's not supposed to happen, but you could see the soul vault. It's been filled with so many souls that it radiates light. After being filled by the dementors for so long, it's overflowing with them. Combined with the draw of the Resurrection Stone, it was probably easy for some to come loose and flow back to you through the link of the central dementor, the Taker-Giver." Hermione paused in thought. "The reliquary being stretched to capacity would explain why so many dementors have come to you with souls."
"They can't take them where they used to, so they come to me instead. With the Resurrection Stone, I'm like a substitute. But how long will they keep doing this? I don't want dementors showing up on my doorstep forever!" Not that they actually appeared on his doorstep. No, they always found their way into his house. He found them at random hours, usually when he turned around and suddenly noticed them floating nearby.
"We may have found a solution for that."
"Really? What do I need to do?" Harry's chair scraped back as he stood abruptly. "I'll do it right now, just tell me!"
"The ritual. Bill and I believe you need to do the ritual."
"The immortality ritual?" He glanced at Bill, but the redhead was still occupied with the pensieve and neglected to react.
"The circle was designed to only be used once. At the end of the ritual, after all the souls' power has been transferred and the person made immortal, the magic sustaining the dementors will be gone and they'll weaken and fall apart."
"...Is there a way of causing that without doing the ritual? I don't want to be immortal, Hermione. I especially don't want to be made immortal buy the countless souls of the dementors' victims."
"No, but we think that if you did do the ritual, you specifically, that you wouldn't become immortal. All the souls would fall straight into the Resurrection Stone and not affect you at all. No more trapped souls, no more primed ritual, and no more dementors."
"That sounds good..." But Harry would still have the Resurrection Stone inside him. And all the dementor magic he had now. Those factors aside, the solution seemed too neat to be real. "How certain are you that it will happen like you said?"
A deep breath of air from the mentally absent third person in the room halted Hermione's response and signaled the return of Bill Weasley from the pensieve. His eyes blinked and then focused raptor-quick on Harry. "I know how the dementors keep getting in to your house."
Silence covered the room for a heartbeat. Hermione, mouth already open to reply to Harry, instead asked Bill, "How?"
"I need to see something to be sure, but..." His eyes darted from Harry to Hermione and back. "Can you cloak yourself in dementor magic? Like in the memory?"
"What, right now?" Harry was nonplussed.
Hermione was not. Her gasp was sharp but faint, and she looked intently and Harry, thinking hard. She said nothing when he looked at her, his expression a question.
"Yes, if you would. If you can do it again." Bill nodded once, determined to get his unvoiced suspicion confirmed.
"I suppose..." he grumbled reluctantly, staring at the professional curse breaker.
"Please." Bill stood to join Harry, who was himself still standing after Hermione told him he should do the immortality ritual.
It still seemed like a bad idea, by the way.
"Fine." The dementor-afflicted wizard stepped back from the table for space—Bill stepped around it to get closer, wand ready in his hand—and took a few deep breaths. He closed his eyes and reached deeply into his magic. Everything that had come from the dementors, magic that appeared as a shifting mix of silver, iron, slate, and charcoal to his mind's eye, was contained to his core while the magic he was born with, a shade of bronze that was so much brighter than the dementor magic it was like comparing the sun to the moon, spread out from his core in long cords throughout his body. His concentration thinned the bronze magic and pulled the multi-hued gray magic over it like paint until in had nearly completely replaced it. The end result was the reverse of the state his magic had been in when he started, and when Harry felt the process was complete and he had a steady hold on it, he opened his eyes.
Hermione was paler and shivering, but her eyes were locked to him and she was scratching notes down on a fresh page of her notebook without looking at the paper. Bill was looking him up and down, mumbling to himself, while the occasional tremor shook his frame. He kept twitching his wand but didn't cast anything, merely observing.
Expecting something similar to when he'd been in the unknown depths of Azkaban, Harry looked down at himself and was not surprised. His skin, both ashen and normal areas of it, was paler, and the distinction between them more prominent. His clothing looked dull, and the wisps of black fog that always clung to dementors clung to him now as well, partially obscuring him. His feet, around which the trailing darkness was thickest, felt numbed, and he couldn't feel the ground.
It was not as unpleasant as it had been when the presence of high numbers of dementors caused the transformation, likely because he was controlling it voluntarily this time, but he still didn't like the inhuman feeling. He was deeply cold, and his heartbeat seemed oddly distant.
And he could sense his friends. They were like fires to his magic, warm hearths of life that drew him closer. He could reach out to that warmth, take it for himself if he wanted, he knew he could.
Harry held himself in place and carefully muffled that new sense and its instinctual desires, shoving it all to the back of his mind. He took a deep breath of air—air carrying traces of the taste of life, something he tried very hard to not notice—and spoke. "Is this enough?" His voice rasped in his throat, windy and broken and quieter to his ears than it should be.
Bill and Hermione both startled. Hermione's pencil jerked a long line across the middle of her page and the graphite tip snapped off. She pulled her wand from her pocket immediately and tapped the end of her pencil with a whispered spell to re-sharpen it. In the same moment, Bill froze for half a second before recovering. "Yes, that's good. I need to cast a few things now, so please hold still."
The spells Bill used were ones Harry recognized from his past efforts to analyze the wards that shouldn't be allowing the dementors into Harry's home but were. Intuition poked at him, telling him that he'd just figured it out, that he knew somewhere in the back of his mind how the dementors kept getting in.
Hermione finished her notes and waited for Bill while Harry tried to puzzle his insight to the surface.
Bill finished his analysis before he could, and twirled his wand around his fingers. "A significant portion of your magic is dementor magic, which you already know. It's what's allowing you to do this right now." The wand gestured generally at Harry's altered state. "But while it may have come from the dementors, and is still dementor in nature, it's your magic now. Yours." And Harry was starting to consciously understand. He could feel the steps of logic leading him on. "Wards recognize a person by the unique signature of their magic, allowing registered witches and wizards access. A common but lesser known trait is that they are also slightly malleable, to adapt to the changes that occur in each person's magic as they age over time." Due to the dementors, the fact that Harry's magic had changed was undeniable. "Your residential wards are no different. They shifted as you took in more and more of the dementors' magic. Because they still recognize you with it, they also recognize the dementors as part of you." There it was. "So, any wards that let you through them will let them through just as easily."
Harry's sigh was heavy with resignation. It sounded vaguely like a man's dying breath. "So there is no solution?"
"But there is, Harry! I told you the solution!"
She hadn't told him how to fix his wards. But... she had told him that doing the ritual would ultimately get rid of the dementors. If there were no more dementors, there would be no more problem with the dementors getting through his wards, so that would be a kind of solution. "You still want me to do the ritual."
"Ah, she told you that much already? That's good," Bill said. "Did she tell you how to do it?"
"No. You returned while we were still talking about it." The discomfort of his voice on their ears was visible to him, though they tried to hide it. "Do I need to be like this any longer?" His normal hand indicated himself.
"Yes, of course you can go back to normal. Sorry. Is it..."—he searched for a word—"...uncomfortable?"
"Yes." Permission granted, Harry relaxed his hold, then pushed all his magic back to where he wanted it when it seemed disinclined to flow back into place on its own. It took less time to restore normalcy. "Oh, that's better." Hermione and Bill both seemed to sag as tension left them. "You were saying? About the ritual?"
Bill twisted Harry's discarded chair around and sat in it, facing him. "All you'll need to do for the ritual is activate the outer circle before you cross it. Doing that will change what the dementor there will do when you reach it."
"Meaning...?"
"When it connects with you fully, which you will have to allow it to do,"—Harry scowled at that, and Bill winced—"it will start transferring everything from the reliquary in the center. Instead of trying to take your soul."
"And it won't make me immortal?"
"Immortality is the next step in the ritual, but because all the souls from the reliquary will go straight to the Resurrection Stone instead of staying in you, there will be nothing with which to make you immortal."
"Right!" Hermione was nodding in agreement.
"Okay. And at the end, when Hermione said the dementors would unravel? Will that still happen if the ritual fails in the middle?"
"It won't fail, it will just successfully do nothing."
"Thank you for clarifying that."
Easily interpreting the sarcastically monotone statement as 'That explains nothing,' Hermione spoke up. "There's a fine difference between the two, a really important difference in this case. Say you want to water some flowers. If you have no water to use, you'll fail to water the flowers. But if you merely want to use the water up, and there's no water, you will succeed even though nothing happened."
"But the point of the ritual is to make someone immortal. Isn't that like the first thing?"
"Not with the way the circle was written. The job of the circle is to convert all the foreign souls inside the person using it into extra life force. If there are enough souls, that will turn from an extremely extended lifespan to actual immortality. But if there are no souls, then the ritual will successfully convert nothing into nothing."
"And the dementors?"
"They were made to support the ritual." Harry looked at Bill, listening carefully as he elaborated on something Hermione had said while he was still in the pensieve. "When the ritual ends, the power supporting the central dementor will be gone and it will fall apart immediately. The regular dementors, which depend on the ritual circle and central dementor to give them power, will slowly fall apart themselves." That sounded like a fairly horrible way to go, even for soul-sucking creatures that were also apparently artificial. "Theoretically," he continued, oblivious to the thought that crossed Harry's mind, "if the ritual were to be used again, both dementors would need to be remade."
"The ritual doesn't say how to do that, does it?"
"No."
"You should destroy the circle afterwards, just in case. We wouldn't want anyone to find and use it, or reverse-engineer the dementors, would we?" Hermione smiled weakly, as if the thought filled her with dread.
Sensible. "I'll do that. How long will it take for the dementors to... fall apart?" The words soured on his tongue.
"We don't know. They'll probably follow you until that happens, though."
Harry cursed. Then he stood there and thought about everything he'd heard while the other two watched him patiently.
He wanted to be rid of the dementors. Honestly, he wanted everything to go back to the way it was before they tried to take his soul that first night, but that was impossible, so the best he could hope for was to get rid of them. Finishing the immortality ritual seemed to be the only way to do that. They'd just keep coming otherwise, especially since they could get through any wards he tried to hide behind.
He wasn't eager to destroy them, and they were going to fall apart slowly if he did, but they weren't living creatures either. Every one of them was an animated corpse, worse than inferi considering inferi could be destroyed by fairly normal (if excessive) means like fire and didn't consume the souls of their victims.
So all Harry had to do was go back to Azkaban to trigger the immortality ritual, destroy all evidence of the circle afterwards, and suffer the dementors for a little longer after that. Then they'd all be gone and would never plague anyone again.
Which raised another thought. "Alright. I can do it. But what happens when the Ministry realizes the dementors have disappeared for good? They'll panic and blame me for it."
"They won't be able to prove anything." Harry challenged Hermione's words with a sharp glare, forcing her to glance away. "Yeah, I know, that won't stop them. It never has before," she sneered. "You may want to hide out somewhere, at least until the dementors are completely gone. But it should help if you can sneak into and out of Azkaban when you do it."
"That's a nice idea, but how am I supposed to do that? Even if I use my invisibility cloak, someone will notice if I cross the wards. I'll get caught, and then look even more suspicious."
"But what if what they saw wasn't you?"
"Are you talking about polyjuice, or a glamour?" Bill looked just as confused as Harry felt.
"No. Those wouldn't work very well anyway. What if everyone, even the wards, thought you were one of the dementors?"
"You're joking."
Harry had to wait for his chance, which meant waiting for the dementors to take him to the island again. It was a good thing he'd prepared in advance: under Hermione's insistence, he'd acquired a deep black cloak, an overly large one that billowed around him when he wore it, and modified it to look as worn and ragged as a dementor's. When he tried his magically shifted state while wearing it, he nearly tore it off and made a mental note to cover his eyes with something next time.
Because Hermione wasn't joking when she proposed the idea.
The dementors came almost a week after the meeting with Bill and Hermione, four of them floating into his bedroom just as he was getting ready to go to sleep. It took only a minute to pull on the special robe and tie a blindfold, made from an extra scrap of the cloak, around his eyes to hide them, and another minute to transform. The dementors didn't care and dragged him out just the same.
But it wasn't the dementors he was trying to deceive.
They crossed the wards of Azkaban without any problems, and the Auror guards watched them pass with a normal level of caution and no suspicion. They saw five dementors, not four plus a trespasser like last time, and didn't otherwise react. Noticed but unremarked, Harry floated into Azkaban with ease.
He pulled the blindfold down to hang around his neck when they descended into the lightless depths of the prison so it wouldn't obscure his vision when they reached the ritual room.
It appeared unchanged from his first visit, and the pull from the Resurrection Stone was as strong as before. Dementors ringed the room, all facing him, and the one in the center was motionless. Harry approached the edge of the circle unchallenged and crouched there, eyeing the runes. According to the two experts, all he had to do was send some of his magic into the outermost ring of runes to start, then walk in.
He touched the carved floor gently, with his normal hand, and sent a thread of magic down through his fingertips. The runes nearest his hand started to glow gently, and he kept adding magic. Slowly, the light grew brighter and expanded away from him until the entire circle was brightly lit. When it flashed once, he stopped and straightened, and watched the interior of the circle flare with the unlight like last time. The connection between the color-shifting pedestal and dementor was strong enough to obscure the floor completely. Looking at that, Harry hesitated to cross into the circle.
Then he moved, allowing the Resurrection Stone to draw him forward, and tried not to think about it. He would be fine. He would be fine.
The Taker-Giver dementor was in front of him, reaching for his head. As the wizard was entirely within the bounds of the circle this time, it didn't bother with trying to capture his hand and tie him up in its power; black wrapped around his neck like a collar, immobilizing him, and their hoods came together, blocking his vision completely. Magic more concentrated than he'd ever felt from the dementors before this flooded his mouth. He did not resist it this time as it poured in like a river.
How he hoped this would be the last time this happened to him.
True to prediction, the magic flooding from the dementor didn't try to encapsulate his soul for the taking. It burrowed into his core and then hollowed out, opening a hole.
Saying it was like being impaled through the heart with cursed glacial ice that wouldn't allow him the courtesy of death while simultaneously violating him was a paling description of the real sensation. Saying what followed was like a firehose of fiendfyre was pretty accurate.
The dementor's magic acted as a pipeline from the pedestal overfilled with souls directly into Harry. Only the Resurrection Stone provided any measure of relief. It was fully up to the task of taking everything the dementor gave him, sucking down the souls faster than a desert stole water. They came one by one, but so quickly they were indistinguishable from each other, a rainbow of old victims that were finally rushing free of the dementors and on to their next great adventure. The first souls were the brightest, in more hues than he had names for, but as they continued coming, those colors faded. When the last souls came through, the oldest souls who'd been consumed when the dementors were a new and unknown terror, they were a colorless and almost transparent white.
A few last souls arrived more slowly, and then the flow stopped. The magic that had brought them in shrank closed and withdrew, allowing his perforated core to heal.
Instead of being released, though, he was covered head to toe by the dementor. Blind and nearly numb to outside sensation, he felt the ground warm quickly. Heat washed through him, but nothing else happened. It faded, and then he was free. He could see again, but the room was much darker than before, lit only by the residual power in the outer ring of runes. The interior of the circle was black, and the pedestal, which he could only discern as a silhouette, was dark, magically barren stone.
Before his eyes, the central dementor dissolved away. It's cloak turned to dust and vanished, leaving no trace. The last light rippled outward across all the dementors in a pulse and was gone.
Surrounded by doomed dementors, cold, and darkness, the immortality ritual was over.
The Resurrection Stone pulled him weakly, indicating a few stray souls still inside dementors. He went to them one by one, not needing his eyes to find them—vision wouldn't have helped him pick the individuals out anyway—and took from them until all were empty and the Resurrection Stone was finally, blessedly quiet.
And he was tired.
For the next few minutes, he did absolutely nothing, but he still had to destroy the runic circle and escape undetected. Undetected as Harry Potter, anyway.
With a simple floating lantern charm to illuminate his work, several small blasting curses and not so small cutting curses was enough to break the floor into rubble. Vanishing charms followed, removing all the rubble and leaving nothing but a jagged circular hole a few inches deep at the edges and more than a foot deep in the center.
He extinguished his lumos, retied the blindfold over his eyes, double-checked that he was still dementor-like, and left. Perhaps half of the dementors trailed listlessly after him, but all but one fell back by the time he floated back out the prison's entrance. That one was finally left behind as he crossed the ward boundary.
Half asleep, he roused himself enough to apparate when he reached shore. He appeared with a pop in Bill and Fleur's beach cottage. It was a remote location, a suitable hiding place for him as all the dementors slowly left Azkaban for good to follow him. With nothing to hold them to Azkaban any longer, they would be drawn to him over the next several days, eventually fading away. Neither Hermione nor Bill had been able to guess just how long that would take, but Harry supposed he'd figure it out as it happened.
Right now, his priority was rest. He transformed back into a normal human, staggered inside and through the small house to the nearest bed-like piece of furniture, a couch in the front room, and collapsed on it, asleep before he finished falling.
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